Will the much-feared planning disaster on the southeast corner of Leslie and Lake Shore be averted after all?
[rssbreak]
Designs for the new Light Rail Vehicle Maintenance and Storage Facility, aka the Leslie Street carhouse site, were unveiled Friday, August 6.
Any one of the concepts submitted by the three competing architectural firms – Brown + Storey, Fleisher Ridout and gh3 – would be a fantastic improvement on the corner.
But what of the mess of big-box stores already cluttering the intersection and threatening to squeeze the life out of the eclectic mix clear up to Queen?
To say nothing of residents’ concerns about noise and other impacts from streetcars turning at the corner of Leslie and Queen.
The battle to keep SmartCentres from setting up a big-box mall on the Film Studios site on Eastern, thus saving the area from the millions of car visits that go with it, may have been won. But word is, car dealerships are in the cards.
The plan to remake Leslie and Lake Shore is being viewed with an eye further north – and south. The goal: to form a bridge to Leslieville and serve as a green gateway to the Leslie Street Spit.
Tall order for a TTC maintenance yard.
Brown + Storey’s plan imagines “horizon figures,” tall structures made out of discarded materials erupting from the topography like mushrooms, “a new kind of public space that creates a bridge between motion and rest.”
Fleisher Ridout’s back-to-nature pitch calls for “a new successional landscape of mixed deciduous and coniferous uplands, wet meadows, grassy sand dunes and serpentine trails providing habitat for the waterfowl and amphibious wildlife that once filled the marsh.”
The plan by gh3 proposes a system of “walks and gardens,” a walker’s and cyclist’s dream in the spirit of 19th-century waterfront visionary John Howard that features a stone hedgerow, “oxygen-producing” green walls and trees to absorb pollutants.
Here’s to dreaming of what could be in Leslieville.
