Before the week that was in city politics came to be defined by the mother of all public meetings – also known as the day Rob Ford played chicken with Toronto on service cuts – there was another defining, albeit less noticed, moment. That was the opening of Sherbourne Common.
A strange juxtaposition, perhaps. But for those looking for symbols in the current state of city politics, the timing of Sherbourne’s official unveiling on Tuesday, July 26 – while Ford & Co engaged in thinking-small meanderings at City Hall – couldn’t have been more apropos.
The city was ablaze in 31°C heat, but at the foot of Lower Sherbourne the wind was blowing at a steady clip and the clouds were racing overhead. The light in the afternoon sky was a shutterbug’s dream, so crisp that you might mistake the view for a digital rendering.
Kids tried out the funky new play structures. But it was Light Showers, Jill Anholt’s 9-metre-high sculptures, which anchor the park and double as giant filters for Sherbourne’s built-in water treatment facility, that stole the show.
The structures are meant to “visibly express the surrounding community’s aspirations to sustainability,” according to the artist. But they represent much more – a fanciful and functional vision of the waterfront whose future is headed into troubled waters. To thank for that we have an administration at City Hall eager to cut ties with Waterfront Toronto and sell off any leverage it has over waterfront growth to department store developers.
Take a good, long look. Sherbourne Common is likely the last piece of artistic and publicly funded development that’ll be planned for the water’s edge with the participation of the city for years to come. You’ll notice I said “publicly funded.” No doubt there’ll be endless opportunities in Ford’s privatized Toronto for the 80s-style concrete madness that has largely killed the waterfront west of Jarvis.
But waterfront dreaming isn’t dead yet. Some things are bigger than Rob Ford.
Plans for a park on the West Donlands site, for example, will move ahead because that’s where the athletes’ village for the 2015 Pan Am Games is slated to be built. The Queens Quay streetcar corridor is also a good candidate for completion because private development along the street will require reliable transportation.
The bad news is that the days of bold, forward-thinking innovation are kaput – or on hiatus until a new mayor and council dedicated to city-building are elected.
Politicos of all stripes on hand for the ribbon-cutting ceremony at Sherbourne’s opening sang the park’s praises. Reps from all three levels of government, which together fund Waterfront Toronto projects, lauded Waterfront Toronto’s work. Among them was Scarborough Councillor Norm Kelly, the Parks and Environment Committee chair.
Kelly called Sherbourne “a fantastic public space” and said the park “will be a great asset” to the city. Were the nice words for the cameras?
On the other side of Queens Quay, meanwhile, construction cranes continue work on the new George Brown campus that forms part of the East Bayfront precinct. Next to that is the already completed Corus building, the Water’s Edge promenade and Sugar Beach. Here, too, the Ford admin’s waterfront wanderings have shaken confidence in plans for mixed-use development.
Sherbourne is one of many projects gestated under former mayor David Miller, whose commitment to Waterfront Toronto – Ford has yet to attend a meeting of the board – helped spur development on vacated industrial wasteland. And herein lies a tale of two cities: the Toronto left over from the Miller era and the one Ford has set out to, well, destroy.
All along the waterfront and throughout the metropolis, in fact, work begun in the Miller era continues, from the revamp of Regent Park to the ongoing construction of condo towers in the core and the reimagining of neighbourhoods across the city, including the waterfront.
Ford, on the other hand, has pulled the plug on a plan to build a stacked ice rink and mused about selling off valuable city-owned land assets and deep-sixing the Lawrence Heights redevelopment. His attitude toward arm’s-length agencies charged with managing land assets is ambivalent at best.
Ford hasn’t actually set out to build anything. His is a starkly different vision of the role of local government than his predecessor’s.
Miller saw Toronto as a city-state. And as mayor of the sixth-largest government in the country, he leveraged what political power he could to get things done to improve life for its citizens. This is especially true on the waterfront, where before Miller came along development was mired in red tape and largely going nowhere.
Ford, on the other hand, is all about shrinking the size of government and with it the quality of life of the majority of Torontonians. It can’t even be called addition by subtraction, since whatever savings his moves have made for taxpayers have gone to higher service fees, for example.
Ford believes the responsibility of cities begins and ends with the elementary, like picking up garbage and fixing potholes. That philosophy, if you want to call it that, extends to economic development, strangely enough. As a self-described businessman, you’d think the mayor would have an interest in urban investment and growth.
But consultants KPMG’s Core Services Review has proposed cuts to the economic development department – yes, the folks responsible for promoting investment in Toronto – even though a small fraction of its work, about 4 per cent, is discretionary.
Is this the happy place the mayor promised during the campaign, where everyone has fun?
On Wednesday (August 3), Ford was to take PM Stephen Harper on a tour of the Union Station revitalization, another waterfront project pushed by Miller – and opposed by Ford when he was councillor.
Under David Miller, waterfront development took off.
enzom@nowtoronto.com
