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TheStar.com - GTA - Artful dreams of a new Gardiner
Artful dreams of a new Gardiner
From Shanghai to London, cities are learning to embrace and transform their elevated highways. As Leslie Scrivener reports, maybe it's time we followed suit
Aug 05, 2007 04:30 AM
Looking out from the 20th floor of her condominium at Harbour Square, Ulla Colgrass has a lovely view of the Gardiner Expressway.
Despite its tired state, crumbling cement and rusting steel, it is not the six-lane nemesis it once was.
A community activist, Colgrass says she doesn't hear complaints from residents about the day to night drift of traffic beyond their balconies. "People who live here are not bothered by it. I don't know why, but there is a burning desire among planners and politicians to take it down."
The Gardiner is not really a barrier to the waterfront any more, she says. As condos are built within arms reach of the expressway at Yonge and Bay Sts. and further west at Fort York Blvd., the expressway is vanishing before her eyes.
"It used to be a big barrier and eyesore, physical as well as psychological, but that's no longer the case because it's buried in high-rises," says Colgrass, a journalist and chair of the York Quay Neighbourhood Association. "There's a bit of hum from the traffic, but it's not the nuisance it used to be.
"It's disappearing."
The city's Waterfront Secretariat is now reviewing the recommendations and cost estimates of recent waterfront task forces on the fate of the Gardiner. The options: Do nothing; bury sections of it; improve it. The plan is to synthesize the findings, report back to the city in a year and follow up with a public consultation.
What is clear is that the city doesn't have the money nor the appetite for a Boston-style Big Dig that will bury the expressway, create a decade or so of traffic turmoil and cost more than $1.5 billion. (It's for good reason the Big Dig is also called the Highway to Hell.
Toronto wouldn't be the first to embrace its elevated highway — cities from London to Shanghai have instead opted to revel in the creative possibilities above and below their downtown expressways. And in that, there may be some valuable lessons for Hogtwon.
In Shanghai, a dizzying maze of highways is illuminated at night in vibrant neon colors. "It's Shanghai so it's a bit over the top, but what's important is that they are consciously trying to make a place that people would enjoy walking through, beneath and beside. And they do – it attracts wide public use," says Toronto architect Calvin Brook. "That's a great, original way to rethink the possibilities of what an expressway's role can be in a city."
Also diverting, though more traditionally, is Quebec City's painted columns under its elevated Autoroute 440, which looks similar to the Gardiner, in the neighbourhood of St. Roch. These murals include beguiling trompe d'oeil illusions of an Egyptian temple, a surrealist fantasy and the entrance to a Gothic cathedral.
Still, not everyone is keen on this kind of trickery. "It starts to trivialize a piece of public infrastructure," says architect John van Nostrand. "It undermines it."
In Louisville, Ky., the not-for-profit Waterfront Development Corporation created an 34-hectare park, great swaths of it under the elevated Interstate 64, out of what was once a sand and gravel pit, scrap yard and mess of rail lines. "It was a terrible area," says corporation president David Karem. "Not only because of the elevated expressway but the city was cut off from the (Ohio) River."
They never considered burying the highway, he says. "It wasn't just the extraordinary expense. The park has been open for 10 years. If we had built a tunnel, it would not have been anything in anybody's lifetime. Nobody would have been able to enjoy it."
Now there is a Great Lawn, home to concerts, picnics, touch football, kite-flying and the like. Nearby are plazas, a water park and Karem adds, the $100 million development has been a catalyst, drawing new residents to the riverside area.
In New York, redevelopment of the High Line, a 22-block-long elevated rail line that runs through Hell's Kitchen and West Chelsea, is now underway. It will become a green promenade with views of the skyline and the Hudson River and, this being Manhattan, luxury housing alongside.
Also in New York, a market was built under the Queensborough bridge at 59th Street. At the turn of the 20th Century it had been a farmer's market, but fell into disrepair and became a department of transport storage depot and paint shop. It was revitalized in 2000, when the Bridgemarket was built — posh food emporium, restaurant and design store.
