Toronto Star Archives

Back

2024: Wexford Blooms 2gether

Toronto-area strip malls are foodie havens. Here’s how this project is helping them become places for people, not just cars

November 21, 2024

Toronto Star

By Shawn Micallef

Link to article

While not exactly a secret, strip malls were an underappreciated urban aspect of the city for years. In 2002, former mayor Mel Lastman even said, “Strip plazas have got to go. These things are a holy mess. Their time is over.”

Yet they’re essential parts of our urban landscape and throughout the Greater Toronto Area have been recognized as great retail expressions of multiculturalism. Cheaper than downtown main streets, small businesses can flourish, especially true in the food scene. Previously ignored strip mall eateries are routinely celebrated, while a place like Ridgeway Plaza in Mississauga, with nearly 100 ethnic food options, has become such a foodie haven it suffers from the strain of so many people visiting.

Seeing how strip malls, designed sometimes decades ago for motorists, have evolved into vibrant, walkable places on their own has been fascinating. Now the plazaPOPS project is helping them adapt more formally.

“I grew up getting bagels and cold cuts from strip malls near Bathurst and Lawrence, and loved these places despite being told in planning school how ugly and worthless they, and the suburbs in general, were,” says Daniel Rotsztain. “Despite having a lot of big roads and cars, Toronto’s suburbs are its most interesting places.”

Innovative public space changes sometimes have a hard time taking off in Toronto, especially ones that take away parking.

“Fortunately, we found the quirkiest strip mall owner in the quirkiest corner of Scarborough

who took a chance on us, the Kiriakou family of Wexford Heights Plaza,” says Rotsztain. “Now that we have photos, testimonials and reports detailing the positive impacts public space projects have on businesses, it’s far easier to get a property owner on board. The pandemic also made things easier, demonstrating to business owners the value of vibrant public space, while also pushing them to improvise and do things they never would have otherwise.”

This year, plazaPOPS hired Wexford resident and urban planner Naziha Nasrin to lead their programming. “We wanted to reflect the needs of our community and give them things that they wanted to see,” says Nasrin. “This year we were able to host multiple workshops, including Arabic calligraphy, urban sketching, and an arts showcase hosted by a local resident who lives across the street.” Naziha is particularly proud of their dhaba, or night market, inspired by informal South Asian roadside eateries.

“When we held our first dhaba, we expanded our site and took up half the parking lot to have a big community night market that reflected the culture of our local residents along Lawrence,” says Naziha. “Many of the business owners are immigrants from South Asia and the Middle East and have a big culture of being outdoors on patios, sitting on chairs in parking lots and sipping on chai and watching the street life go by. One of the vendors told me, ‘I’m so happy I’m here. This event is a representation of the real Scarborough.’”

Toronto needs more of this adaptation of both policy and the urban form, not unlike how Italian immigrants applied for Toronto’s first licenced patio on St. Clair 1963.

See for yourself at the next Wexford dhaba beginning at 6 p.m. on Fri., Sept. 13 at 2020 Lawrence Ave. E.

Explore plazaPOPS

Back

2019: WexPOPS

How turning parking spaces into tiny parks could ease Toronto’s public space shortage

August 19, 2019

Toronto Star

By May Warren

Link to article

In a weekly series the Star seeks simple, affordable solutions to the problems faced by Torontonians and the city as a whole.

The problem: As Toronto’s population grows and becomes more dense, parts of the city are suffering from a shortage of parks and public space.

In the Mission neighbourhood of San Francisco lies a tiny oasis made of bent pipes and reclaimed wood — complete with benches for weary pedestrians and plants that give the sidewalk a pop of green. It’s squeezed into two former parking spots.

The “Pipelet parklet,” across from a high school, was designed and built by students through the non- profit Youth Art Exchange and installed in late 2017. It’s one of 59 “parklets” across the Northern California city, the result of a push to turn street parking into micro parks.

“The city kind of embraced the concept of creating small public spaces,” said John Francis, manager of the parklet program, over the phone from San Francisco.

“We’re just storing cars in those places otherwise.”

As Toronto deals with a growing population, sky-high prices, and fierce competition for land, finding room for large public parks is increasingly difficult, especially downtown. This well-documented lack of parkland is coupled with a large city investment in parking. The Toronto Parking Authority is the biggest supplier of municipal parking in North America — managing 19,000 on street parking spaces and 22,000 off-street spaces offered at below-market rates.

Toronto has some parklets, mostly as part of the King St. transit priority project. But as part of its Pavement to Parks program, San Francisco has streamlined the process for getting them on the ground, co-ordinating across silos and providing a handy manual complete with notes like “consider the rainforest, no tropical hardwood.” The city, unlike Toronto where parklets are divided between public space and expansion for restaurants, is also determined to keep them open to everyone, not just customers of a particular business.

“In San Francisco we’re very clear that you don’t have to buy something from the sponsor’s business to sit in a parklet or enjoy the parklet. We have signs that say ‘this is a public space,’” said Francis.

It started with “guerrilla” pop-up parks — citizens took over a parking space or two for a few hours, put down some grass and fed the metre — which led to a 2010 pilot program.

In 2016 the board of supervisors — San Francisco’s governing body — passed the Places for People Ordinance, legislation designed to help correct an imbalance in access to public space, by making it easier to create parklets and other urban parks, according to Robin Abad Ocubillo, senior planner and urban designer with San Francisco city planning.

“Not all citizens have equal access to open space and that is a historical structural problem that we face in our cities and in our country,” he said.

