Will the city continue to deny urbanity?
The Scarborough subway comes with a lot of promise.
Though these political promises include economic benefits and increased mobility, there’s also the implicit and explicit promise of the arrival of downtown-style urbanity to Scarborough City Centre, the cluster of office and residential buildings surrounding the Scarborough Town Centre mall and Civic Centre.
Those who arrive in Toronto via Highway 401from the east pass it all by, and visitors who know little about our city might be forgiven for thinking it’s actually downtown Toronto: it’s an impressive cluster, especially when driving by, just one of the many dense nodes across this city and region.
However, once the car is parked, this city centre doesn’t feel so downtown; instead, there are large swaths of paved parking lot and open space in between the buildings. Some structures are quite fantastic, like the 1973 Raymond Moriyama-designed Civic Centre and the new branch of the Toronto Public Library.
The promise of the Scarborough subway, should a plan ever be finalized, is to create a more beautiful and humane public realm here, a “downtown neighbourhood” kind of feel that would connect and transform all these buildings and spaces. Much of our fast-growing city was created this way, and it would not be the first Toronto neighbourhood to go from farmers’ field or village to a dense urban core in just half a century or so.
Downtown North York, or North York City Centre (or maybe we can just call it “Uptown” now), is one of these places. Sometimes called the downtown that Mel Lastman built, just a generation or two ago the strip of Yonge St. between Sheppard and Finch Aves. was a lowrise, mid- century streetscape. It still bears those mid-century traces and even those of the original villages that were here before, such as Willowdale and Newtonbrook, but they are fleeting.
In their place is a new, ever-rising skyline and many thousands of people who have moved into this neighbourhood. It’s busy 24 hours a day, too, with karaoke bars up near Finch Station operating at all hours and the sidewalks busy with life otherwise. The subway under Yonge that made all this growth possible reached Finch Station in 1974, but in 1987, North York Centre station was added between Finch and Sheppard stations to accommodate the early wave of development around what was then North York’s relatively new city hall on what is now Mel Lastman Square.
It’s all still a work in progress, with more buildings coming, and to his credit, Lastman had a vision for all this, but the very “downtownness” of it, a last step in making this a truly great neighbourhood, is being denied. The cosy, pedestrian-friendly and sometimes beautiful urban streets that are celebrated in older Toronto neighbourhoods and in cities around the world usually did not happen by accident, rather through a combination of intentional design and individual enterprise. Yonge St., in North York, needs more design.
The city of Toronto was moving forward with a “REimagining Yonge Street” project that would help the streetscape between Sheppard and Finch catch up with the mixed-use and populous neighbourhood the area has become. Part of the plan, created with extensive public consultation, would see new street furniture, trees, public art, better paving material and improved connections to adjacent parks added to the strip.
Cycling infrastructure would be created and, most importantly, pedestrian crossings would be improved. Right now, crossing points are few and far between, so people often run across six or more lanes of Yonge St. traffic just to move around their neighbourhood. In a dense, highly populated place, frequent and safe crossings are essential. This past year has seen a flurry of pedestrian-car collisions, many of which happen in places like this, where residential neighbourhoods have formed on what are essentially arterial highways.
The denial of Lastman’s vision came last week when Mayor John Tory’s executive committee, following a motion by local councillor David Shiner, voted to delay funding the REimagine project, even though, as the advocacy group Cycle Toronto points out, the federal government has already contributed half the funding for the project.
Here we have a mature but growing, dense neighbourhood located along a subway that has been running for more than 40 years that isn’t being allowed to become the place it needs to be.
The unwillingness of our municipal leaders to take this final step should be yet another reason to ask questions about the promises made around what the subway will bring to Scarborough City Centre. Will the city stop short there too, urbanity denied?
For now, all the folks who’ve made a home in those North York towers should organize and start asking their representatives why their “downtown” doesn’t get to be the real downtown kind of place it has almost become. Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. His new book is Frontier City: Toronto on the Verge of Greatness. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef