Queens Quay is now a proper urban neighbourhood — even with no helipad
Author and columnist Shawn Micallef’s book “Stroll,” first published in 2010, roamed Toronto’s neighbourhoods and examined their evolution — their past, present and future. In this excerpt from the new, updated edition, he looks at the changes that have come to the waterfront … and some promised ones that never came to pass.
In late 2022, its Toronto Star sign freshly removed, One Yonge Street was surrounded by a cluster of buildings, some newer than others, and was just another building in a dense urban quarter of the city. It wasn’t always thus, though. When the Toronto Star moved into the exposed aggregate beast of a building at the foot of Yonge in 1971, Queens Quay was lined with dying industry and railroad tracks. The Star was a redevelopment pioneer and, as early as 1963, stories in the Star waxed poetic about the future of the waterfront: “On stage is a panorama of rails, rust and rot … waiting in the wings are magnificent plans to transform it into office, motor hotels, a marine park, a heliport and ferry terminal extraordinaire.” The Star’s departure from this building was a kind of bookend for Queens Quay from the start of one era to its near completion.
Heliports were hot in the sixties and all the best buildings had them, but the jet age didn’t make it to the waterfront as quickly as the Star predicted, and the rot continued to rot. Fast-forward forty years and the Star was still on the eastern frontier of Toronto’s waterfront development. Queens Quay became unfit for its royal name; the semiindustrial scrubland remained relatively contiguous all the way to Ashbridges Bay, near the Beach neighbourhood, but now that’s changing fast.
Redpath Sugar shows no sign of leaving the area, and has even reinvested in the site, which is a good thing. Freighters are often docked next to the building, unloading un
refined sugar from the Caribbean, giving Sugar Beach its name and often affording the air a sugary sparkle. The plant employs a lot of people who make physical product (a novel thing in the “creative city,” but it’s also a reminder of Toronto’s industrial heritage and of our onceworking waterfront. The area beyond, for years a refuge of odd industries, including a golf dome, is being filled in with new residential, commercial, and educational buildings.
There were always things happening along the waterfront, east of Yonge: a big supermarket, the old LCBO headquarters (the facade now part of a new development), legendary megaclubs like RPM, the Guvernment, and the Warehouse. But it wasn’t the kind of place that people paid attention to in a ‘wow, the city is changing’ kind of way. Nothing changed here for so long that even when things were really happening on the waterfront, Torontonians didn’t believe it, or were easily bamboozled into thinking otherwise. During Toronto’s brief fling with Google’s Sidewalk Labs, the “Smart City” project proposed for some of the remaining post-industrial land east of Queens Quay, there were some bad-faith revivals of this trope.
Excitement and anticipation around Toronto’s waterfront is nothing new, but neither is disappointment — the Star itself inadvertently started the now infamous waterfront “wall” of 1970s concrete so reviled in our city. The ‘wall’ is just more city, though, while the real ‘barriers’ were the Gardiner Expressway and the rail corridor. In 1964, Bauhaus school founder Walter Gropius, then a professor at Harvard, saw the plans for new developments as very exciting, and said, “Toronto is fortunate that its cross-town expressway was built north of the reclaimed land” — observing that, though Torontonians hate it so, the Gardiner could have been much worse, as waterfront freeways are in many other cities.
The main culprits behind the post-Gardiner barrier to the water are the Westin Harbour Castle Hotel and the neighbouring residential towers of Harbour Square, built in the 1970s by Robert Campeau, the later deposed, now deceased, king of Canadian development, who was an eventual victim of 1980s excess. The hotel’s gaping mouth contains the most elaborate and well-lit parking ramp in the city, and is often filled with oversized pickup trucks and SUVs that can’t fit in the parking garage, a phenomenon at many downtown hotels. Figuring out how to walk into the hotel is a challenge, and guests dodge tourists and vehicles with every step. Like the Star building, these were all pioneers in a harsh landscape: there was nothing anybody wanted to see on Queens Quay so the buildings turned their back on it.
