Lord love a duck — it revealed potential of Toronto’s waterfront

The duck conquered Toronto. It conquered the cynics, the snarkers and the skinflints. The duck sailed into our harbour and stole the hearts and Instagram accounts of a city.

Well, almost the whole city. In the run-up to the giant inflatable “rubber” duck’s appearance on Toronto’s waterfront throughout Canada Day weekend, many pundits were already deflating the event. Or at least trying to.

Some complained the duck was an import from the States, or it had nothing thematically to do with Ontario 150 or even Canada 150. The cost was an issue too. Others just snarked at the very idea of an inflatable duck. Perhaps it’s just a Twitter thing, where snark is part of the everyday vocabulary, but that noise was so at odds with the public reception of the duck: Toronto fell quickly in love with it.

The duck was part of the Redpath Waterfront Festival, an annual event that gets people down to the water’s edge. Organizers say they surpassed half a million people on the first day alone, beating their weekend record in one day. And they estimate upwards of 750,000 people visited altogether. That’s about the entire population of Winnipeg.

They also say the event will likely exceed the $4.2 million in spinoff economic benefits previous festivals had on the waterfront neighbourhood. It puts the $121,325 Ontario tourism grant the organization got into perspective: this is what it’s for, to generate greater amounts of cash flow into local businesses.

That $121K figure was widely quoted as the cost of the duck alone, but much of it went to line items such as marketing, fencing and security, costs all festivals have, with just $21,000 (U.S.) going to the duck rental.

The result was a packed waterfront. After years, no, decades, of Toronto worry and complaints about an “empty” post-industrial waterfront, there were now complaints about how crowded it was. It was like Toronto was embodying the aphorism “nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded,” attributed to baseballer Yogi Berra. That sentiment seems very Toronto, though, a city still getting used to being a big city.

The duck was a bit of whimsy, a public happiness machine that brought people together, if temporarily, as if one of our sports teams won something big and created a spontaneous coming together. It was also a reason to go down to the waterfront, a reminder that it exists, it’s nice and it’s open for our enjoyment. Toronto is also getting used to having a nice waterfront and has relied on a litany of lazy excuses to deny that for too long.

To this day there are not a few people in this city who think it’s a wasteland despite thousands of new residents and a revamped public realm that includes new parks such as Sugar Beach and HTO, wooden “wave decks” and a redesigned Queens Quay that reopened in 2015.

That it was a bit forlorn for decades, with exceptions such as Harbourfront Centre that date back to the 1970s, and that revitalization efforts were slow to start, may explain why so many minds have been slow to change about the waterfront.

Yogi Berra might have had something to say about the Gardiner, thought by some to be a “barrier” to the waterfront, though it takes less than half a minute to walk under and is now surrounded by buildings. It no longer dominates the waterfront: people and the buildings they work and live in do.

Another perpetual Torontoism is that “ugly” condos somehow block the waterfront. Perhaps a few of the early ones are ugly and ill-thought out, but the claim that they block the waterfront evaporates when you go there and find it’s indeed possible to walk along most of the water’s edge in pleasant or even beautiful surroundings. The evidence of a blocked waterfront just isn’t there, unless one doesn’t like the very presence of residential buildings, a sentiment that, like so much antiapartment feeling in this city, seems suspiciously misanthropic.

There are kilometres of peoplefree parkland along the water to the east and west of downtown, if that’s your bag, but all those people who live along Queens Quay have made this part of the waterfront an urban destination with life there nearly 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. As the East Bayfront is developed, and George Brown’s waterfront campus and Corus Quay building get new neighbours, all of this will continue.

It will be interesting to watch how the wonderful new Trillium Park that has revitalized the eastern edge of Ontario Place is embraced in the long run. A bike ride at dusk there earlier this week saw many dozens of people out for a stroll or jog, and some just sitting by the lake watching planes take off from the island airport a few hundred metres away. The gates to the yet-to-be revitalized parts of Ontario Place were open, and we cycled by the 1970s modernist buildings and the marina filled with boats.

It felt, for a moment, like a Toronto version of Amsterdam. But Amsterdam has people next to most of its celebrated canals who breathe life into them in summer but also their gloomy winter. Since public outcry during the Ontario Place planning stages a few years ago was resoundingly anti-residential, this part of the waterfront will rely on visitors to populate it. I hope the public still come to see this great place, even in winter, as they would if there were full-time residents there.

That duck, though, it drew crowds of people who’d not yet seen what’s been going on down at the waterfront. The truism “if you build it they will come” is in fact not completely true in Toronto. People need a reason to get out of their neighbourhoods, and the duck was a good one it seems. Programming public spaces with art and culture makes sure our public investment in these shared spaces is capitalized on.

Perhaps the duck wasn’t high art, but it proves people crave some kind of spectacle and will come out when it’s provided. Let’s program more performance and experiential pieces of public art here and elsewhere, ephemeral versions of the sculptures and statues found around town.

Long live the duck. It’s gone on to visit other Ontario cities, but it sure inflated some love along Toronto’s water’s edge. Shawn Micallef writes weekly about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef.

The truism “if you build it they will come” is in fact not completely true in Toronto. People need a reason to get out of their neighbourhoods