In Portland, Ore., skateboarders claimed an abandoned space that was a drug users' and squatters' haven under the Burnside Bridge. Without city approval, the young boarders built a park themselves, starting with concrete they found in their garages at home. Now it's one of the best skate parks in the world and skateboard icon Tony Hawk names it among his top five.
In London, the Westway under the A40 (running from London to Oxford) is a model of what could be done with the Gardiner – with jewlery shops, soccer fields, stables, tennis courts, a refugee centre and markets tucked tidily under the elevated highway. About 80 per cent are community services, 20 percent commercial.
Such examples won't silence those who remain deadset against the Gardiner, seeing in its destruction a newfound opening to the lake.
But what Shanghai, London and others have done is inspiring a growing number of critics who say it's time to make peace with the highway and make the best of it.
The Gardiner, after all, isn't going away anytime soon. So how can we live it? Not only that, how to make it, dare we say, beautiful.
It's not so difficult, insists architect Brook, who has thought about the Gardiner since it was his thesis project at Harvard in 1985. Brook, with architect John van Nostrand, prepared a report in 2003 for the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation with their vision for the waterfront, which included moving Lake Shore Blvd. and putting a creative mix of shops and studios under the Gardiner. But with the Lake Shore staying put, short of commissioning Christo to wrap the Gardiner, what would they do with the expressway now?
Go back to basics, they suggest – clean it regularly, repair it, paint it, and bounce light off it. Get rid of the industrial green paint job on the steel beams. Care for it and invest in it. The beauty in its bones will emerge – the discretely arched concrete beams, the shapely Danish-modern supports.
"It's beautiful, totally sculptural," says Brook.
And then, add plants, like Phragmites Australis, the common reed, which grows near the Gardiner at the Dunn Ave. ramp. Storm water running off the deck could be used to water greenery growing underneath it. He sees planting beds on the barriers that separate the expressway's east and west lanes — something similar is already being done at Pearson's Terminal One. Furthermore, plant on the side rails of the Gardiner so that vines would curl under the soffits and down the columns.
"You could start with a pilot project. I think the city could do it without blowing its brains out," he says. "Psychologically, it would transform the assumption that this is a wasteland that doesn't deserve any civic treatment. There are so many opportunities to weave more natural elements into the city."
Brook and van Nostrand also envisioned a skating rink on the land under the tall pillars west of Bathurst, bike ramps rising over Parliament St. onto the railway viaduct, and replacing overhead lighting with a dazzling open basket weave of coloured lights arching across the Gardiner. "So it becomes a sinuous river of light moving through the city, something enormously bold, and a counterpoint to the CN Tower," says Brook.
The city has already launched a beautification program under the expressway, using some of the landscaping ideas from the Brook/van Nostrand plan, though it hasn't fully embraced the green part of it - that was nixed by transportation services worrying about vines getting in the way of maintenance.
The arrival of new residents in the condos is the impetus for improving the dreary area, which has long been little more than a dirt pit.
About 21,600 new comers are expected within a half-kilometre of York St. below Front St. W., another 11,000 will come with the East Bayfront development, joining the 10,000 or so already living on Queen's Quay W. between Bay St. and the Rogers Centre.
Condo developers are paying for some of the redesign and one corner, at Lake Shore and Yonge St. has recently been transformed into a friendly plaza, with lights and artful streams of cemented river rock (cemented because it's sometimes called riot rock - as in rock that can be hurled during a riot.) The Clean and Beautiful City program spent about $500,000 improving Lake Shore between York and Bay Sts.
One of the objectives, says city planner Al Rezoski, is to get pedestrians walking under or near the Gardiner and eventually along a continuous walkway that will go to Bathurst St.
With these enhancements, including new pediestrian splashguards, it's usable and safe now. The light coloured columns have the effect of framing views of the city. And a cyclist can avoid the mayhem of Queen's Quay W., which has no bike lane, and ride pleasantly shaded by the Gardiner, all the way to Coronation Park.
