The Path Forward
The Beltline Trail is the green spine of the city. Formerly a rail route, today it welcomes pedestrians, runners and cyclists across a 9 km east-west path through midtown Toronto.
Stitching together Trail and Yard
SvN Architects + Planners joined the Beltline Yards project to design its many green spaces and forge a new vision for the future of the Beltline Trail. Their work is about creating cohesion: stitching together the trail, new parkland and the surrounding transit station all into one flowing public space.
In conversation with: Drew Sinclair, Jonathan Tinney, Gerardo Paez
The Beltline Trail is a tricky one to define. It’s a long, urban trail, but because of the city’s rapid growth, it’s broken into smaller segments. The former railway is a magnificent piece of urban renewal, but it’s unfinished. It’s an absolute asset for those who live nearby, but not enough of a draw for those who don’t.
“The Beltline has for a longtime had this potential to connect east-west across the city through a priority transportation corridor, meaning its priority is not moving cars but moving people,” says SvN principal Drew Sinclair. “Where its potential hasn’t been fully realized is where these key gaps exist.”
For SvN, a landscape design, architecture and planning practice, this truth about the Beltline Trail formed a significant piece of the puzzle in designing the landscapes at Beltline Yards: How to stitch together new buildings with an existing green space? And how to improve a part of that green space in a way that catalyzes future improvements beyond the boundaries of the site? And so the story of the Beltline Yards and its landscapes becomes one of connection: connecting what Beltline Yards will be with the potential of what the Beltline Trail could become.
“Where its potential hasn’t been fully realized is where these key gaps exist. If you can fill them in, you can create this superconnecting loop for the first time.”
– Drew Sinclair, SvN
The potential? An urban trail that forms a full loop through Toronto, connecting the many neighbourhoods it touches. Speaking with SvN, it’s clear the opportunity for Beltline Yards is to lead by example by creating a landscape-led masterplan that seamlessly flows between trail and neighbourhood.
“The trail is something quite different from Beltline Yards,” Sinclair continues. “The trail is a linear public space that’s about movement, it’s not serving an industrial purpose. The way we’ve been able to navigate between those two design languages is to imagine the industrial underlay and the organic overlay.” So for example, the industrial underlay might be something like a playground, designed to echo the language of 19th century industry and railroads. Or the brick chimney, standing next to an amphitheatre in the park, a relic of the past that will be embraced as a wayfinding landmark for Beltline Yards.
To get a better understanding of the organic overlay, on the other hand, meet Gerardo Paez, the soft spoken landscape architecture lead at SvN who designed the landscapes to simultaneously provide intimacy and create expansiveness. He paints a picture of wildflower meadows, open lawns and quiet moments among the trees that provide a varied environment for the community, while also creating a natural transition between trail and neighbourhood. “We wanted a place that’s flexible enough to kick a ball with a toddler or read a book on a bench, but also to have an event with different members of the community,” he says.
To create that sense of variety, Paez and his team are planning small groves of birch, trembling aspens, white pines and evergreens. The exact plant species and placement are still being determined, but the vast majority will be local Ontarian species, selected to enhance biodiversity and cater to four- and six-legged neighbours as well as the usual two-legged ones. Ultimately, the ambition is to create clusters of trees that bloom and change colour with the seasons, letting the people of Beltline Yards enjoy their gardens any time of year.
“My own walks in the morning are along a park and that keeps me connected and grounded,” says Paez. “It’s just a beautiful sensation of serenity. And that’s what we’re trying to get at with the planting scheme at Beltline Yards.”
The Early Days of the Beltline
"The Toronto Beltline didn’t begin as a place for pedestrians but as a place for trains."
— Drew Sinclair, SvN
Construction of the Toronto Beltline began in 1890. The city was going through a growth spurt, and the plan was to build a rail route that connected downtown with planned residential developments north of Eglinton Ave and west of High Park. The trains started running in 1892, but it wasn’t meant to be. The new neighbourhoods the train was built to connect failed to materialize and after just two years, the final train completed its final journey.
From Steam Trains to Dog Walkers
Anyone who knows Toronto knows that the city grew far beyond its turn-of-the-century limits. New neighbourhoods flourished, but the Beltline rail route only served freight trains between 1910 and the 1970s. After that, the tracks were disused until the late 1980s, when the land was sold and redeveloped into a recreational trail, a green corridor to fulfil the original promise of the Beltline: to be a great connector of Toronto’s neighbourhoods.
The Beltline today and beyond
The beloved 9 km-long route stitches together communities across Rosedale, Forest Hill and Fairbank into a welcoming car-free path. But the trail, which is formed of three separate sections, could do much more. The big-picture potential is an uninterrupted loop that connects the city. We’re getting the ball rolling at Beltline Yards, where an entire segment of the trail will be revitalized and integrated into a new 2,200 m² park.
