Waterfront Toronto: Rebuilding Queens Quay Above and Below Ground

An Extensive Site Restoration

“A Canadian landscape magazine once ranked Queens Quay among the world’s worst streets, declaring it ‘perhaps the ugliest urban waterfront boulevard of any major city’. Fast forward to 2015, however, and Queens Quay’s ugly days could be over. A $110 million revitalization project launched after years of delay aims to transform a 1.5-km stretch from Bay St. to Spadina Ave. into a model streetscape,” wrote reporter Amy Dempsey in an article published by the Toronto Star in August 2012.

A Model Streetscape

Queens Quay is a prominent street in the Harbourfront neighbourhood of Toronto, Ontario. The street was originally commercial in nature due to the many working piers along the waterfront; it has been extensively rebuilt in since the 1970s with parks, condominiums, retail, and institutional and cultural development.

Toronto’s main waterfront street, is being completely transformed by connecting waterfront destinations to help create a lively and active urban waterfront with an extensive tree canopy. The transformation is taking place below ground as well, as underground green infrastructure technologies including the Silva Cell are being installed to help take municipal services as well as tree health to another level.

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In the video above, Waterfront Toronto peels back the pavement to show what they’re building underground and how that is coordinated with the landscape work that can be seen above ground.