While those are promising first steps, the Sunday Star asked a range of other experts for their thoughts on improving the expressway.
Or, as Brenda Goldstein, a project co-ordinator at the Ontario College of Art and Design, puts it: "How do you make it friendly and attractive."
While no friend of the Gardiner –"It's a barrier to the waterfront" – David Liss, director of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, does have some suggestions. Among them: Close the Gardiner to cars on nights where there are fireworks displays and open it to pedestrians for a magical view.
He'd also remove the advertising billboards on the western approach to the city.
"It's a major eyesore," he says. And why not talk to artits and creative people, not just developers and engineers, about the expressway's future? "Dare to dream beyond the confines of the economic equation."
Architect Siamak Hariri echoes Brook's plea for more greenery – plant more trees, give them enough soil to flourish and, mostly, lavish them with care. "As you approach the city, it would be nicer than the devastated hardscape you see as you look down. It's amazing how much damage trees can cover up," he says. Pay attention to the north-south streets that lead to the Gardiner, he adds. Make them robust and interesting gateways. "Something with a cross-grain to the Gardiner. It can't be timid. If you have strong lines that connect you, you get swept into them, so you almost skip through the Gardiner."
And he adds: Why not have a design competition on the expressway, similar to those recently held for the waterfront?
Zack Taylor, a University of Toronto PhD student who wrote a master's thesis on the Gardiner, suggests a visitors' centre under the expressway west of Fort York.
"On a fall day it's a wonderful space, with nothing to contain it. His advice: Clad the underside of the expressway, which is now raw, rusting steel girders, so it's more like a ceiling.
By the numbers
200,000 – number of cars using the Gardiner daily
70 – Percent of users who live outside Toronto
$12 million – annual maintenance costs
18.5 – length, in kilometres long
8 – length, in kilomtres, of elevated portion
4 – height, in storeys, of the arches
Sources: Waterfront Toronto, City of Toronto, Toronto Star files
AoD
INFRASTRUCTURE
TheStar.com - GTA - Artful dreams of a new Gardiner
Artful dreams of a new Gardiner
From Shanghai to London, cities are learning to embrace and transform their elevated highways. As Leslie Scrivener reports, maybe it's time we followed suit
Aug 05, 2007 04:30 AM
Looking out from the 20th floor of her condominium at Harbour Square, Ulla Colgrass has a lovely view of the Gardiner Expressway.
Despite its tired state, crumbling cement and rusting steel, it is not the six-lane nemesis it once was.
A community activist, Colgrass says she doesn't hear complaints from residents about the day to night drift of traffic beyond their balconies. "People who live here are not bothered by it. I don't know why, but there is a burning desire among planners and politicians to take it down."
The Gardiner is not really a barrier to the waterfront any more, she says. As condos are built within arms reach of the expressway at Yonge and Bay Sts. and further west at Fort York Blvd., the expressway is vanishing before her eyes.
"It used to be a big barrier and eyesore, physical as well as psychological, but that's no longer the case because it's buried in high-rises," says Colgrass, a journalist and chair of the York Quay Neighbourhood Association. "There's a bit of hum from the traffic, but it's not the nuisance it used to be.
"It's disappearing."
The city's Waterfront Secretariat is now reviewing the recommendations and cost estimates of recent waterfront task forces on the fate of the Gardiner. The options: Do nothing; bury sections of it; improve it. The plan is to synthesize the findings, report back to the city in a year and follow up with a public consultation.
What is clear is that the city doesn't have the money nor the appetite for a Boston-style Big Dig that will bury the expressway, create a decade or so of traffic turmoil and cost more than $1.5 billion. (It's for good reason the Big Dig is also called the Highway to Hell.
Toronto wouldn't be the first to embrace its elevated highway — cities from London to Shanghai have instead opted to revel in the creative possibilities above and below their downtown expressways. And in that, there may be some valuable lessons for Hogtwon.
