This is the fifth instalment of The Heretic, a series in which our writers express a wildly unpopular opinion.

Let’s make something really clear: This article is part of a summer series called ‘The Heretic,’ in which, as the loose rubric goes, “our writers express a wildly unpopular opinion.”

I know those words are perched just a few lines up on this very same page. Maybe you saw them. Maybe you didn’t. But I couldn’t risk you breezing past them and jumping right in, because what I’m about to say will likely upset you. To be honest, I don’t like saying it much myself. But here goes: I can’t stand Nathan Phillips Square.

Phew. That was awkward. But I feel better. Lest you think I’m just playing along with the game, though, let’s take it a step further. This wasn’t handed to me as a position to be defended, an exercise in rhetoric, high-school-debate style. Nope. Over years of having to negotiate its 11-acre concrete desert on routine city-related chores, I’ve come to loathe the experience of simply being there.

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You’ll argue, I’m sure, that I’m just anti-social. It’s our great civic plaza, a Modernist iteration of age-old gathering spaces like those in ancient cities from Athens to Rome — a democratic space where all are welcome, where we bathe in the glow of our grand ideals. That was the idea, sure. And sometimes, maybe, it’s even partly true, though I’m unconvinced that a revolving door of one-day festivals quite lives up to those notions (overdrinking at Nuit Blanche, for one, sticks out). Summer’s busy, sure; this month, some of that idealism seems to hold with festivals paying tribute to the city’s Japanese, Indian and Filipino communities.

But on more days than not, even in summer, the square is a void, leaving us to the mercy of its natural state: an island of punishing emptiness and bleak disuse. It is outrageously, unforgivingly exposed. Setting out to cross it on a hot summer morning, as I recently did, risks heat exhaustion. I lingered in the shade of its elevated walkway (its only redeeming feature, serving mostly as a barricade to the city beyond), scoping alternative routes so as to avoid heatstroke. I wasn’t the only one. Not a single human lingered in the square, and those brave enough to cross scurried to the shaded fringes. I often need to remind myself: This didn’t happen as an accident of organic urban evolution (more on that in a bit). The square project gave itself carte blanche to fashion a civic focal point, and came up with this.

An inhumane expanse of hard indifference, I’m sure, wasn’t the goal when Viljo Revell won a design competition for a new city hall with the spacey curves of his two-tower proposal. With the building, I have no quarrel. It has become a quirkily endearing icon of late-Modern architecture, occupying that oddly dissonant esthetic space of outdated futurism (for timelessness — Modernism without the frills — we’ll always have Mies van der Rohe’s TD Centre).

But Revell’s plan was in line not just with architecture of the day, but a prevailing notion of city building. Urban renewal, they called it, a sunny term for a dark interpretation of Modernism’s blithe ideals. The movement’s most enduring lame-duck legacy is good intentions brutishly executed: High-minded ideas like the democratization of space, or healthy notions of work-life separation getting contorted, in the real world, to serve up housing projects, suburbs and elevated expressways — all that worked out well, didn’t it? — that imposed a mechanical process of social erasure on an existing order. Forget all that messy history, it seemed to say. This is about the future.

Brutish execution is what lies underneath the square’s hard ground. To build this shining vision of progress, the city expropriated St. John’s Ward, the historic heart of the diverse city we all like to claim as our global brand. Vibrant, tumbledown and brimming with difference, it was a natural target for Toronto the Good; various efforts to raze it had fizzled (a Champs-Elysees-style promenade had been proposed as early as 1911), but the zeitgeist of urban renewal finally bolstered the effort.

In true Toronto fashion of the day, there was a tagalong aspect to the effort: New York and Chicago had cratered whole neighbourhoods for expressways and housing projects. If everyone else is doing it, why can’t we? (Chinatown was in the crosshairs, too; only tireless local activism saved it.)

City planners, having drunk the urban-renewal Kool-Aid, saw The Ward as a blight of the past. We have a better way, they said. And so we have 11 acres of concrete — and for the city’s foundational neighbourhood, a sealed tomb.

This likely won’t be top of mind as you scurry for shelter from one side of the square to the next, whether from punishing heat in the summer or viciously icy winds that whip unimpeded across the shelterless expanse all winter long. The urge for self-preservation aside, how could it be? One of the things Nathan Phillips Square has done well since its beginnings is keep that story locked up tight. Skating rinks and fountains are fine, but is there any sense of history here, where likely stood an patchwork of immigrant businesses? There’s a little display inside — just as well, maybe; who’d want to stand out here anyway? (A deeper exploration of The Ward exists as a virtual museum with the Block by Block project).

There’s a deep irony, to me at least, that this space, lauded as a gathering place for one and all, is fundamentally a bureaucratically convened version of what had evolved all on its own over a century preceding it. The square’s revolving door of uses says something to me about the city’s stance, back then, on non-mainstream cultures and their place downtown: Fine for a parade, but please move along. The city’s efforts to either choke out The Ward or leave it to rot are well-documented; those festivals that take place on the square are, in a sense, an invitation to dance on its grave.

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So we have two problems: A vast, hard space made uninviting by a lack of human scale; and a dark history, where making way for the new meant the obliteration of the old. Maybe there’s a way to kill two birds with one stone: Some discreet, human-scale interventions, maybe, that break up the square’s stolid commitment to the plinth — a bad, old idea from Modernism itself, aging poorly? And what if those interventions (some shade, a tree, maybe) had some lessons to teach, about what came before — that the slate wasn’t quite so clean as some might have you believe?

The spatial ills of the square’s indifference to human scale were addressed — and well, if a little too reverentially — in a $60-million 2015 revitalization effort that plopped a huge stage on the square’s northwest corner, but then contented itself with decorations around its fringes: A facelift for the snack bar, green roofs and gardens for the elevated walkway. Curiously, a hard-won victory for the architects was “to open the square back up and remove the clutter and encumbrances,” Andrew Frontini, an architect on the team, told Canadian Architect magazine in 2015 (one encumbrance, the Peace Garden, was moved — you guessed it — to a far corner).

Recessed fountains found their way into the main expanse, tucked beneath the surface and geysering up occasionally. A nice idea, but too subtle, that interrupts the nowhereness of the square almost not at all. There was an overriding sense on the team to not “violate” the design’s original intentions, but that’s too respectful by half. Nathan Phillips Square is predicated on a violation, of the ugliest and most inhuman kind.

Clutter is a human. Cities are messy. That’s why we love them. Is a sanitized patch of concrete at our city’s heart really the symbol we want, or deserve? Violate it, I say. Let’s muddy things up.

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