Harbour Square is redeemed by its lakeside public spaces. There are wooden docks with stairs that lead down to the water and lots of green mixed in with the concrete, and these spaces are populated and well-used. From the ferry, the building looks beautiful and utopic, like a futuristic “Star Trek” city rising out of blue and green nature. Up close, a giant concrete public-art sphere, part of a 1995 installation called “Sundial Folly” by John Fung and Paul Figueiredo, allows passersby to climb around and inside; it seems to float with the lily pads in a fountain. The ball is hollow, with a suspended walkway and an observatory-like view of the islands from inside. This is concrete used for good not evil, and though the south side of the complex is awful, the lakeside of Harbour Square is a fine and unsung pedestrian promenade.
At York Street, the lakeside concrete canyon starts to lighten up with the Queen’s Quay Terminal, a giant old warehouse with a glass condo sprouting out of the top. In 1983, Zeidler Partnership Architects turned the 1927 Terminal Warehouse — the first poured-concrete building in Canada, and known as a “fisherman’s dream” for all the products it housed — into offices and condos. Out front is the landscaped and literary Toronto “walk of fame” with the names of book award winners. The southeast corner is hollowed out four floors high (as if Lake Ontario storms had worn it down to its skeleton over time), with restaurants, some retail, and a theatre inside.
The terminal building is part of the four hectares overseen by Harbourfront Centre, a federal crown corporation — and now a charitable organization — established in 1972 to revitalize Toronto’s waterfront. Though it runs the risk of becoming a tourist trap — it’s one of those places where people come in from elsewhere to see “the city” — it’s a good place and it works. On warm nights, it’s teeming with people from downtown, uptown, and beyond, and there’s opportunity for nice cultural collisions when a band is playing on the open-air stage and folks who might not normally listen to a particular kind of music, let alone attend a show, get to participate. This is how cities should work.
The sometimes open, sometimes in disrepair metal-and-wood pedestrian footbridge that crosses the marina to the west of the Harbourfront stage was my preferred route around the area until Waterfront Toronto opened the third of their innovative wave decks at Simcoe Quay in 2009. The undulating wooden sidewalks are dreamlike, as if what we know about urbanity has suddenly become an absurd cartoon. In officious Toronto, the wave decks are an audacious addition to the streetscape and, perhaps predictably, within months of opening were already the subject of one lawsuit from a man who hurt himself while trying to walk them and wanted to blame somebody for his fall. Now there are warning signs and a guardrail.
Further on, in a naturalized area at the foot of Spadina, beyond the Spadina WaveDeck, plaques describe the flora and fauna as well as how the shoreline has shifted and expanded over the decades. Even more fun are the secret paths through reeds where your feet squish in the muck, and where you can stand in the place where the lake and land mix together in soft and dirty ways. Nearby, during summer months, tall(ish) ships rock in the swell. Across from here, at 401 Queens Quay, is Harbour Terrace, a 1987 building by Li Architects that won a Governor General’s Award for architecture and is a latemodernist beauty that looks straight out of the original “Miami Vice” series.
These wetlands lead to the high and dry Toronto Music Garden, inspired by Bach’s “Suites for Unaccompanied Cello.” In the midnineties, landscape designer Julie Moir Messervy worked with cellist Yo-Yo Ma to interpret the piece in flora, based on its six dance movements. There is even an underutilized amphitheatre on a grassy slope, waiting for somebody to stage a Fringe Festival play or perhaps some other kind of gentle guerrilla theatre. Across the way, Arthur Erickson’s King’s Landing condo looks, with its terraced floors, like a white cruise ship ready to set sail into Lake Ontario.
The stretch ends with a nice mix of condos and co-ops, complete with a community school where you’ll find the most urban-looking basketball courts — in the “Sesame Street” sense — in the city. It’s a real waterfront neighbourhood that’s socially and economically diverse. The Billy Bishop Airport proponents who often claim this is just the wealthy elite area complaining about the airport’s existence have probably only ever seen the neighbourhood from the air. It’s not exclusive, and though that rhetoric flares up from time to time, just crank the Bach and go for a waterfront walk and you won’t hear anything about that.