What good is a beautiful building with terrific acoustics if you can’t get to it?
The Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts is built on a busy corner so that there is no way for a car or a cab to pick anybody up without seriously disrupting downtown traffic.
Don’t give me the business about how I should be taking the subway to the centre and how planners shouldn’t have to worry about cars. Going to the opera is one of the few small pleasures left for my ageing mother but every time she goes she, has a terrible experience. Exactly where can I or any cab driver leave her and a caregiver off or wait to pick them up?
As it stands, you can stop, but then the drivers behind get furious. Trouble is, no amount of honking from cars is gonna make an elderly person go any faster. It only applies pressure and no small measure of humiliation.
The irony here is that, despite all the best efforts of the Canadian
Opera Company to cool-ify opera and expand its audience to a younger demographic, the vast majority of opera lovers are an ageing population that can’t be dumped on the corner of Queen and University.
Somebody do something.
