Opera Place is the name of a residential building at 887 Bay St. and just north of it is another musical building, the rather up tempo “Allegro at Opera Place.” Even the park tucked in behind the Metro Central YMCA is officially called Opera Place, though the names don’t resonate much.

The down-tempo story here, operatic only to those who like stories of government decision making and recession, is that the entire site at the southeast corner of Bay and Wellesley Sts. was cleared by the provincial government in the 1980s for what would have been Toronto’s opera house. With a postmodern design by architect Moshe Safdie, it was cancelled by Bob Rae’s government and most of the land lay empty for more than 20 years. Unbuilt plans like these are a common Toronto libretto.

An exhibit called “No Little Plans: alternative building and transportation visions for Toronto” at the Toronto Archives on Spadina Rd. has gathered together a number of unrealized plans that include housing projects, freeways, grand avenues, parkways, and the dozens of designs for New City Hall that were not chosen. It’s like an alternative Toronto mined from “miles of files” held in the Archives, the brain of Toronto that never forgets. The exhibition is curated by Mark Osbaldeston, author of two volumes of Unbuilt Toronto, books that chronicle the city that might have been.

Finnish architect Viljo Revell’s models from the first and second stages of the New City Hall competition are in the exhibit, too. As Osbaldeston points out, there’s a great story that Eero Saarinen, the famed modernist architect who was on the competition jury, pulled out Revell’s first version from a pile of cast offs and brought it back into the running, ultimately winning. That Saarinen story, he explains, has been reasonably proven true now thanks to Chris Armstrong’s recent book Civic Symbol: Creating Toronto’s New City Hall. Seeing the early model in person is like meeting the childhood version of an adult friend.

Late 19th and early 20th century Chicago architect Daniel Burnham coined the phrase the exhibit’s name references: “Make no little plans,” he said, aspirational advice to cities. Cynics will often say Toronto doesn’t think big, and looking through both Osbaldeston’s books and the exhibit, it’s clear that sometimes we thought big, then decided not to act big.

“There are different reasons why different plans don’t go ahead, but I think the one thing they all tell us is that fundamentally, the way the city develops is the result of choices,” says Osbaldeston. “And that’s why these plans matter. They remind us that there are important choices to be made now, on transit, on the waterfront, on where and how growth occurs.”

One of the most ambitious unrealized plans in the exhibit is the Ataratiri project, planned for what is now the West Don Lands. It also began in the 1980s but was cancelled when the early ’90s recession hit, though not after hundreds of millions were spent. The quarter-century old architectural designs by Toronto firm Brown + Storey look remarkably contemporary, very much in line with what Waterfront Toronto has done and has planned for the area. In Toronto’s current inferno of a real estate market, it’s hard to remember how devastating the bottoming out of the market was here in the early ’90s. Some people remain in debt to this day.

Some images in the exhibit are depressing, like seeing what is essentially a plan for a downtown relief line on a 1910 map of proposed subway lines. Others are amusing, like the fantastic picture of the massive Ataratiri model where officials and media are stepping on and over the Gardiner expressway, always in the way.

Some debates never die, but Toronto’s not alone; Osbaldeston’s next book Unbuilt Hamilton, exploring his hometown’s big plans, is out this September.

No Little Plans runs until August.

Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef

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