Scarborough needs a grand project - a park laid over McCowan Road, with a market building modelled on Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market - to revive its old city centre and inspire a new image, local councillors and ratepayer groups agree.
What’s less clear is whether Torontonians in other parts of the city will part with their development monies, typically spent in those neighbourhoods, to see the project, dubbed Span McCowan, built.
The still un-planned Scarborough subway extension is another possible roadblock for what Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker called "something very special that puts Scarborough Centre on the map," but Scarborough Community Council told the city this week to study Span McCowan in detail.
The proposed subway link "will open the doors for vast growth" in the Scarborough Civic Centre area, and the park and its market will become a destination, De Baeremaeker said.
"If we don’t provide something spectacular like that, then we will have failed."
Inspired by other parks created by concrete decking, such as Millennium Park in Chicago, Span McCowan was supported by groups of area homeowners and condominium boards who saw a "major disconnect" between the east and west side of McCowan, said Iain McLeod, president of the Glen Andrew Community Association.
McCowan south of Highway 401 is hard for pedestrians to cross, and the area’s growing population is short of parkland, which Span McCowan supporters argue the project can create for less than the cost of converting other land nearby.
At community council, they also presented the park and building as a year-round cultural complex, which could be a "home for all things Scarborough," and where the spirit of the former City of Scarborough could be reinvented.
"Downtown has a huge platform to engage communities, but we don’t here in Scarborough," Jason Rodricks, North Bendale’s community association president, who said the results of Span McCowan could involve youth in meaningful activities.
"How can we do that without an established platform, a meeting space?"
McCowan south of Progress Avenue is sunken like an expressway, and Span McCowan was conceived two years ago by Lorne Ross, a former Scarborough chief planner, as three acres covering the road from Progress to Bushby Drive and Town Centre Court.
The city, however, said the road underneath the park would qualify as a tunnel, which would require expensive ventilation systems. In April 2013, the proposal was revised to cover 1.6 acres and not create a tunnel.
But while judging it "technically feasible," a recent report said the park would cost about $40 million, not including $1.5 million for the shell of a market building.
The report added a study of the subway extension route "will examine the issue of pedestrian crossings and connections" in the Scarborough Centre area, and offers opportunities for improvement.
"Because the Span McCowan proposal may conflict with the location of potential subway infrastructure as well as construction phasing," said the report, "it would be premature to proceed with further feasibility studies," until the subway study is done, which could be in 2016.
A farmers’ market in Albert Campbell Square did poorly compared to others in he city, and was discontinued after 2012. City staff also said an increase in residential and office density would be needed to sustain a successful market.
None of this dampened Scarborough councillors’ enthusiasm for what De Baeremaeker called "a really neat, funky market" people will come to see. They ordered staff to prepare preliminary designs and cost estimates.
Mike Del Grande, the city’s former budget chief, praised the idea for its city-building vision.
"You’ve got to start thinking big and you’ve got to start thinking creatively," the Scarborough-Agincourt councillor said, reminding colleagues the city, during the last few years, has spent more than $50 million on Nathan Phillips Square and $40 million to straighten a section of Dufferin Road known as the Dufferin Jog.
In fact, many projects have been slated for the public lands around Scarborough Civic Centre, but though the city identifies seven "priority projects" which would cost $15.3 million - including a revitalization of Albert Campbell Square - it has so far budgeted just $1.3 million to pay for them.
Motions passed by Scarborough councillors Tuesday said the market building above McCowan, to be managed by a community board, should be built with what is called Section 37 money, gifts developers pay the city in return for increasing density in a neighbourhood.
Such money is more plentiful in downtown wards such as Trinity-Spadina, and is typically spent only in the wards where it is given, Scarborough East Councillor Ron Moeser pointed out. He suggested, however, that projects around civic squares "should be handled differently" in their use of Section 37 funds.
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