An illustration of the proposed university park, looking south on University Avenue toward Queen Street West. Illustration of PUBLIC WORK
One of Toronto’s most exciting park projects – turning part of a downtown driveway into green space, has a boost.
On Tuesday, Mayor John Tory announced his commitment to the “University Park” plan, which would create nearly nine acres of new green space by redesigning University Avenue in the city center.
Mr. Tory, running for re-election, announced she would give priority to three park projects. One is a three-acre park at the foot of Bathurst Street, which reuses a garage and builds a deck across a section of Lake Ontario. Another is a set of incremental movements along the downtown rail corridor. The last one is on University Avenue. As I wrote a few weeks ago, University Park is an obvious victory: a visible public space with symbolic value that will serve a large population. It is relatively cheap and easy to build. It just took a little political will.
Now Mr. Tory says it’s rising. “It will be a historic project that is absolutely right in terms of what and where it is,” he said in an interview Tuesday. “It will give life to this street.”
“If I come back here,” as mayor, he said, “I’ll be very committed to getting it.”
He noted a staff report that will reach the City Council Executive Committee next week; puts these three projects as priorities for the city center. At the Toronto City Council Kremlinology, that means these are things the mayor wants to happen and has asked the staff to hand it over.
This year the City Council will make a detailed assessment of the underground services in the area. They will work to coordinate the park with the construction of a new Ontario line subway station that will break the corner of Queen and University over the next decade.
In 2026, when his next term as mayor ends – if he is re-elected, as is almost certain – what will people be able to see? The Bathurst Quay Park under construction; and a phase of the University Park “will go well, and maybe under construction,” the mayor said.
The idea has been moving for a few years. A version of it appears in the new city center plan, which was initially proposed in 2018. It was designed for the city by landscape architects PUBLIC WORK. Two years later, a private foundation, the Michael Young Family Foundation, hired PUBLIC WORK to expand and revise the idea. They have done this with the help of the non-profit organization Evergreen.
These advocates are making an important and selfless contribution to the city. University Park would serve an area that includes the city hall, two courts and the city’s main hospital complex, which has patients from across the province.
And rather than just providing new green spaces (about nine acres), it would transform existing sites. The campus, Queen’s Park and University Avenue are highly visible and symbolic components in the urban structure of the city. But a road passes them. Until 2020, these roads had four vehicular traffic lanes in each direction; they still move at high speed. This makes them nasty and even dangerous to cross. “University Avenue is not a street that is currently full of car traffic,” the mayor said, accurately.
So if it’s such a fantastic idea, what has it taken so long? Mr. Tory said she has supported the idea since she learned about it from the Young Foundation. City staff “told me it couldn’t be done at all,” he said. After stepping back, he said, he received a different response.
This is plausible. Toronto is a great city; The town hall is now a large machine running on few resources. And yet it now seems that Mr. Tory, who has defined himself as a discreet tax conservative, wants to offer some important things. “As you get closer to the end of a chapter in life,” he said, “it makes sense to say, we have to do better than that.”
In many ways, from how it treats the most vulnerable to how it creates new housing, Toronto really needs to do better. The fate of University Park could be an indicator of how the city and its current mayor are changing.
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