Yonge love

City officials hate Yonge Street so much they're tearing its heart down. But what bureaucrat could plan this much fun?

BY NATE HENDLEY

At Yonge and Dundas stands a stretch of downtown where theories about urban regeneration will soon be played out at the hands of demolition crews and developers. At the southeast corner of Yonge and Dundas is the World's Biggest Jean Store, a retail space so ugly Mayor Lastman felt compelled to criticize it at a public ceremony at City Hall. On the northeast corner is a money-exchange and a pawn shop housed in buildings Councillor Kyle Rae blasted for their lack of aesthetic value.

Rae, whose office once counted 29 dollar shops on Yonge between College and Queen, has been one of the main movers behind what's called the Downtown Yonge Street Regeneration Program. City council has designated $53 million to expropriate a dozen of its least favorite properties in the area in an attempt to "regenerate" the commercial downtown. Such drastic actions are necessary, says Rae, if the city wants to halt "the dumbing-down of Yonge Street."

The cause of this "dumbing-down" isn't hard to locate. Built in the late '70s, largely without windows, the Eaton Centre "internalized the street," as University of Toronto urban geography professor Gunter Gad puts it. The Centre's presence, combined with the lure of suburban and underground shopping malls, left the east side of Yonge a mass of cheap stores.

This is all supposed to change -- by late 2000, a 30-screen movie house should be open at Yonge and Dundas, along with countless upscale stores and restaurants. Council is also spending $2.5 million on a public square.

The theory behind this redevelopment is a process called "urban regeneration," which is the flipside of an old concept called urban renewal. The latter involved razing slums and putting up new residential buildings. Urban regeneration, as practised at Yonge and Dundas, seeks to revitalize areas by improving commercial, not residential, space.

Despite a few success stories, such as the St. Lawrence Market neighborhood, urban renewal has been widely dismissed as a mistake of the past. That's largely because urban renewal was responsible for disasters such as Regent Park, which was carved from the south end of Cabbagetown in the '40s.

"In my mind, urban renewal is mainly a pejorative term," says Ron Sosklone, program director of the Downtown Yonge Street Regeneration Program. "It involves demolishing whole areas of cities and replacing houses with something that isn't as good."

Urban renewal is also associated with top-down, government-run and -funded schemes, factors not likely to ensure attractiveness or a pleasing environment.

The ideal usually cited by pro-regenerators is New York's Times Square, where Disney stores have muscled out porn shops. The idea is that the power of commercial enterprise can overcome years of neglect, decay and overall scumminess. In fact, municipal employees such as Robert Glover, Toronto's director of urban design, say they're pleased the Yonge Street project doesn't involve "government imposing a solution."

After expropriating buildings around Yonge and Dundas, city council didn't try to carry out their own government-run building scheme. The land was sold by city hall to private developers such as PenEquity Management, which is building the 320,000-square-foot, multi-screen Metropolis movie theatre slated for the northeast corner of Yonge and Dundas.

Urban renewal programs tend to impose deadening "monocultures" on their inhabitants, says Mark Sterling, Toronto's former director of urban design. One example is public housing, which usually herds one group of people -- those with lower incomes -- into one locale, he says.

The Yonge Street backers somewhat obsessively point to the "mixed" nature of their initiative. The project will entail films, food, clothing, sidewalks and even a massive change of appearance for the Eaton Centre, which is blasting holes in its walls to create a street-level retail facade. All to draw in young and old, rich, poor and middle-class. Everyone, except scumbags, is invited.

CONTROL FREAKS OLD AND NEW

The main similarity between old-style urban renewal and Yonge Street's urban regeneration seems to be the sociological attitude -- if you change enough buildings, you can change behavior.

Proponents of public housing insisted poor folks would commit fewer crimes and vices if only government razed their slums and built them new homes. Yonge Street regenerators state that once new stores and theatres go up, illicit activity at Yonge and Dundas -- where cops made over 1,000 arrests in 1998 -- will decrease.

"Drug dealers will not want the profile they'll have there," insists councillor Rae. "It'll be too public for them." Rae's may be right, in which case the thieves and criminals will go away to plague another area of the city.

I also think the Yonge Street Business and Residents Association is right when it says in press releases that redevelopment will return Yonge Street "to its former days of glory." I support the Yonge Street initiative, but remain cynical about the hype and expectations surrounding it. Possibly because whenever I take the College streetcar home, I pass Canada's first urban renewal project involving building public housing over a slum.

Finished in 1957, everyone thought this place was great at the time. Its inhabitants became subjects of a book written by Albert Rose of the School of Social Work at the University of Toronto. "Crime and delinquency have all but disappeared among the residents of the new housing," wrote Rose. "A relatively normal environment has been substituted for one of the poorest slum areas in Toronto."

Rose was talking about an area that today, if anything, is even uglier and more crime-prone than downtown Yonge Street. But city planners and developers don't seem in a hurry to put a new Gap store, a new multiplex theatre or a new public square in Regent Park.

Call Nate Hendley at 504-4339 x: 313.