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Riverdale Rink Rat said:
Been reading your posts, and it took until this one for you to shift your arguments into the past. Keep posting, and you might get to the point where you completely disagree with your (earlier) self!

Roads are not the city, and the DVP/Gardiner is most definitely NOT the 'fabric of the city'. I would argue that the portion of the Gardiner which cuts through the bottom of the city is exactly the opposite -- it's designed to allow people to bypass the city, not interact with it.

As a resident of Riverdale, I want to be able to use my arterials to get north -- not affected by this teardown. To get west -- this'll cost me the extra minutes from Carlaw to the CNE (5 mins.? Maybe?).

OTOH, pulling down the Gardiner and building Sherbourne park, the Queen's Quay bikepaths, the connected Harbourfront boardwalk, West Donlands parkland and neighbourhood, and finally East Bayfront does nothing but improve my life. Your major argument -- 'but how do I get to Walmart?', if I may paraphrase -- will be answered by building a new Walmart JUST FOR YOU on Lakeshore at Leslie. We all win!

As for your Pittsburgh/Cleveland idiocy -- c'mon. Toronto TODAY is both the premier city in Canada and the second most important city in N.A., with L.A. the only arguable alternative. Chicago/SF/Atlanta? Regional centres at best.

So... aim for NYC. Raise the city centre density! Build an iconic park to relieve the non-green misery of the apartment (condo) dwellers! Make the centre of the city and the harbour so beautiful that it becomes a tourist attraction! TEAR DOWN THE GARDINER!!
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Please! Cleveland and Pittsburgh are both cities (like Toronto) that were based on manufacturing and are struggling to reinvent themselves, as is Toronto. Montreal was Canada's financial center until only a few decades ago. Massey Fergueson, Inglis, Westinghouse, General Motors: more recently, those companies built this city. Our blue collar roots are not that far gone.
We're never going to be New York, London or Paris. Not at least for another 50 years or more. It could be argued that we've only just joined the 20th century (Sunday shopping, for example.) I'm all for raising the city density and I love tall buildings as much as the next guy (probably more!), but I am absolutely horrified when I look at the congestion on our downtown streets now, let alone when all these 40, 50 story buildings are finished.

Put 50,000 people in the Portlands area, another 50,000 in the core, then decapitate the Gardiner?
 
Dichotomy said:
Please! Cleveland and Pittsburgh are both cities (like Toronto) that were based on manufacturing and are struggling to reinvent themselves, as is Toronto. Montreal was Canada's financial center until only a few decades ago. Massey Fergueson, Inglis, Westinghouse, General Motors: more recently, those companies built this city. Our blue collar roots are not that far gone.
We're never going to be New York, London or Paris. Not at least for another 50 years or more. It could be argued that we've only just joined the 20th century (Sunday shopping, for example.) I'm all for raising the city density and I love tall buildings as much as the next guy (probably more!), but I am absolutely horrified when I look at the congestion on our downtown streets now, let alone when all these 40, 50 story buildings are finished.
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While Toronto and the rust belt share a common history I wouls argue that we've done a pretty good job at reinventing ourselves. I mean, Toronto is the financial and commercial centre of a G-8 country - can Cleveland or Pittsburg boast the same thing? Of course not. Montreal may have at one point been the financial capital of Canada, but Toronto is now thanks in large part to the PQ.

It'll be interesting to see how transit patterns change if/when they start tolling the Gardiner and DVP.
 
Dichotomy said:
Not sure who's going to want to live down by the stink of the Don River, but I guess that's just me.
Ever hang out at the foot of Coxwell (where all those lovely 600k townhomes are?) when the wind is blowing the wrong way?
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The odours in that area relate to the Ashbridges Bay sewage treatment plant on the south side of Lakeshore between Leslie and Coxwell. http://maps.google.ca/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=43.658092,-79.319444&spn=0.008833,0.021071&t=h&z=16

The prevailing wind is from the northwest, and generally nothing can be smelled. Sometimes the wind is from the southwest, and that can carry the odour. Though it's about 2.0 km southwest from me, and I can't say I've ever smelled it this far (near Gerrard Street).

The Don River is about 2.5 km to the west. It's extremely unusual for the wind to be from due East, particularly for sustained periods (perhaps for a few hours in a major storm - and then the odour doesn't tend to travel much because of the rain). This smell won't be a problem that far west. There isn't much in the way of industrial activity near the Don producing much in the way of odours anymore, and the Don itself is being cleaned up.

This seems to be making a molehill out of an anthill.
 
nfitz said:
The odours in that area relate to the Ashbridges Bay sewage treatment plant on the south side of Lakeshore between Leslie and Coxwell. http://maps.google.ca/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=43.658092,-79.319444&spn=0.008833,0.021071&t=h&z=16

The prevailing wind is from the northwest, and generally nothing can be smelled. Sometimes the wind is from the southwest, and that can carry the odour. Though it's about 2.0 km southwest from me, and I can't say I've ever smelled it this far (near Gerrard Street).

