On a recent Friday, five geraniums drooped in the heat of Old City Hall’s courtyard. The city has cracked open the 1899 building for five hours each Friday, so a few locals wandered across the asphalt, unsure what they were meant to find.
What they saw looked improvised: a couple of tables, security guards, plastic pots of flowers. It looked like someone had dashed into Metro with a hundred dollars and called it “placemaking.” This is not animation; it is civic drift, dressed up in grocery-store geraniums.
Can the city make this place something better? Of course. It’s a time capsule of Victorian Toronto studded with marble staircases, bronze railings and sculpted grotesques. It overflows with atmosphere.
But early signs aren’t promising. This summer, two city departments plus a platoon of consultants are “reimagining” Old City Hall, smothering it in bureaucratic fog.
Toronto’s Old City Hall could soon be a home for its civic treasures. It can be more than that
Instead, the place needs ideas and a leader. Not another process, but a curator of civic life. Someone who can stage events, animate the courtyard, and set a tone. Establish that vibe first, and political will for a full rethink – including a city museum – will follow.
What might that change look like? For some ideas, I sat down with landscape architect Marc Ryan of the company PUBLIC WORK, best known for The Bentway, under the Gardiner Expressway. He sees Old City Hall as a site where Toronto might confront its past and rehearse its future.
He suggests reversing the usual perspective: don’t come in from the grand front steps, but through the sally port on the north side where prisoners arrived on their way to the basement jail. Stitch the courtyard back into the surrounding streets. Consider the building not alone, but as part of an L-shaped civic precinct with Nathan Phillips Square and the current City Hall.
“We can balance out the openness of the square with a sense of enclosure,” he said, “and create something greater than its parts.”
Mr. Ryan points to precedents elsewhere. The Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi once enclosed a New York statue of Christopher Columbus inside a fully furnished living room suspended on a scaffold, inviting the public to see a monument in an entirely new way.
Old City Hall could be Toronto’s opportunity for the same kind of reframing. This is not about decoration. It is about transformation. Mr. Ryan argues that temporary artistic interventions can reset civic imagination.
“A temporary action in the public realm is a public statement,” he said. “It can foreshadow change.”
Meanwhile, in the real world: This summer’s desultory open houses are, for some reason, the work of the city’s Corporate Real Estate Management division. Development agency CreateTO is separately pursuing a long-term vision.
“We’re very aware of the importance of this site, with its proximity to City Hall and its rich history of the place,” CEO Vic Gupta told me. “We will think very creatively about how to serve the needs of a growing city and achieve council’s policy goals.”
To that end, it has hired development consultants Spanier Group, CBRE, Turner & Townsend, Artuitive and Bespoke Collective. In parallel, Monumental has been hired to lead public engagement.
Despite the skills and energy of those involved, this is a recipe for failure. There are two separate teams. Real estate comes first. Everyone and no one is in charge.
That is typical in Toronto, and that is why the city is not good at creating public places. Since 2000, the city’s government has delivered billions of dollars’ worth of new buildings and parks; yet few of those are memorable.
Almost all the public-space successes have been driven by groups outside city hall: Waterfront Toronto’s Sugar Beach and several other parks. The Bentway. Evergreen Brick Works.
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These places have two things in common: Visionary leaders and excellent designers who were well paid and given room to run. On The Bentway, Mr. Ryan, partner Adam Nicklin and colleagues altered people’s perception of the Gardiner and delivered a new kind of public space.
“Every public space in Toronto changes us,” Mr. Ryan said. “The Brick Works changed us. Sugar Beach changed us. The Bentway changed us.”
The danger is that Old City Hall changes nothing − that a landmark at the heart of the city remains a dead zone while committees deliberate.
Toronto deserves better. Old City Hall deserves more than grocery-store flowers. It deserves a director with taste, urgency and authority to turn a relic into the city’s living room. And from there, to build a future.
