Toronto Lower Don Lands Redevelopment | ?m | ?s | Waterfront Toronto

A few images from the area today.
Clearing the site of the former tank farm. All the tanks are gone now.

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Part of the caison wall going in where T&T used to be.
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Starting to work on the east side of Cherry.
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Sunnyside Beach, 1914. Before the Gardiner Expressway buried it. (The original sand was dumped there by the lake currents from eroding the Scarborough bluffs.)

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And 1920...
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From link

Those hydro lines are now buried. The hydroelectric corridor transitions from towers to underground at the South Kingsway intersection with The Queensway, at the Humber River.
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From link.
 
Those hydro lines are now buried. The hydroelectric corridor transitions from towers to underground at the South Kingsway intersection with The Queensway, at the Humber River.
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From link.
Nobody was saying you can't bury high-voltage transmission lines, the reason they (and all overhead wiring) are often not buried is cost.
 
Could this have been Toronto's Marina Bay? Or the ground is not good enough to support something that tall. This is right next to downtown and no other site has better potential in terms of visibility.
 
You can't build that tall - the area is underneath the Billy Bishop flight path.

AoD

Without taking a stand on the height question per se...............removing Billy Bishop would resolve that issue....................which I confess to unambiguously favouring.
 
Not including some talls near the north end of the site (next to the Gardiner), I'm betting most of the builds will stay low to medium-rise (assumes no Ford Ferris wheel). As I've said before, I just hope that no one developer (or one architect) get their hands on large plots of land.

Hope the designs are informed by the best of the east of Yonge revolution mixed with the handful of East Bayfront winners (AquaLuna/Bella, mass timber etc.). Obviously projects should take cues from the incredible parklands planned, the harbour and ocassionally a bit of "industrial-chic" as a nod to the past. When all is said and done, new neighbourhoods should obviously look like they belong (ain't rocket science).

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UT
 
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Interesting to be reminded that what we see now is not the finished river bottom. From Rocky

" Did you know this won't actually be the bottom of the river? This is really the foundation for the ecosystem we're going to build on top. We've got to add a layer of sand, a clay mat and geomembrane, and another layer of sand before we can put in the river finishes."
 
You can't build that tall - the area is underneath the Billy Bishop flight path.

AoD
In that case I would rather have Billy Bishop closed because not only it is restricting development in prime areas, it is wasting a very valuable space in the Islands. I would love to see parks extended to fill Billy Bishop. We won't need a ferry to visit the Islands which in itself is a major win.
 
In that case I would rather have Billy Bishop closed because not only it is restricting development in prime areas, it is wasting a very valuable space in the Islands. I would love to see parks extended to fill Billy Bishop. We won't need a ferry to visit the Islands which in itself is a major win.

Closure of Billy Bishop is not up to WT - and not necessarily foreseeable in the immediate future either.

AoD
 
Good luck with that suggestion
 
Anyone see this gross corporate propaganda?


Yep read it - well, what he didn't say is that the so called "free infrastructure" comes at the cost of carte blanche in the Portlands (not just Quayside at EBF, which was the original focus of the RFP). Nice bit of revisionism there. And frankly the "saviour complex" is misplaced - Portlands revitalization is happening with or without Sidewalk (they aren't the ones paying for Don Mouth, for example), and it felt like the latter wanted in on its own terms - and when told they can't have it - they dashed. No big deal, there will be other takers.

Mind you, he worked in "the God realm" in NYC, where the developer had considerably more success at squeezing the public for private profits:


AoD
 
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Yep read it - well, what he didn't say is that the so called "free infrastructure" comes at the cost of carte blanche in the Portlands (not just Quayside at EBF, which was the original focus of the RFP). Nice bit of revisionism there. And frankly the "saviour complex" is misplaced - Portlands revitalization is happening with or without Sidewalk (they aren't the ones paying for Don Mouth, for example), and it felt like the latter wanted in on its own terms - and when told they can't have it - they dashed. No big deal, there will be other takers.

Mind you, he worked in "the God realm" in NYC, where the developer had considerably more success at squeezing the public for private profits:


AoD
Along with the re-writing of history in that article, especially as concerns the original scope of the project, I have a problem with the way he characterized a number of dealings through his glossing over of details. @Ward8's choice of the term propaganda to describe the essay is spot on.

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