Gardiner investor an ‘urban angel’

On Tuesday morning, Judy Matthews will appear alongside Mayor John Tory, Waterfront Toronto CEO John Campbell and others at the Fort York Visitor Centre under the Gardiner Expressway to announce a massive gift to the city.

Massive? Think $25 million. Think a transformation of the concrete eyesore under the Gardiner into a space where people will want to spend time. We’re not just talking decorations here: Councillor Joe Cressy told the Star the park, trail and cultural space network will link 70,000 residents of neighbourhoods from Liberty Village through CityPlace to the central waterfront.

And by all accounts, it is essentially Matthews’ project. She’s supplying the money, of course, but she also brought the idea, ready to go, to the city. Who is this woman? Robert Prichard, who met her during his term as president of the University of Toronto, calls her an “urban angel.” Mayor John Tory says she’s also something of a “bulldog.”

Matthews declined to comment for this piece in advance of the formal Gardiner announcement, but it doesn’t take much looking to see she’s been quietly leaving her fingerprints all over the city for decades, through activism and philanthropy.

You could say city building is in her blood. According to a history of the University of Toronto, she is the greatgranddaughter of E.J. Lennox.

Lennox was the architect who designed Old City Hall, Casa Loma and the King Edward Hotel. Educated as an urban planner, she has been an activist in and around her home in the Annex since the Spadina Expressway battle.

She and her husband, investment banker Wilmot Matthews, have long been major donors to Toronto cultural institutions. There is a Chinese sculpture court named after them at the ROM, an educational centre named after them at the Royal Conservatory of Music, they were founding donors of the Luminato Festival, gave $1 million to help establish the Evergreen Brick Works and they are the only individual citizens thanked for their generosity on the title page of the United Way’s influential 2011 Vertical Poverty report. But her reputation as a quiet force in Toronto’s non-profit ecosystem wasn’t forged through cheques alone. She’s known as an expert fundraiser and organizer — most recently working with ArtScape on its Daniels Spectrum cultural hub in Regent Park and as a strategic adviser to Parks People. Late last year, she was given the Outstanding Volunteer award by the Association of Fundraising Professionals.

“I remember in first-year university, in philosophy class, reading Plato’s Republic,” she said in a video shot to recognize her for the award, “and reading that he said that the greatest good, the highest virtue was to work for one’s city. . . . In other words, for the common good. This struck a strong chord deep inside of me.

“I really feel a strong need to create places that people can gather and connect. Places to eat, drink, play and talk to your neighbours,” she says in the AFP video.

Robert Prichard remembers seeing her reputation for generosity and for organization come together in the mid-1990s, when she came to see him with a plan for the complete rebuilding of St. George St.

“What she did back then was absolutely transformative and extraordinary,” he said. “She came to see me, and she had a vision, and she then offered to give me a million dollars to do it.” Prichard says the plan she came with, to make the street greener and more pedestrian-friendly — a grand boulevard in the centre of the university campus — was so developed, he hired her to implement it. She raised $6 million from other donors to complete the work.

“She led it, she drove it. What was amazing was not just her generosity, but her vision and commitment.”

And now, it seems, she’s doing something similar with her Gardiner project, at a larger scale and in a more prominent place.

According to sources familiar with the process, Matthews was looking for a way to make a substantial gift to the city that would make a big difference in the public realm. When she spoke about it with urban designer Ken Greenberg, he suggested doing something transformative under the Gardiner. They then developed the plan together.

Mayor John Tory had mentioned the possibility of livening up that space under the highway, during debates about what to do with its eastern end this year.

“And lo and behold, two months later, in come the Matthews, and they want to do this incredible philanthropic city-building thing,” Tory said. “They came in, and they had this idea — with the donation attached to it — and they wanted to see if it had any legs. And I said, ‘Are you kidding?’ They had already had Ken Greenberg working on it, so we put the city people to work, making sure that we got it to the point where we could say yes.”

Tory says “in the most complimentary way possible,” that Matthews was a “bulldog” about the project. “She said, ‘We want to do this, but we’re not going to do it if it doesn’t get done quickly, if it doesn’t get done in a way that the city gets behind it,’ and so on.” Tory said he and Matthews agreed that Waterfront Toronto should directly oversee it, partly in recognition of the quality of public spaces that organization has created in the past at places such as Corktown Common.

Prichard said that after Matthews’ work on St. George, it “crystallized in people’s minds the potential” of public spaces at U of T, and opened up a new philanthropic culture around such spaces at the school. Tory said he hopes her gift under the Gardiner does the same for civic spaces. “I really hope that the example is set . . . that it does set off a whole chain reaction of people . . . that they’ll start thinking of things they can do in the city, big or small.” Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire