Since the 1873 publication of Henry Scadding's Toronto of Old, Hogtown has enjoyed the attention of numerous civic historians, amateurs all, fighting the good and unending fight to keep urban memories alive.
The tradition begun by Dr. Scadding has continued down to the present day in the historical writings of John Sewell and Robert Fulford, journalist John Lorinc and the writers around Spacing magazine, and in Rick Bebout's excellent Internet survey of Queen Street.
In September, Toronto lawyer Mark Osbaldeston joined this circle by showing some images from his new book, Unbuilt Toronto: A History of the City that Might Have Been (Dundurn Press), at the International Interior Design Exposition.
Given the fugitive nature of trade fairs, the display was very brief. But a more durable show of the engaging things Mr. Osbaldeston has discovered opened last week at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), and will remain on view until Jan. 4. Everyone interested in Toronto as it is — and Toronto as it isn't — should catch this concise exhibition.
Organized for the ROM by Phil Goodfellow, vice-chairman of the Toronto Society of Architects (TSA), Unbuilt Toronto: The City that Could Have Been consists of two sorts of visual information, arrayed on large placards.
One illustrates unrealized projects selected from Mr. Osbaldeston's book. Federal Avenue is an example of the kind of bold city-building we lost. Proposed in 1911, a time when beautification was all the rage in American and Canadian cities, this majestic street in the centre of downtown would have revitalized the old warehouse and factory district south of Queen Street, and given a strong spine to the present-day financial district.
Beyond the drawings reproduced in this show, no trace of Federal Avenue remains. Nor does Toronto have much to show — thanks be to the heavens above — for Metro Centre, which was proposed in 1968 and cancelled in 1975. This huge development would have razed 200 acres of rail sidings and warehouses on the west side of downtown and replaced them with dull residential and commercial high-rises and desolate, wind-swept plazas. It would also have led to the demolition of Union Station. This project, and some others here, remind us that not everything Toronto has lost is worth lamenting.
But as we learn from this show, some remnants of admirable architectural dreams do remain. I am sorry, for example, that Toronto has nothing more than a stump to recall the proposed Eaton's College Street tower, destined for the intersection of College and Yonge streets. The handsome base of the building was constructed between 1928 and 1930, but erection of its tall shaft was squashed by the Great Depression.
The second layer of information in this exhibition features unbuilt projects by contemporary architects. To construct this component of the show, the TSA invited designers to submit substantial but unrealized schemes to a juried competition. The results tell an interesting story of imaginative labour, and they reveal the richness of the attention paid by architects and designers to problem areas in Toronto.
Take the mouth of the Don River. Long ago walled in by concrete and diverted into an ignominious ditch, the lower Don has become an acute focus for renewal by Waterfront Toronto, the crown corporation charged with overseeing the $17-billion renovation of Lake Ontario's urban edge.
The Don competition was won by a remarkably beautiful re-naturalization plan by U.S. designer Michael Van Valkenburgh (whose name is misspelled on a wall-placket). But the runner-up proposal, presented here — a team effort by the firms Weiss/Manfredi and du Toit Allsopp Hillier — is hardly less lovely. It too incorporates all that we want in this meeting of waters: a return of Don outflow to the marshy conditions of ancient times, and the area's reconstitution as a patch of wilderness parkland at the heart of the city.
While both the winner and loser in the Don competition embodied much the same high measure of thoughtfulness, the same can't be said for the different visions offered for the scrap of former industrial land known as the Queen West Triangle.
A development scheme for this small strip along Queen Street West, which has gotten the go-ahead from city officials, is architecturally inferior and overscaled for its historically low-rise residential and commercial neighbourhood.
In reaction, the vivid citizens' group Active 18 — incorrectly referred to in the past tense on a wall placket in this show, as though this lively movement had died out — commissioned an alternative plan, displayed here, from Toronto architects Janna Levitt and Dean Goodman.
The work of Ms. Levitt and Mr. Goodman has everything the developers' scheme grievously lacks: proper attention to civic space, proper scaling of buildings, mindful attention to the interesting and various streetscape of this stretch of Queen West. It is a shame that the Levitt-Goodman approach to resurrecting the Triangle will not be followed.
One caveat: While informative and engaging, the show is poorly installed. The large placards have been hung in two long parallel rows that run around the small exhibition area, with the lower row so low the visitor has to stoop to read it. This evocative display of the architecture Toronto didn't get deserves more room to breathe — not the cramped room in which we find it.
