Toronto One Park Place | 96.01m | 28s | Daniels | Hariri Pontarini

Regent Park Boulevard is starting to be paved

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There is a ton of red brick in the rather sizeable podium.

The south tower should be close to topping off. While other construction across the city seems to have been delayed with our extreme winter weather, this site has been humming along.
 
There's supposed to be a topping off party next week.

More of Regent Park Boulevard - I'm guessing this is pedestrian only

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rdaner said:
Great street presence! Pix from 17 Oct 2013.
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Click to expand...

Is it just me or is the placement of the planting beds really awkward here? They're right in the middle of the sidewalk and create a narrow walking area on either side. They should be towards the steet where they would widen the useful pedestrian space significantly and act as a buffer between pedestrians and cars. Overall a great project but it's annoying to see them get such basic streetscape concepts wrong.
 
Really?!? It's not narrow on either side at all. We see zero things wrong here and it's much wider than most sidewalks. Check it out in person!
 
That sidewalk looks barely wide enough for two people to walk side-by-side.
 
Yeah, it looks like about 1.5 m wide, with another 3 m or so on the other side of the planting beds, on the street side. If they had put the planting beds right next to the street it would have created a single ~4.5 m sidewalk buffered from the street by the trees (along with other street amenities like fire hydrants and newspaper boxes). It's how they did Yonge next to the Quantum buildings and Dundas next to the Eaton Centre. Not to mention it's how most of the world's great streets are set up.
 
What I'm afraid of is having a tree in the planter with a mound of exposed dirt. I've noticed this with planters on Wellesley Street and Bremner Blvd, where there are huge, ugly, cement planters and only 1 or 2 trees planted in them. There is no attempt to cover the huge area of earth, so all you really notice is a dirt mound. Now if they covered the dirt mound with lush plantings, like on Bloor or Dundas Streets, that would be great but that costs money and we all know, this city hates to spend money on frills like plants or flowers.

Why bother even building planters if they are just going to make the street uglier and remain dirt mounds. (like on Wellesley Street)
 
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