The Don River is about 2.5 km to the west. It's extremely unusual for the wind to be from due East, particularly for sustained periods (perhaps for a few hours in a major storm - and then the odour doesn't tend to travel much because of the rain). This smell won't be a problem that far west. There isn't much in the way of industrial activity near the Don producing much in the way of odours anymore, and the Don itself is being cleaned up.

This seems to be making a molehill out of an anthill.
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Well, this is completely off topic, but since you're bringing up the winds, I should tell you that I face the east and from about November through to March I cannot leave anything on my terrace because everything gets soaked. Fortunately it is the summer months when the Don would be warmer and, therefore, smell stronger, but it rarely freezes over so anyone living near it would have the smell. It's a minor point, IMO, but there were a lot of reasons no housing was built down there in the past. I wonder what insurance rates for anyone buying a townhouse will be for that area. Flood damage anyone?

One interesting point to note about history and the Roman Empire: one of their biggest claims to fame was their roadbuilding abilities. A city depends on its roads. They are its arteries. Subways cannot carry goods. Toronto has lousy arteries. The 401/DVP/Gardiner are the aorta.
Well, you work the rest out for yourself.
 
Dichotomy said:
One interesting point to note about history and the Roman Empire: one of their biggest claims to fame was their roadbuilding abilities. A city depends on its roads. They are its arteries. Subways cannot carry goods. Toronto has lousy arteries. The 401/DVP/Gardiner are the aorta.
Well, you work the rest out for yourself.
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Well considering the train was still hundreds of years off, I don't think the Romans ever got together and decided that roads were superior to rail. Cars weren't around either and I doubt they ever built elevated expressways. These roads were for pedestrians and people with horses.

Subways can carry goods, we just don't use them that way. If you good cars off the road and freed up our arteries it would be easier to get cargo around.
 
MIght be the precipitation

Dichotomy said:
Well, this is completely off topic, but since you're bringing up the winds, I should tell you that I face the east and from about November through to March I cannot leave anything on my terrace because everything gets soaked. Fortunately it is the summer months when the Don would be warmer and, therefore, smell stronger, but it rarely freezes over so anyone living near it would have the smell. It's a minor point, IMO, but there were a lot of reasons no housing was built down there in the past. I wonder what insurance rates for anyone buying a townhouse will be for that area. Flood damage anyone?

One interesting point to note about history and the Roman Empire: one of their biggest claims to fame was their roadbuilding abilities. A city depends on its roads. They are its arteries. Subways cannot carry goods. Toronto has lousy arteries. The 401/DVP/Gardiner are the aorta.
Well, you work the rest out for yourself.
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1. The reason the stuff on your terrace gets wet from Nov to Mar is that is when it rains and snows more in Toronto. Winds swirl in snowstorms -- nothing to do with 'prevailing'.

2. I run beside the Don twice a week. It no longers stinks, and hasn't since the early 90s at least.

3. The gazillions of dollars spent on the West Don Lands has been to build a berm to protect against flood damage. The condos will be just fine.

4. The 401/QEW carry trucks just fine. The DVP/Gardiner are mostly for bringing cars into or out of downtown. Please stop conflating the two -- they're not the same issue at all (except for Glen, who really, really wants to put a steel mill in beside the sugar refinery.)
 
Further on point #2... can you fish the Don now?

Riverdale Rink Rat said:
2. I run beside the Don twice a week. It no longers stinks, and hasn't since the early 90s at least.
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Ran across the Lakeshore bike bridge and up the Don pathway yesterday. Ironically, the one place which stank was right under the Gardiner/DVP curved bridge. The bridge support in the middle of the river had collected a heap of junk, mostly downed branches, and a bit of an oil slick from the Gardiner runoff. (BTW, I don't think that tearing down the Gardiner will help with that slick -- there's enough other roads that will still have runoff end up in the Don -- but it might help.) Getting rid of that piling and opening up the bottom of the Don so that it flows better would probably be a good thing for the river, though.

However, the most astonishing thing about the jog was seeing two fisherman wetting their lines in the Don. While the ducks/geese/cormorants have long been back, are there really fish that foolish as to swim the Don? Are they edible if caught?
 
I've always maintained that: whatever the city says it will cost to 'tear down' the end of the Gardiner, automatically increase that by 250% and you will have a fair guesstimate.
The Front St. extension went from $42M to $110M and then was scrapped. Skydome was outrageously over budget, then they sold it for chump change.
This city has absolutely no idea how to budget anything. Miller wants to spend millions on the east portlands when we have parks now that are in shambles.
 
You'd have to make the same budgetary adjustments for the long-term repairs & refurbishments the highway will need, I guess. So I'm not really sure how the cost argument works. Unless we just do nothing and let it fall apart naturally. The city's done that before, too.
 
GraphicMatt said:
You'd have to make the same budgetary adjustments for the long-term repairs & refurbishments the highway will need, I guess. So I'm not really sure how the cost argument works. Unless we just do nothing and let it fall apart naturally. The city's done that before, too.
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You seem to be implying that the Gardiner has not needed maintenance and repairs until now. Otherwise the city could just rely on past experience.
 
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