While this is true, I do I have some suggestions. At the top of the list is this: Toronto needs to make better recreational use of Lake Ontario and its waterways. More specifically, it needs a summer bathing culture.
One of the gold standards for this is easily Zürich. The city has a long history of urban swimming right in Lake Zürich and the Limmat River. And because the city has some of the cleanest urban water in the world, all that is really needed are platforms leading straight into water. But Zürich also has a rich history of beautiful public bathhouses (called Badis). These facilities accommodate the obvious daytime functions, but they also transform at night into bars, clubs, and event venues. It's for these reasons that their seasonal opening in May is often viewed as the official opening of summer in the city. This is what Toronto needs. So how do we make that happen?
The obvious first step is that we need clean water, which means we need to eliminate the poop. This remains a problem and here's why (taken from this 2014 document):
About 30% of the land area, which is really in the older area of the city [of Toronto], is serviced by combined sewers. That's a single pipe that carries both raw sewage and stormwater runoff when it rains. Inherent in the way these systems were configured back in the late 1800s and up to about 1950 is that during heavy rains there's a spillage of combined sewer overflow, as we call it. It's a mixture of raw sewage and stormwater runoff. We have about 80 outfalls across the city, 34 of which discharge to Lake Ontario.
The good news is that we're working on it. In 2018, Toronto started on the largest stormwater management program in the city's history with the promise that it will virtually eliminate the release of combined sewer outflows into the Lower Don River, Taylor-Massey Creek and Toronto's Inner Harbour. I don't know enough, technically, to say whether this will get us all the way there, but I do know that it is absolutely crucial to making Toronto more like Zürich. Zürich also some combined sewers, but they use large retention tanks to hold excess wastewater and prevent it from overflowing into Lake Zürich and the Limmat River.
The second step is that we need to invest in incredible bathhouse facilities. From what I can tell, this is also a work in progress. As part of the preliminary design for the Parliament Slip (in the city's central waterfront), there is a proposal for a floating barge and two outdoor pools. There may even be a snack bar! (Let's hope it's a lot more than that.) This won't be the same experience as swimming directly in Lake Zürich, but it will still be awesome and Toronto should make it happen.
But there are other opportunities. One that often comes to mind for me is Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion. Originally constructed in 1922 and renovated in 1980, today it mostly feels abandoned, other than the mediocre cafe facing the boardwalk (and yes, the adjacent pool). It's severely underutilized and under kept. What we ought to do is host an international design competition and challenge the world to rethink it and its relationship to the lake, just as we did for our central waterfront. And of course, we should do this in parallel with making our bodies of water some of the cleanest in the world.
Toronto needs a summer bathing culture.
Photos from Zürich Tourism