From environmental activism to the LGBTQ rights movement, the city has “always been a pioneer in terms of civic engagement and civic participation” and “the expression of our country’s democratic ideals in public space,” he said.

For Abad Ocubillo parklets are “part of a long tradition in San Francisco around empowering citizens and empowering the public to shape civic life and shape our civic commons, our public realm, by making it easier, less expensive, less process-intensive, to go ahead and make these projects.”

Many are sponsored by restaurants and cafés, and customers are encouraged to enjoy a coffee or a bagel in street seating, as long as non-customers aren’t kicked out. They can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $150,000 Francis said, but are usually around $20,000 (U.S.).

They are technically temporary, and some have come and gone over the years. Others have changed in design.

There’s not a maximum size but they usually don’t take up more than two parking spaces, and the parking doesn’t have to be replaced. Francis doesn’t have any hard numbers but anecdotally has heard they’re good for business.

“It couldn’t not be,” he said.

“It kind of does act as an expansion of your square footage, in a way.”

The Mission’s Pipelet Parklet cost about $35,000, said Reed Davaz McGowan, executive director at Youth Art Exchange, and was funded by corporate sponsors and grants. It’s one of three the non- profit organization has worked on, providing high school students with an opportunity to leave their mark on their communities.

“We tend to work in neighbourhoods that are not the most well known parts of San Francisco and so otherwise might not able to get the glory of having a parklet,” said Davaz McGowan.

“We see them as opportunities to create gathering spaces, community spaces, cultural spaces.”People do complain about the loss of parking, she said, and there are also concerns about them becoming sleeping spaces for San Francisco’s large homeless population. The parklet manual touches on this — not to the level of “putting pigeon spikes or anything on it, but they are concerned about long stretches of benches into the design and so those are things that do inform what the designs of the parklets are,” Davaz McGowan said.

In Toronto, parklets are divided between “parklet cafés” (there are 15 including 12 that are part of the King St. project and “public parklets” (19 with 15 part of the King St. project), according to city spokesperson Eric Holmes.

A new bylaw for both types will be enacted in September.

Under it, café applications must be submitted through Municipal Licensing and Standards, and once approved owners can serve customers food and drinks in them. Public applications must be submitted though Transportation Services. A permit is required in both cases, but the fee for the public ones is lower as they’re meant as space for everyone.

Jake Tobin Garrett, policy and planning manager at non-profit park advocacy organization Park People, calls parklets a “delightful” idea and “really interesting way of adding public space.”

But they are not an “end solution to public space in busy areas.” The four small parkettes planned on side streets along Bloor St., as a partnership between the Bloor Annex Business Improvement Area and the city, are on example of a Toronto twist on it, he said.

“They’re a way of expanding seating and trees and greenery and gardens in these sort of key locations along intersections along these streets.”

A pop-up public space in Scarborough’s Wexford Heights Plaza parking lot this summer, funded by Park People and a city grant, “basically takes the idea of a parklet and adapts it to a suburban strip mall context,” Garrett said.
Owners of businesses in the strip mall gave up a few parking spaces “to create this public space for people in the community to use that now has seating and pollinator plants that have attracted butterflies and caterpillars to this parking lot.”

It’s not an either or situation, and different kinds of urban space are needed, he said. But they all take political will.

“The cities where you see these parklets and other kind of street plazas become more prevalent and dynamic are the ones where the city has put a lot of effort both in their own time and in funding to actually put these together,” Garrett said.

Francis agreed parklets aren’t a perfect or permanent solution. But they do offer a small way to “clawback space from the automobile” and make car-centric streets slightly more livable.

“In my perfect world we wouldn’t need them, because our streets and public realm would be designed to a much higher standard,” he said.
“But in the meantime we have this great program that let’s us do that.”

Explore plazaPOPS

Back

2019: WexPOPS

5 new projects receive grants to shake up underused public spaces

August 25, 2018

Toronto Star

By Gilbert Ngabo

Link to article

A linear park in the heart of downtown. A green pop-up square in the middle of a strip mall’s parking lots. A train-watching area or a community cafe out of a shipping container.
These are among five community initiatives that have won grants between $15,000 and $50,000 from the Public Space Incubator, a challenge from advocacy group Park People, to implement bold concepts for better use of public spaces across the city.

The announcement comes as Toronto celebrates completion of the first phase of the Bentway, a project that transformed the dull Gardiner Expressway underpass into a skating trail and a vibrant community gathering space. Like the Bentway, the new initiatives aim to liven up some of the city’s unused or underutilized open spaces, and make those spaces more welcoming and engaging for people.

Park People’s manager of policy and planning Jake Tobin Garrett said the group received more than 70 letters of intent for the grants, which were narrowed down to the final 25 applications from which the five winners emerged.

“We knew we would get a lot of interest in this, but we were surprised to receive so many applications,” he said of the program, which was made possible by $340,000 in funding from the Balsam Foundation and renowned urban planner and architect Ken Greenberg and his wife, Eti.

The main objective of the challenge was to solicit ideas that could shake up how we generally view public spaces, Garrett said, noting the effective use of shared space is becoming more important as more people move into the city and into smaller condos and apartments.

“There’s a lot of focus, I think, as we grow as a city and increase in density and we’re seeing all these new people moving in and neighbourhoods sort of changing, to focus on making our collective spaces the best that they can be,” he said.

The winning projects include PlazaPOPS, which will transform the parking space along a strip mall on Lawrence Ave. near Wexford Heights in Scarborough into a parklet for artistic engagement, starting next spring. The pop-up plaza concept originated in San Francisco, and has expanded to other cities.