Yonge-Dundas Square has never been up to the task. More than two decades after its unveiling, the plaza continues to operate as a void chinked back from Yonge Street, rather than magnetically embracing. On the day of this writing, singer Adele occupies an impressive amount of square footage and air space, her face set massively next to electronic signs with eyes blinking mascara products next to promises for jobs from the Ontario government. These are loud, bright, gaudy distractions and still, there’s no there there. At its inception, the square was conceived to hyper-inflate our obsession with celebrities and the distractions of everday life. The belief was that the square should reward the public’s preference to engage within a consumer culture rather than bothering to gather to help create and define it’s own culture.
The square’s deficiencies become glaring during moments of public protest or solidarity, especially in contrast to the those gathering at the same time for a similar cause in other corners of the world. The 2011 Arab Spring protests, beginning in Tunisia, saw up to one million people gathering peacefully in Tahrir Square in Cairo, eventually toppling Egypt’s dictator. Similar public gatherings eventually toppling autocrats in Yemen and Libya. In North America, protesters rushed to the streets and public squares to call for greater equality and justice following the killing of George Floyd in police custody. And, in cities around the world, peace marchers demanding an end to the Putin-led invasion of Ukraine have drawn countless crowds to public squares in Berlin, San Francisco, London and Toronto. Dundas Square was the starting point for the Mega March in support of Ukraine held in late- February 2022. I was there with family and friends to hoist a large banner made of blue construction tarp duct taped in yellow with the peace symbol. Thousands thronged to Yonge Street, waving flags and signs, visuals that were hand crafted and held aloft, though we were all dwarfed by the electronic cacophony. We marched over to City Hall and it was only when we arrived at Nathan Phillips Square that the enormous significance and power of civil protest found full expression. The brilliance of that modernist square is in its duality, the way it embraces and releases, providing space for free movement while holding the energy within the architectural frame in the near and distant ground. The rugged stone mass of Old City Hall looms on the south-east corner, commercial towers to the south, Osgoode Hall on the west and the curved towers of Viljo Revell-designed City Hall to the north. That day of assembly for Ukraine, people flooded into Nathan Phillips Square because there was a place to occupy, room to hoist flags, engage with the vast crowd from the ground or from the ramparts sweeping around the entire space. In fact, you could protest and skate at the same time.
The urban design strategies of embrace and release are sadly absent at Dundas Square. The buildings that surround on all sides are banal, seemingly plastic-thin and hardly enriched by the towering billboards. Toronto place-makers might have looked to the world’s great templates; the monumental might of Milan’s Piazza del Duomo defined by its gothic cathedral and the grand, double-arcaded Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II next door, or found some measure of inspiration in Paris at Place des Vosges, where courtly, red-bricked townhouses frame the grassy commons from all sides.
As I wrote 20 years ago, Yonge-Dundas Square still feels like a cheap counterfeit of Times Square. There might have been oak and maple trees to offer shelter during icy winters or raging hot summers, there might have been gardens that delight the senses throughout all of the seasons, fantastic kinetic public art and playful street furniture. But imagination got parked a couple decades ago.
Something that might have been attractive remains something to tolerate, to occasionally occupy. Mostly, Yonge-Dundas Square is a void that should be avoided.
Rochon 2022 Y-D Sq response MATT edit
Moderators: matt, kurtkraler, glyn