In The News

A new proposal from Waterfront Toronto hopes to transform the dreary and desolate space underneath the Don Valley Parkway into an lively urban park. As reported by the National Post, the revitalization of the site (the area right below the on/off ramps at Richmond and Adelaide streets and Eastern Avenue) will be funded by a $5.3-million infrastructure boost from the federal government.

"Waterfront Toronto said yesterday that, thanks to $5.3-million from Ottawa, it will turn the one-hectare stretch of city and provincially owned land into a park, complete with ball hockey and basketball courts, community gardens, "ribbon" benches and climbing structures for children."

"This is about taking an incidental space and making it something more than incidental," said Greg Smallenberg of Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg, a Vancouver landscape architect firm that Waterfront Toronto has hired for "comprehensive landscaping" of a 32-hectare parcel of provincially owned land on the west side of the Don River's mouth, which it calls the West Don Lands."

"Waterfront Toronto, owned jointly by the city, provincial and federal governments, plans in the next five years to build mostly a residential community, with housing for 12,000 people. River City, a private condominium project by Urban Capital Corp. south of King Street between Bayview Avenue and a new extension of River Street, has already opened a sales office in the area for its 900 "loft-style" units in five buildings ranging to 16 storeys high."

"Underpass Park will knit the River City developments and three buildings of new Toronto Community Housing, to its north, with a new seven-hectare park to the southeast."

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original source the National Post