If you can't take it down, then pretty it up.
The
Gardiner Expressway's been an albatross around the neck of the city's waterfront development for generations. Needed as a traffic artery, it bifurcates the city, separating the rest of Toronto both physically and psychically from one of its most potentially attractive features.
But
Waterfront Toronto today announced a way to have overhead highways and play with them, too. Thanks to Vancouver planning, urban design and landscape architecture firm
Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg, $5.3 million and a winning 2015
Pan Am Games bid to speed everything up, the
West Don Lands are about to get the city's first (and the nation's largest) underpass park.
It will be located under the Eastern Avenue overpass, near where it meets Richmond and Adelaide streets between Cherry Street and Bayview Avenue, a few blocks north of the main part of the Gardiner. The park will be put together with various sustainable elements such as LED lighting, recycled rubber ground surfaces and re-used cobblestones from underneath a nearby part of Eastern Avenue. Complete with half basketball courts, a caf�, community gardens and playground, the 1.05 hectare park will provide the first meaningful, enjoyable connection between both sides of the overpass.
Set near the site of the Pan Am Games athletes village, the park is an early step in the reclamation of the formerly industrial West Don Lands, a project that also includes the
River City private sector housing community that will begin construction later this year, and the Don River Park, a 7 hectare community centrepiece scheduled to break ground this summer.
"The design takes full advantage of the existing site's eccentricities and its free-for-the-taking weather protection," says lead designer Greg Smallenberg in a press release today, "transforming something that might otherwise be incidental into a delightful urban patch."
Work on Underpass Park is slated to start in May or June, with a Spring, 2011 completion.
Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Samantha Gileno, Waterfront Toronto