A modest proposal: Maple Leaf Museum
http://www.thestar.com/article/177979
An open letter to David Crombie
Dear David,
In these pages last week, you ruminated about your long search for a Toronto museum, a journey that has led you to St. Lawrence Hall, on King St. E. Here's my unsolicited advice: shift your gaze several blocks north, to a hulking, vacant building that sits squarely in the middle of this city's emotional core.
Maple Leaf Gardens.
As president of the Canadian Urban Institute, you've been involved in developing a heritage plan for the Gardens as Loblaw, its current owner, attempts to transform the house that Conn Smythe built into yet another big box store.
It's time we begin thinking very differently about what is inarguably one of Toronto's most culturally significant structures. And you can kick-start this discussion.
Let me lay out the case for the Gardens.
By next year, the last of the city's major cultural building projects will have been completed, providing both the Royal Ontario Museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario with spacious new wings and galleries.
But even after these expansions, both institutions will have far more in their collections than they can display. This mismatch will only grow in coming years.
A decade from now, the Gehry and Libeskind additions will be familiar features of our architectural landscape, and both the AGO and the ROM will be pondering the problem of how to provide new and innovatively designed space to satisfy the cultural cravings of an ambitious global city.
There's little doubt Toronto needs a museum to tell the story of its historic continuum, as well as its multicultural present. But let's not forget about the future. In recent years, the city's top private collectors have amassed vast troves of contemporary art but have no place to display the bulk of this work.
Toronto also has an internationally recognized fine-art photography scene that is constantly struggling to show its face. Other visual-art aficionados point to the mounting interest in the contemporary aboriginal art being produced in Canada and around the world.
Rather than start from scratch on an isolated waterfront site (as has been proposed for the city's Humanitas scheme) or in the cramped salons of St. Lawrence Hall, we should first leverage our existing heritage assets, as is being done with the Wychwood Car Barns.
And instead of saddling a cash-strapped municipality with a $200 million capital project, we should be talking to the boards of the ROM or the AGO about a partnership that would secure the Gardens as an annex for future expansion. After all, these institutions already have the administrative and curatorial infrastructure, as well as the fundraising savvy.
It's the brand of off-site expansion that's been undertaken in many other great cities as their leading cultural institutions outgrow their digs.
The most potent example is London's Tate Modern, which opened in 2000 in the monumental Bankside Power Station, on the south shore of the Thames. Built in 1947 by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and decommissioned in 1981, the station was acquired by the Tate, whose trustees hired architects Herzog & de Meuron to transform it into a gallery for modern art. The Tate Modern, which offers free admission to many of its exhibits, has become London's largest single tourist draw.
The Tate Modern's power lies in not only its collection, but with the fascinating restoration of a mammoth, utilitarian structure that was never intended to be a museum. Some of the turbines have been retained, as has the internal generating hall. This wasn't a work of "starchitecture" so much as a supremely imaginative example of how a city can preserve the rapidly disappearing artifacts of its industrial past.
We could do the same with the Gardens – a 76-year-old barn redolent of the gritty, working-class ethic that characterized early 20th-century Toronto. And though we mustn't overlook the victims of the abuse scandal during the Harold Ballard years, the Gardens had an electrifying impact on hundreds of thousands of kids who went there to see their first NHL match. I can vividly remember the purely aesthetic experience of first setting foot in that cathedral-like space, with its brilliant collage of colours and noises.
To me, it's also revealing that the late media mogul Ken Thomson was both a major fine-art collector and a dedicated hockey fan who frequented the Gardens. The building is evidently a place that has resonated very broadly across our city's culture.
Quite apart from the collective civic emotion invested in the space, the Gardens' distinctive heritage features – its cascading yellow brickwork, the iconic dome and the interior lattice work that supports it, and the buffed self-assurance of the letters that adorn the Carlton St. entrance – represent the raw materials of what could become an internationally recognized symbol of innovative heritage restoration.
As far as I know, no other city has tried to transform an aging sports stadium into a museum. As was the case with the Boston Garden, most cities just knocked them down to make way for arenas with better seats and cushier boxes.
Toronto, at least, had the wisdom not to demolish the Gardens when its ownership passed from Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment to George Weston Ltd. for an undisclosed sum. Over objections from activists, city council in 2004 approved plans to renovate the arena into a supermarket and liquor store. "Adaptive re-use" it was called.
Ever since, Loblaw, a Weston subsidiary, has been telling shoppers and investors that the new store will be opening imminently, but each deadline has come and gone with no evidence of construction activity.
It's not hard to see why: the company is battling fierce competition from Wal-Mart and other chains, and has seen its share price and profits drop sharply, culminating last month in the announcement it would cut 800-1,000 employees.
When the supermarket chain bought the Gardens, many critics bemoaned its fate. But I'd argue that the Weston family's ownership of Toronto's hockey shrine should be seen as potentially encouraging news for Toronto's heritage and cultural advocates.
The Westons have a long track record as exemplary cultural patrons, supporting the growth plans of local institutions, including the Ontario Science Centre, the Don Valley Brickworks naturalization, and the ROM Crystal (Hilary Weston chaired the fundraising campaign).
Internationally, the family's U.K. foundation donated £20 million to the stunning Millennium restoration of the British Museum, by Norman Foster, as well as many other cultural venues.
With Loblaw's current market challenges, the financial case for refurbishing the Gardens couldn't be terribly attractive, especially given its close proximity to two rival supermarkets that have opened within a few blocks of the arena in recent years.
So perhaps the time has come for someone to approach the Westons about envisioning an alternate future for this Toronto landmark, one that dovetails with their own philanthropic interests in museums, culture and education.
David, you have said for years that Toronto has become a prisoner of its dedication to incrementalism – a big city unwilling to make the big gesture. Maybe we can begin to change our civic culture by seizing the opportunity to re-imagine Maple Leaf Gardens by transforming it into an annex of either the ROM or the AGO, with a mandate to tell Toronto's stories and a commitment to a bold, unique heritage restoration.
The Westons have demonstrated their cultural vision before. Let's find a way of asking them to show it again.
Yours, etc.
John Lorinc is the author of
"The New City: How the Crisis
in Canada's Urban Centres is
Re-Shaping the Nation" (Penguin).
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