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Toronto Music Garden: From Barriers to Baroque
A Whimsical Escape
Like Coronation Park, the Toronto Music Garden, completed in 1999, uses landscape design to tell a story of music, specifically Johann Sebastian Bach’s First Suite for Unaccompanied Cello. World-famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma and designer Julie Moir Messervy partnered to create this waterfront space for Torontonians. The park’s design represents dance and melody. Like the flow of music, the paths and flower beds curve through the park. The Canadian designer of the park’s pavilion, Thomas Tollefson, was told he could design the feature however he wanted so long as there were no straight lines. The garden was officially opened in a ceremony on June 10, 1999, with a performance by Yo-Yo Ma accompanied by performers from Toronto’s Opera Atelier.
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Barriers to the Lakefront
Today, spaces like the Music Garden allow us to relax and enjoy the beautiful surroundings of Toronto’s waterfront. However, this has not always been the case. The story of Toronto’s central waterfront area is one of the conflicts between public access, leisure, and industry. Disagreements about what shape the harbour should take became heated in the 1850s, a decade of major railway expansion in Toronto.
Beginning with the Northern Railway in 1852, the railways, which desired direct access to water transportation, built tracks along the waterfront. By 1859, central access to Lake Ontario had largely been blocked off to Torontonians, who were forced to cross active rail lines to reach the lakeside. Industrial development and harbour pollution continued for decades. In 1953, city planners began work on another major barrier to the lake, the Gardiner Expressway. The construction of this highway further isolated Toronto’s city centre from the lake, and it remains an obstacle for people trying to access parks along the shoreline today.
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Boating and Bathing
Although many obstacles separated Torontonians from the lake in the city centre, many residents found other ways to access the waterfront as a space for fun and relaxation. Canoeing in the Toronto Harbour remained a popular pastime among local men and women, with the Toronto Canoe Club founded in the 1880s. For over one hundred years, another popular sport in the harbour was iceboating. This winter sport involved riding – and often racing – sailboats supported by metal blades, which allowed them to glide across the ice. Starting in the late 1800s, the Toronto Rowing Club and Toronto Iceboat Association held many races on the harbour’s frozen surface.
Despite concerns over water pollution, bathing in the lake remained common in the late 1800s. Swimmers navigated around industrial infrastructure and areas of the lake fouled by large amounts of sewage. One wharf at the foot of Church Street, predominantly used as a coal dock, was used by swimmers because it was seen as a cleaner area to swim.
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“More familiar with the backside of the moon…”
Torontonians continually voiced their frustration over the lack of access to the lake at the city’s central waterfront. In 1958, Toronto author and painter Helen McLean expressed embarrassment over this separation, calling it “barbaric” that there was no place to sit and enjoy views of the lake. Almost two decades later, a writer for the Toronto Star was more colourful in his description of Torontonians’ relationship with the lakefront, stating, “it is quite possible that many people in Toronto are more familiar with the backside of the moon than they are with their own waterfront.”
Thanks to community efforts, today more of the lakefront is available for Torontonians to enjoy, and even barriers like the Gardiner Expressway have recently become community spaces. The Bentway is a charity that works with the city to turn areas underneath the Gardiner into community gathering spaces for events, public art, and leisure activities. After its first two years welcoming people to programs under the Gardiner, The Bentway had hosted 333,000 people and redeveloped over 150,000 square feet of space for public use.
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Dig deeper…
For more information about the Gardiner Expressway and its relationship to the Toronto waterfront, see:
Timothy J. Colton. Big Daddy: Frederick G. Gardiner and the Building of Metropolitan Toronto. University of Toronto Press, 1980.
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