In Shanghai, a dizzying maze of highways is illuminated at night in vibrant neon colors. "It's Shanghai so it's a bit over the top, but what's important is that they are consciously trying to make a place that people would enjoy walking through, beneath and beside. And they do – it attracts wide public use," says Toronto architect Calvin Brook. "That's a great, original way to rethink the possibilities of what an expressway's role can be in a city."
Also diverting, though more traditionally, is Quebec City's painted columns under its elevated Autoroute 440, which looks similar to the Gardiner, in the neighbourhood of St. Roch. These murals include beguiling trompe d'oeil illusions of an Egyptian temple, a surrealist fantasy and the entrance to a Gothic cathedral.
Still, not everyone is keen on this kind of trickery. "It starts to trivialize a piece of public infrastructure," says architect John van Nostrand. "It undermines it."
In Louisville, Ky., the not-for-profit Waterfront Development Corporation created an 34-hectare park, great swaths of it under the elevated Interstate 64, out of what was once a sand and gravel pit, scrap yard and mess of rail lines. "It was a terrible area," says corporation president David Karem. "Not only because of the elevated expressway but the city was cut off from the (Ohio) River."
They never considered burying the highway, he says. "It wasn't just the extraordinary expense. The park has been open for 10 years. If we had built a tunnel, it would not have been anything in anybody's lifetime. Nobody would have been able to enjoy it."
Now there is a Great Lawn, home to concerts, picnics, touch football, kite-flying and the like. Nearby are plazas, a water park and Karem adds, the $100 million development has been a catalyst, drawing new residents to the riverside area.
In New York, redevelopment of the High Line, a 22-block-long elevated rail line that runs through Hell's Kitchen and West Chelsea, is now underway. It will become a green promenade with views of the skyline and the Hudson River and, this being Manhattan, luxury housing alongside.
Also in New York, a market was built under the Queensborough bridge at 59th Street. At the turn of the 20th Century it had been a farmer's market, but fell into disrepair and became a department of transport storage depot and paint shop. It was revitalized in 2000, when the Bridgemarket was built — posh food emporium, restaurant and design store.
In Portland, Ore., skateboarders claimed an abandoned space that was a drug users' and squatters' haven under the Burnside Bridge. Without city approval, the young boarders built a park themselves, starting with concrete they found in their garages at home. Now it's one of the best skate parks in the world and skateboard icon Tony Hawk names it among his top five.
In London, the Westway under the A40 (running from London to Oxford) is a model of what could be done with the Gardiner – with jewlery shops, soccer fields, stables, tennis courts, a refugee centre and markets tucked tidily under the elevated highway. About 80 per cent are community services, 20 percent commercial.
Such examples won't silence those who remain deadset against the Gardiner, seeing in its destruction a newfound opening to the lake.
But what Shanghai, London and others have done is inspiring a growing number of critics who say it's time to make peace with the highway and make the best of it.
The Gardiner, after all, isn't going away anytime soon. So how can we live it? Not only that, how to make it, dare we say, beautiful.
It's not so difficult, insists architect Brook, who has thought about the Gardiner since it was his thesis project at Harvard in 1985. Brook, with architect John van Nostrand, prepared a report in 2003 for the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation with their vision for the waterfront, which included moving Lake Shore Blvd. and putting a creative mix of shops and studios under the Gardiner. But with the Lake Shore staying put, short of commissioning Christo to wrap the Gardiner, what would they do with the expressway now?
Go back to basics, they suggest – clean it regularly, repair it, paint it, and bounce light off it. Get rid of the industrial green paint job on the steel beams. Care for it and invest in it. The beauty in its bones will emerge – the discretely arched concrete beams, the shapely Danish-modern supports.
"It's beautiful, totally sculptural," says Brook.
And then, add plants, like Phragmites Australis, the common reed, which grows near the Gardiner at the Dunn Ave. ramp. Storm water running off the deck could be used to water greenery growing underneath it. He sees planting beds on the barriers that separate the expressway's east and west lanes — something similar is already being done at Pearson's Terminal One. Furthermore, plant on the side rails of the Gardiner so that vines would curl under the soffits and down the columns.
