Work is under way to gussy up Toronto's cultural image, with cranes swinging at the new opera house and the Royal Ontario Museum, and construction about to begin at the Art Gallery of Ontario. There's also talk of a new museum to showcase civic heritage, and intentions to build an aquarium of the sort that has been a boon in other localities. But the city remains by far the largest on the continent without a major planetarium.
Nick Van der Graaf wants to change that. The 41-year-old political activist and former journalist has put together an ad-hoc group of scientists, educators and star-struck citizens armed with a grand vision: to build a planetarium that will serve as "an educational institution, a popular tourist attraction and a thing of beauty gracing Toronto's awakening cityscape."
His group, which incorporated as a non-profit federally registered entity last summer and includes CBC radio host Bob McDonald as chairman, is one of several proposing a planetarium for Toronto. The city has been without one since 1995, when the ROM closed its McLaughlin Planetarium.
"What I kind of see in my mind's eye is the building they call the observatory in Chichen Itza," Mr. Van der Graaf says, referring to an ancient Mayan complex in the rain forests of the Yucatan Peninsula. "It would be surrounded by actual greenery that would recycle the air and water naturally. And it would have something of that classic planetarium shape -- a dome -- and it would be like a temple in a jungle."
His team has also been inspired by the innovative and wildly successful upgrades to some of the world's best-known planetariums, especially the Hayden in New York, which has become a gleaming icon on the city's Upper West Side.
"We would like to see a real, state-of-the art, 21st-century facility that would even go beyond what the Hayden's doing in New York," says Mr. McDonald, host of the popular program Quirks & Quarks on CBC Radio and known for his efforts to promote public-science awareness.
With the latest digital projection and animation techniques, planetariums can do more than recreate what the sky would look like at any time of night, on any day of the year, as seen from any location on the planet. These days they can take audiences to the surfaces of distant moons and right up to the edge of a black hole.
Building a new planetarium would cost an estimated $10-million to $20-million, its backers say -- far less than either the proposed $100-million aquarium or the $200-million civic heritage museum, called Humanitas. And it could be run by a much smaller staff. Of course, such a project would require corporate sponsorship to get off the ground, and that means convincing the business community as well as local politicians that, once built, the facility can pay for itself.
A central part of Mr. Van der Graaf's vision involves "green" technologies that would keep costs down. "I don't know if we can create a planetarium that will generate a lot of money," he says. "But I do believe we can create one that can sustain itself."
At times, though, it seems like an uphill struggle. As yet there's no business plan, no design and no site to build it on. But they do have a tentative name: GeoSpace Planetarium.
Some of the people Mr. Van der Graaf has approached, however, "don't really know what a planetarium is. They have it confused in their minds with an observatory." Part of the reason for that confusion, he believes, is that a decade has now passed since the McLaughlin closed. "The idea of it, the chance to visit it, has retreated into the past."
That past haunts today's efforts to develop any kind of new public astronomical facility in the city. Deputy mayor Joe Pantalone, for example, agrees that a planetarium is "something that is clearly missing in Toronto," but quickly adds: "The fact that, obviously, there was one here and it didn't seem to make it is not encouraging."
That is exactly the line of thought that all proponents of a new planetarium -- not just Mr. Van der Graaf's group -- want to dispel. The McLaughlin, they say, closed because the Progressive Conservative provincial government under Mike Harris asked for an instantaneous -- and visible -- $600,000 cut in the ROM's budget.
Mothballing the McLaughlin had nothing to do with declining attendance, says Ian McGregor, one of just two astronomers retained by the ROM after the closing. In fact, it was pulling in about 200,000 people a year, equal to about one-third of the museum's overall attendance. "The McLaughlin was a very popular place," he says, but he adds the museum has no plans to bring it back.
In its absence, smaller planetariums, including the 7.3-metre-wide StarLab theatre at the Ontario Science Centre, along with three portable domes used by the ROM, are doing booming business. (A larger planetarium at Seneca College is temporarily closed because of construction.) "Our planetarium is booked solid, between school programs and public programs," says Sara Poirier, an astronomer at the science centre.
In fact, the centre can't rule out one day developing a larger planetarium itself. At the moment, the OSC is occupied with the $40-million development of the Westin Family Innovation Centre, thanks to a generous private donation. After that opens next year, Ms. Poirier says, there's no reason that a new planetarium wouldn't figure in the centre's plans.
"We know that if we do build a planetarium, we will fill it," she says.
Another potential planetarium project is brewing in the west end, where Randy Attwood, president of the Mississauga Astronomical Society, is putting together his own proposal. He has been approaching businesses, a local college and a municipal government (not Mississauga, he says, but prefers not to name the city just yet). And, like Mr. Van der Graaf, he envisions something novel, with exhibits that emphasize Canada's leading role in astronomy and space exploration. "It's not a McLaughlin Planetarium carbon copy," he says.
What everyone seems to agree on is that the McLaughlin's closing left a gaping hole in Toronto's cultural landscape.
"Every other major city in the world has a planetarium," says John Percy, a University of Toronto professor specializing in astronomy education. "It's worked in so many other places, I don't see why it can't work in Toronto."