It'll be pretty cool when the Harbour sites and Waterpark Place III are completed, driving on the Gardiner and the Yonge/Bay/York off-ramp will feel like snaking right in between buildings.
 
The plan is to replace them with a single ramp that will hit ground at Simcoe, although that has not been finally approved yet, and no date for that has been set. In any case, here's hoping that will happen. It needs to so that the area around the park currently surrounded by the spiral ramp has a chance to feel and function as a normal urban park.

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Bull.

The park would work perfectly fine with the ramp in place. It's a matter of turning weaknesses into opportunities. Here, one might capitalize on the unique shape of said weakness and use it to inform a fundamental rethink of the space. The clumsy 'bulldoze and rebuild' solution is one which has proven problematic in the past and suggests that we've learned nothing about planning, architecture and urban design in the last 40-50 years.

Like the Gardiner itself, I'd prefer to see a solution which retains and modulates the existing infrastructure to increase capacity and flow while meeting the (possibly unforeseen) needs of other users. These sorts of plans may not be as exciting but in the end, they're often the ones which work best. For example, it's no surprise that Roland Colthoff's silly 'pedestrian-bridge-over-the-Gardiner' (which was really just an expensive way not to solve any of the problems the highway presents in the first place) received so much attention some years back while John van Nostrand's far simpler (read: better) plan to retain the highway as it is while inserting all sorts of new goodies in and around it received so little.
 
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While I prefer JvN's plan for the Gardiner over RRC's, I prefer my plan for the park over yours. The city has plenty enough places to play around with the underside of highways: it looks like it's being done very well at Underpass Park, it looks like it will be fantastic at the Fort York Visitor Centre, and the forecourt for Panorama is a wacky delight. We have several other pieces of Gardiner underside to work with should we continue to transform it, and I hope we will.

Just east of York Street between Queens Quay and Harbour Street though? I want a green square that is free from overhead interference by the automobile. I want a patch of land that feels like a proper bit of parkland to make the area feel like a proper bit of city - or one where the pedestrian reigns supreme. There are very few places anywhere in central Toronto where we have a square park bordered by buildings on all sides and therefore feels like a great front yard for all of them. In this spot we have Harbour Square and the York Quay towers to the south, we have Waterclub to the west, we will have Menkes' tall 90 Harbour replacement to the north, Oxford's new RBC building to the east… and Tridel's tall flatrion to the northwest, the topic of this thread. The people living and working in those buildings should have the benefit of a great green lawn with some spectacular work of art in the middle, a water feature, some trees, and it should all be free of the constant reminder of cars.

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Panorama is cool in the summer, but when I went there in the winter, there were these big brown ice formations on the ground that looked like flowstone in caves. The park there would still be separated from many of the surrounding complexes by major roads like York, Lakeshore and Queens Quay, so it will still be surrounded on 3 sides by automobiles... although it could be worth trying to improve access to the park, you can only access it from the NW and SE corners and the North and West sides lack sidewalks.
 
This is a great opportunity for the tallest, most dramatic flatiron building in the world!

I'm sure Tridel will find a way to screw this up :)
 
interchange42 said:
There are very few places anywhere in central Toronto where we have a square park bordered by buildings on all sides and therefore feels like a great front yard for all of them. In this spot we have Harbour Square and the York Quay towers to the south, we have Waterclub to the west, we will have Menkes' tall 90 Harbour replacement to the north, Oxford's new RBC building to the east… and Tridel's tall flatrion to the northwest, the topic of this thread. The people living and working in those buildings should have the benefit of a great green lawn with some spectacular work of art in the middle, a water feature, some trees, and it should all be free of the constant reminder of cars.
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Wrong. We'll have a street to the west, to the south, to the north, and a parking lot to the east. Hardly "free of the constant reminder of cars."
 
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Actually, Oxford's RBC building will likely be built to the east of a new north-south road, so in fact this "new" park will likely be entirely surrounded by roads. Despite that fact, removing a circular ramp taking up a huge percentage of the park will do wonders for it, and when you're in the middle of it in the future, you won't likely feel impinged upon by the automobile… even if you had to cross a road to get to the park.

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I think if a well-made park is desired, the removal of the ramp would be an unquestionable asset. The current sudden shutoff of sidewalk access between Maple Leaf Square and Queen's Quay boulevard on the east side of York is a bugger. The current ramp configuration blocks any sidewalk expansion or access at the foot of York.
As an open green space, well-bounded by buildings, the park would work well as a Sherbourne-Common type gateway park, opening York street to the lake. It would be an acceptable and functional break in the long streetwall on the north side of Queen's Quay. It could function well as a transitional neighbourhood park, as well - negotiating between condos, the lake, and the southern business and tourist district.

I'd miss the ramp in a personal way, though. It's just about the only one of it's tightly-wound kind in downtown. Turning off the Gardiner down this ramp while coming into the city on a bus from the west was always one of those "now you're here" moments.

Still, an new shortened Simcoe ramp set to the west would give a lot more welcome access along York and along Harbour - as well as produce a new park. That would all be a good thing.
 
…other than the fact it wouldn't really go anywhere? New York's High Line park plan started with the plants that were reclaiming it after a couple of decades of abandonment. We don't have that situation here.

I am not for burying the Gardiner, but I am for the replacement and removal of this particular ramp. There's enough overhead in the area, and I still say that de-ramping this park would be the best thing for it. Retention of the columns, as was done in some spots at the former east end of the Gardiner, might work very well here however, and in fact would give park landscape architects something very interesting to work with as the genesis of a new design.
 
Automation Gallery said:
Hard to believe that you can build anything on that slender piece of land, let alone 75 storeys.:confused:
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Take a look at Backstage. Not as tall but the site looks impossibly tight.

I can't imagine walking out of my condo if I lived there -- wedged by two elevated highways would make for a rather bleak and uninviting environment.
That area will be a lush forest of high rises when it's all built up, which would be cool driving along the Gardner.
 
If all goes as it should at the City, the elevated ramps to the south will disappear in the next few years, so it won't feel so hemmed in.

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