“Everybody calls it the pit,” says Laura Mendes as we walk to the central space between the towers of Main Square, a cluster of four residential buildings at Main St. and Danforth Ave. The pit is a sunken courtyard that was once the patio of a shuttered indoor pool that served residents in the surrounding buildings. Peering over the concrete edge we looked at raised planting beds set on the courtyard floor growing speckled peas that will eventually spell out words readable by residents living above.

Called “Living Text,” the project by artist Paul Chartrand is part of a free, nine-day public art and community festival called Main Squared that aims to play with the notion of what a town square is and get people thinking about the potential of the spaces in between Main Square’s towers.

“At the end we’ll have a little salad party after it’s harvested,” says Mendes of the peas. She’s the director of Labspace Studio, an artist collective that has curated 12 contemporary art installations in the festival. Produced by East End Arts, one of the city’s six local arts service organizations, it’s one of the City of Toronto’s Cultural Hotspot initiatives in the east end this year. “The name Main Squared is a play on the mathematical formula, to amplify,” says Mendes. “We want to amplify the square.”

The pit, and the rest of square, could certainly use some amplification, as it’s a bit forlorn in places, though by no means a wasteland. “There’s no place to sit,” says Mendes, as we walk around the site. Though benches are hard to come by, lots of people use the square and its concrete edges have become makeshift seating.

Main Square was a public-private project of the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMHC) during the heyday of the Crown corporation’s public investment in large housing projects. It had subsidized, affordable units for people with less income, part of a profit-sharing program. Opened in 1972, Main Square was planned with the most utopian and egalitarian aspirations of the day.

A 1971 brochure boasted the community was being built around the “Communicept” program, “a totally new idea in community living” that included the apartment towers, a shopping level with 30 stores, swimming pool, gymnasium, space for hobbies and community meetings and a daycare centre, with 30 different apartment layouts to choose from.

In 1998, CMHC sold its share of the project to a private company. Located between Main subway station and the Main GO Train station and at the terminus of the 506 Streetcar, this residential cluster is a logical place for more density, and the open space in front, the square, is a prime candidate for infill development.

It would be a shame to lose what could be a great public space, but Main Square is one of the handful of dense anomalies along the Bloor-Danforth subway corridor, now more than 50 years old but mostly lined by two- and three-storey low-rise buildings. Hubs like Main Square do the heavy lifting for a city that prospers from people wanting to live here but that doesn’t want to share that burden equally. In doing so, Main Square has provided a home for many thousands of Torontonians over the decades.

“It’s fascinating how far these communities go,” says Cindy Rozeboom, director of programming at East End Arts, of the human web residential buildings weave. “People would tell us that their mom lived here or that they’ve lived here a few times in their life.”

“Lots of people have lived here for a long time,” adds Mendes. “We got a really positive reception from residents.” In preparing for the festival they held a series of community consultations, workshops and distributed surveys. They’re also going to open up some of the storefronts that have been closed for some time, breathing life into the old retail spaces.

Other art pieces in the festival include “Echo,” made up of two plinths that will act as soap boxes for residents and visitors to climb. “Every square seems to have a statue in it,” says Rozeboom. “We wanted to pay tribute to that but everybody should have a chance to be the figure on display.”

A project called “Block Party” is an interactive seating installation that people can arrange as they like. During this first weekend, the square will also be filled with a marketplace and other performance-based exhibitions are planned, including the “Main Stage Monologues” based on stories gathered from residents and performed by community-based and professional actors.

The festival comes at a good time: Main Square is one of the tower properties included in Toronto’s new “Residential Apartment Commercial” zoning that allows small-scale non-residential uses like food markets, shops, small business, classes, community facilities and other initiatives on hundreds of apartment building sites across Toronto that were once residential only, all part of the City’s Tower Renewal program.

Across from Main Square on the west side of the street, a 30-storey tower has been proposed recently, so change is coming quickly. At the same time, old row houses can be found on Norwood Terrace nearby, neighbours of the Grand Trunk Railway yard that used to sprawl around where the Main GO Station is now, and old Toronto road houses peek above a few of the retail façades along The Danforth. East of Main Square is the vast parking lot of Canadian Tire, prime development land at a transit hub like this. The City is currently conducting a Danforth Ave. Planning Study and in June a citizen-led visioning workshop was conducted at Main Square during the Danforth Fair.

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So there’s lots of economic and community interest in and around Main Square. Any area that’s gone from utopia to somewhat-worn-out-utopia should be so lucky to have this much attention, though it comes with some worry. Change for the better, making public spaces more attractive, often means increased rents that push lower-income people out.

What a victory it would be if Communicept’s noble ideas could also be revitalized in and around Main Square at the same time. Perhaps the Main Squared festival will put the people who use the square today at the centre of the discussion.

Main Squared runs until Sept. 3. More information can be found at www.mainsquared.com

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