Construction on Toronto Port Lands, Love Park projects closer to finishing

If you’ve travelled along the waterfront in downtown Toronto, chances are you’ve noticed progress on parks projects that have been underway for years now.

CityNews recently visited the Port Lands to learn more about developments on the mammoth $1.25-billion, 400-acre project that will see the Don River extended 1.3 kilometres to the harbour sometime before the end of 2024.

“We’ve made a lot of progress on advancing the river valley excavation and finishes. We’ve completed most of the plantings in the central river valley. We brought in pedestrian bridges,” Don Forbes, the project director of remediation and earth works with Waterfront Toronto, said.

Forbes said much of 2022 was focused on the foundational work to bring the river south from Lake Shore Boulevard East.

“In the event of a regional flood, about 700 acres of land in this immediate area will flood and what we’re doing is we are creating a new naturalized river channel to take those flood waters and safely convey them through the lands to the lake to alleviate flooding,” he said.

“It will protect not only these immediate lands, but a lot of already established residential lands up to Eastern Avenue and almost as far as Leslie Street.”

In the latter part of 2022, Waterfront Toronto officially opened the southern realignment of Cherry Street. A new bridge was installed over where the Don River will connect to the Polson Slip.

A new northern stretch of Cherry Street, which already has bridges installed over the Keating Channel, will create a new intersection at Lake Shore Boulevard East. Forbes said it will also have all the below-ground infrastructure needed to support TTC streetcars in the future (planning for a service extension is underway). The new northern section is expected to open at the end of 2023 while a part of the old Cherry Street alignment will eventually be removed.

Road construction on Lake Shore Boulevard East near Don Roadway is still continuing, but there’s good news for drivers.

“The eastbound bridge over the Don River on Lakeshore will be slated for completion in the late summer (or) early fall of 2023. At [that] point we’ll flip traffic from its current configuration onto the new bridge and start building the westbound bridge over the Don River which will be constructed and completed in late 2024,” Forbes said.

East of the newer southern alignment, tree and shrub planting has already occurred while the river bed has largely been formed. Two pedestrian bridges have also been installed, ones that will connect with future walking trails and provide new connections to the Martin Goodman trail.

Getting to this point hasn’t been easy. Forbes said up to around 200 construction workers have been working year-round over the past few years.

“In order to excavate the river valley, we’ve had to dig out about 1.4 million cubic metres of soil and that’s about enough soil to fill the Rogers Centre,” he said, noting a lot of work has gone into moving soil to re-grade the site.

RELATED: 2022 preview on construction projects along Toronto’s waterfront

Despite the main purpose of preventing floods in Toronto, the whole project will bring in approximately 100 acres of public parks and increase water access.

“The design that we’ve come up with and that we’re constructing now is really purpose-driven to get people down to interact with nature and with the habitat that we’re creating,” Forbes said.

“Not only is this going to alleviate flooding, not only is this going to open up lands for redevelopment, but it’s going to provide a lot of great recreational opportunities and allow people to directly connect and interact with nature.”

As an example, he pointed to ease of access for canoeists and kayakers.

“We have some nodes along the river where you could get dropped off with a canoe or a kayak and walk that down to the river and get into the new river channel or into Canoe Cove to travel up and down the river and travel around and see the different habitats that we’ve created,” Forbes said.

Meanwhile, over at the corner of York Street and Queens Quay West (the site of the old York-Bay-Yonge off-ramp from the Gardiner Expressway), construction on Love Park is much further along.

“This is the heart of our waterfront. York and Queens Quay is where all the action is and I think the theme that we have here, the large civic-scale, heart-shaped water feature is really to commemorate we’re standing here at the heart of Toronto’s waterfront,” Pina Mallozzi, the senior vice-president of design for Waterfront Toronto, told CityNews during a tour of the site.

The 165-metre, red-tiled edge of the pond has been finished, but crews are still finishing up the intricate walkways and are completing other touches. Love Park is expected to open sometime in spring.

Mallozzi said 38 new trees will be at the park along with four mature ones that were saved when the off-ramp was demolished. An older catalpa tree in the pond has been protected and crews built an island for it.

Other features at Love Park include a leash-free dog area complete with irrigation, a pergola that will eventually see wisteria vines with white flowers covering it and plenty of benches. Mallozzi said The Waterfront BIA is going to be bringing in moveable furniture for events and gatherings along with nine bronze animals casts of creatures found in Canada.

Love Park underwent an open design competition and a design by Claude Cormier won.

“This is really meant to be a green oasis in the waterfront. It is a little different than some of the other spaces we’ve made. We’ve really focused on maximizing the landscape components on the site,” Mallozzi said.

“We don’t have a lot of public spaces down on the waterfront and they all have to work hard, and this one is going to do just that. It’s designed of very high-quality material meant to last a long time and be durable to the large crowds that we often see down on the waterfront.”