"You could start with a pilot project. I think the city could do it without blowing its brains out," he says. "Psychologically, it would transform the assumption that this is a wasteland that doesn't deserve any civic treatment. There are so many opportunities to weave more natural elements into the city."
Brook and van Nostrand also envisioned a skating rink on the land under the tall pillars west of Bathurst, bike ramps rising over Parliament St. onto the railway viaduct, and replacing overhead lighting with a dazzling open basket weave of coloured lights arching across the Gardiner. "So it becomes a sinuous river of light moving through the city, something enormously bold, and a counterpoint to the CN Tower," says Brook.
The city has already launched a beautification program under the expressway, using some of the landscaping ideas from the Brook/van Nostrand plan, though it hasn't fully embraced the green part of it - that was nixed by transportation services worrying about vines getting in the way of maintenance.
The arrival of new residents in the condos is the impetus for improving the dreary area, which has long been little more than a dirt pit.
About 21,600 new comers are expected within a half-kilometre of York St. below Front St. W., another 11,000 will come with the East Bayfront development, joining the 10,000 or so already living on Queen's Quay W. between Bay St. and the Rogers Centre.
Condo developers are paying for some of the redesign and one corner, at Lake Shore and Yonge St. has recently been transformed into a friendly plaza, with lights and artful streams of cemented river rock (cemented because it's sometimes called riot rock - as in rock that can be hurled during a riot.) The Clean and Beautiful City program spent about $500,000 improving Lake Shore between York and Bay Sts.
One of the objectives, says city planner Al Rezoski, is to get pedestrians walking under or near the Gardiner and eventually along a continuous walkway that will go to Bathurst St.
With these enhancements, including new pediestrian splashguards, it's usable and safe now. The light coloured columns have the effect of framing views of the city. And a cyclist can avoid the mayhem of Queen's Quay W., which has no bike lane, and ride pleasantly shaded by the Gardiner, all the way to Coronation Park.
While those are promising first steps, the Sunday Star asked a range of other experts for their thoughts on improving the expressway.
Or, as Brenda Goldstein, a project co-ordinator at the Ontario College of Art and Design, puts it: "How do you make it friendly and attractive."
While no friend of the Gardiner –"It's a barrier to the waterfront" – David Liss, director of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, does have some suggestions. Among them: Close the Gardiner to cars on nights where there are fireworks displays and open it to pedestrians for a magical view.
He'd also remove the advertising billboards on the western approach to the city.
"It's a major eyesore," he says. And why not talk to artits and creative people, not just developers and engineers, about the expressway's future? "Dare to dream beyond the confines of the economic equation."
Architect Siamak Hariri echoes Brook's plea for more greenery – plant more trees, give them enough soil to flourish and, mostly, lavish them with care. "As you approach the city, it would be nicer than the devastated hardscape you see as you look down. It's amazing how much damage trees can cover up," he says. Pay attention to the north-south streets that lead to the Gardiner, he adds. Make them robust and interesting gateways. "Something with a cross-grain to the Gardiner. It can't be timid. If you have strong lines that connect you, you get swept into them, so you almost skip through the Gardiner."
And he adds: Why not have a design competition on the expressway, similar to those recently held for the waterfront?
Zack Taylor, a University of Toronto PhD student who wrote a master's thesis on the Gardiner, suggests a visitors' centre under the expressway west of Fort York.
"On a fall day it's a wonderful space, with nothing to contain it. His advice: Clad the underside of the expressway, which is now raw, rusting steel girders, so it's more like a ceiling.
By the numbers
200,000 – number of cars using the Gardiner daily
70 – Percent of users who live outside Toronto
$12 million – annual maintenance costs
18.5 – length, in kilometres long
8 – length, in kilomtres, of elevated portion
4 – height, in storeys, of the arches
Sources: Waterfront Toronto, City of Toronto, Toronto Star files
AoD
