TOURISM: ICONIC POSSIBILITIES

Our city needs a booster shot of imagination

LISA ROCHON Saturday, April 26, 2008

Three masterworks of architecture, each representing the will of its epoch, have been set adrift in the city's downtown. For decades after they were built, Old City Hall (1899), Maple Leaf Gardens (1931) and Ontario Place (1971) gave us audacious interpretations of their times. Even now, mistreated, locked up or maligned, these monuments symbolize Toronto's ambitions. Such splendours deserve to regain a foothold in this century. Lisa Rochon considers the options

OLD CITY HALL: becoming the headquarters of the creative city

Most of us know Old City Hall by its triple-arched entrance and the clock tower that guides us north from the bottom of Bay Street. But walk inside, past the intricate ornaments carved into the rugged arches of stone and up the grand stairs - you will be shocked to discover the lightness of democracy gracing its golden entrance hall. Here, a monumental stained-glass window floods the entire two-storey room with light. One of Toronto's most stylish halls is also the city's best-kept secret.

Former finance minister Greg Sorbara, charged with investigating Ontario's tourism potential, recently told me that he has the reinvention of Old City Hall on his mind. A chic hotel for the business elite is an obvious choice. But a city with a reputation for tolerance, openness and creative guts is what will attract hip and well-educated incoming traffic. Consider Old City Hall riffing on something out of Chicago, where the venerable old city library was converted into a major cultural centre. Mix up the programming to capture the laidback cool of Amsterdam, then layer it over with the edge of Buenos Aires. Consider, too, that this four-storey quadrangular building is wrapped around an open courtyard. It could be the new headquarters for the Luminato arts festival, with court rooms and administrative offices judiciously turned over to artists, lighting designers, dancers and musicians. Imagine an intervention that maintains the beautifully restored interiors within the city-owned facility with cafés and restaurants and, in the basement, an all-ages dance hall cool enough to attract teenagers into the building.

In this scenario, the provincial government moves its courts and lawyers out of Toronto's most luminous interiors into a newly constructed facility. Impossible? The vast parking lot south of the Metropolitan Hotel just behind new City Hall is provincially owned and available. There has been talk in the past of relocating the business of the courts to that very site. What's shocking is the way that the province can't be bothered to liberate the venerable old invention of architect E.J. Lennox. The building itself is in remarkable condition, though the courtyard at the heart of the building has suffered. Here, the civic imagination at Old City Hall has reached an all-time low. What should be a secret garden or a park for children is currently crammed with 30-odd cars, police cruisers and garbage dumpsters. It could become an oasis of greenery offering an alternative to the hermetically sealed delights of the Eaton Centre. But the city is too polite to ask the province to leave. So, let me do the honour for them: Get out, so that Toronto can get on with building a people's palace.

MAPLE LEAF GARDENS: becoming the big skate... or the big gallery

In this scenario, Maple Leaf Gardens retains its original splendour. A $20 ticket gains you entrance to the all-season public skating rink. You could skate all day, if you like.

Part of the floor plate could be turned over to the Sports Hall of Fame, an institution that has inducted nearly 500 Canadian athletes through annual awards dinners, and one that is still in search of a space.

Occasionally, the ice rink could be transformed into an exhibition gallery for large installations of art: Think along the scale of the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London. At night, large corporate events could skate and then dine on the ice.

A big beast of a building conceding only the occasional art deco flourish, Maple Leaf Gardens was constructed to the edge of the sidewalk, the quicker to get hockey fans inside the building to go crazy for the sport they loved most. To go there as a kid for the first time meant engaging in a Canadian version of an orgy: the flash of skates and pounding sticks, the bruising press of the crowd, the intermingling smells of sweat and hot dogs.

Suspended in his gondola over the ice, Foster Hewitt appeared out of the heavens like God. When he proclaimed "He shoots, he scooooores!" he thundered like Zeus.

I'm not sure that Ross & Macdonald, the Montreal architects of the Maple Leaf Gardens as well as the Royal York Hotel and the original Eaton's on College Street, knew that they were designing a building with boundless collective memory. For six decades, it was our Cathedral of Sport.
In the end, Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment sold the building to Loblaw, which proposed inserting one of its super grocery stores into the hallowed hall.

Boring.

Since then, there has been silence.

Boring.

But also a blessing. I'd rather locked doors any day over a super-sized food store.

When pressed this week, officials at Loblaw refused to ponder with me the future of Maple Leaf Gardens.

"After speaking with the relevant parties within the business, Loblaw is currently not in a position to give an update and/or comment on the status of the Maple Leaf Gardens project at this time," spokesman Wes Brown said in his e-mail to me.

This is not a surprising response - the financial woes of Loblaw have been aired even this week in the press. To convert the great palace of hockey into a multilevel grocery store would require a small fortune.

To do it without poisoning the minds of Toronto's hockey fans would require a large miracle.

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