TOURISM: ICONIC POSSIBILITIES

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ONTARIO PLACE: becoming part of Toronto's Golden Coast

The population surrounding the western edge of the Toronto waterfront is growing. The desire for great public parks such as Chicago's Millennium Park proves that there's an enormous appetite for places to amble, to ride a bike, to play with monumental public art.

In this scenario, Ontario Place is given the benefit of some much-needed romance. Every evening, the grounds and pavilions are recast in golden light. New bike paths lit by lanterns stretch to the outer (currently inaccessible) edge of the park. There are special evenings when visitors can picnic, then wander along paths lit by hundreds of candles. By day and night, there is poetic contemplation. And a new institution with a credible business plan.

A planetarium hovering above the lake makes for a powerful draw on a mesmerizing site. Besides, it's time to get on with reinventing the McLaughlin Planetarium since it was unceremoniously dumped by the Royal Ontario Museum. Consider, too, that the Hayden Planetarium has recently opened to huge success in New York City. Societies of the contemplation of the sky - do they come by any other name? - could be gathered together at Ontario Place. University seminars, lectures on reading the night sky and summer astronomy camps are all in the cards.

What's curious about the latest transformation of the Toronto waterfront, including the completed HtO Park, the recently announced Jarvis Slip Park and the neighbourhoods of East Bayfront and West Donlands, is not the massive and laudable investment in the public realm along the edge of Lake Ontario, but that what already exists on the waterfront has been largely ignored. Noticeably absent is the remarkable, dimensionless essay of suspended built forms over the lake that the provincial government opened to much fanfare as Ontario Place.

You'll recall that this was the futuristic vision led by architect Eberhard Zeidler with landscape architect Michael Hough, consisting of pavilion pods connected over the lake by transparent bridges. Recovering the site could mean a modest investment, money to simply clean up the grounds, enhance the landscapes to the standard of the original scheme and extend the Martin Goodman trail to the outer edge of the facility.

In 2004, a large visioning report commissioned by David Crombie and Joe Pantalone, the respective chairs of Ontario Place and Exhibition Place, was submitted to several ministries within the province of Ontario. The idea was to create a major 109-hectare park - free to the public - with the option of paid events within the grounds. "In the end, it just went nowhere," says urban planner Ken Greenberg, who worked as a consultant on the report. As with Old City Hall, the province of Ontario is dragging down one of its main tourism attractions. At the lake's edge, that sounds like gurgle, gurgle, gurgle.