Concerned residents draw up plans to beautify city eyesore
For a long time, the people of Toronto have lived with the knowledge that their city's waterfront is an eyesore.
The core of the city is separated from the harbour and Lake Ontario by highways and ugly industrial sites that block the view of the lake and the crescent of islands sheltering the harbour.
In the early 1970s the federal government bought 40.6 hectares of land along the waterfront but nobody had an urban plan that was worthy of the property or the view.
The result has been an erratic hodgepodge of development. Monolithic condominium towers form a cement wall that separates the city from the lake. Outside the walls of the towers, there is almost nothing to see or do.
It was this barren landscape that greeted Anne Christensen when she moved to the harbourfront area two years ago - a singular absence of 'the retail amenities that make a neighbourhood'.
The one respectable concentration of shops and restaurants, Queen's Quay Terminal, was fine on its own but the whole harbourfront area did not attract enough visitors to generate much excitement.