This was once the largest freshwater marsh in the Great Lakes.

This was once a toxic industrial hellscape.

This is now the most exciting and ambitious urban revitalization project in North America.

This is the Toronto waterfront where the Don River meets Lake Ontario adjacent to downtown.

Like countless other waterfronts in Canada and the United States, the area was an ecological wonderland and important trade route for Indigenous people prior to the arrival of settler colonials. The waterfront, here and elsewhere, was gradually given over to industry. Shipping, tanning, petroleum. A thousand other abusive practices.

Native people and native wildlife were pushed out for profits.

These waterfronts and waterways became open municipal sewers. They became toxic waste dumps for industry. By the mid-20^th century, the last place anyone living in a city with a waterfront wanted to live or work was at the waterfront. They stunk. Putrid. Chock full of chemicals and death.

Industrialists and settlers and politicians called it progress.

Toronto followed this trajectory, growing with its back to the water, just like Buffalo and Cleveland and Detroit and Chicago and Seattle and Los Angeles and Minneapolis along the Mississippi River.

Then came 1954’s monstrous Hurricane Hazel. The storm killed hundreds of people in Haiti, obliterated coastal areas in South Carolina and North Carolina where it made landfall, resulted in a 113-mile-per hour peak gust in New York City, and demolished part of downtown Toronto.

Flooding.

The wetlands surrounding Toronto’s waterfront had been dredged and filled. The Don River flowing through Toronto into Lake Ontario had been channelized, encased in concrete, and diverted nearly at a right angle to output at a different location. The hubris of man, so smart, so powerful, so contemptuous of nature and the protections it provides us.

The city realized its decades-long waterfront industrialization had left it vulnerable to catastrophic flooding.

Oops.

Over the subsequent half century, Toronto thought about this problem, nibbled at the edges, hoped for the best. In 1999, the nation, the province, and the city finally got serious, developing a task force to consider waterfront redevelopment as part of an ultimately unsuccessful effort to land the 2008 Summer Olympics.

So what.

The task force was struck by an opportunity far greater than two weeks of hurdles and high jumps. It realized and reported “an almost unprecedented development opportunity” that could have “a major, positive economic impact on the City, the region and the country.” It saw, how if done correctly, if approached comprehensively, a waterfront revitalization could solve for multiple problems, “an integrated partial solution to the environmental, transportation, infrastructure, housing, economic and tourism challenges confronting the City.”

The nation, the province, and the city all agreed and pledged their support to revitalizing Toronto’s waterfront. In 2001, the three levels of government established Waterfront Toronto to oversee all aspects of the planning and development. The corporation’s Board of Directors began meeting in February 2002. In 2003, the provincial government enacted the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation Act, creating a permanent independent organization to oversee the project.

Away we go.

Ookwemin Minising

Through numerous Canadian Prime Ministers, Ontario Premiers, Toronto Mayors and city councillors, through the collapse of the global financial markets and COVID, Waterfront Toronto moved forward. It moved forward with $1.4 billion in combined federal, provincial, and local funding. The scale of this project–undoing and redoing 150 years of development across nearly 2,000 acres–is the kind of thing that can only be achieved by government. Coordinated and committed government investment over a generation.

The results have been spectacular.

Beyond the wildest dreams stuff.

The best landscape architects and designers and engineers and city planners and botanists and artists in the world coming together to produce one of the singular urban achievements ever created by humanity. Not because it’s the tallest or the longest or the biggest, but because it took what man destroyed and returned it to something approaching what it was.

A time machine.

A time machine looking both to the past, but also to what is possible in the future. Not only the future of Toronto or Canada, but the future of the world if mankind puts as much effort and money and ingenuity and innovation and priority into returning to a place of harmony with nature as it did attempting to bend nature to its will over the last 200 years, breaking it, and ourselves, along the way.

While initially solving for flood mitigation and real estate re-development, Waterfront Toronto held firm to the big picture vision of the 1999 task force. People were put first. Reconnecting Torontonians to their waterfront. Re-establishing the human relationship with the lake.

Parking lots and abandoned buildings have become new, accessible, beautiful neighborhoods. Parks and public spaces were prioritized, as was art and architecture, all designed from the outset to be environmentally and economically sustainable.

The Don River was returned to its natural route along a new, manmade river valley. Doing so created a new island where it meets Lake Ontario: Ookwemin Minising. There’s nothing like it in the world.

Formerly known as Villiers Island, 98-acre Ookwemin Minising (pronounced Oh-kway-min Min-nih-sing), meaning “place of the black cherry trees” in Anishinaabemowin/Ojibwemowin, is projected to eventually become home to more than 15,000 people. Roughly half of the new island will be for parks and greenspaces with the other half developable. The developable half will feature Canada’s first climate-positive neighborhood. Roads were designed first and foremost with bicycles and pedestrians and buses and stormwater runoff in mind, not cars.

The island is ringed with wetlands surrounding a new park, Biidaasige Park. Biidaasige Park (pronounced bee-daw-sih-geh), meaning "sunlight shining toward us,” is a greenspace lining the new mouth of the Don River. It is the largest park to open in Toronto in a generation and the first public space to open on the new island.

2026 represents another signature year in the revitalization with major new housing, public greenspace, and art projects opening along with the Ontario Science Center. The park’s signature art project is the Lassonde Art Trail.

Lassonde Art Trail

The Lassonde Art Trail opens this month as Canada’s most ambitious open-air destination dedicated to public art. Spanning over 4 kilometers through Biidaasige Park on Ookwemin Minising island, Lassonde Art Trail offers free, year-round access to a dynamic program of permanent and rotating artworks by leading contemporary artists.

“When the first half of the park opened last summer, I was walking around, and it's just so beautiful, you're walking in the middle of this pollinator field with a huge downtown skyline, and this whole family were walking in front of me, I overheard them saying, ‘We're so lucky that this is happening in our generation,’ and I thought, ‘Wow, I can't believe I've just overheard that,’” Lassonde Art Trail Executive Director Chloe Catan told me via video interview.

Catan worked at Waterfront Toronto before transitioning to LAT.

“Every day we are thankful that we are working on this location, and in this space, because everything about this new park and the new river is positive,” Catan added. “With so many terrible things happening in the world… everything about this project is beautiful and positive; the native plants and the river and all the birds that are coming in and the fish that are coming back, and we're creating art that speaks to that.”

Beavers, too, believe it or not.

International contemporary art superstar and Canadian Kent Monkman’s The Colony (2026) references the essential role that Castor canadensis (beavers) has played in the natural, Indigenous, and colonial histories of Turtle Island. Monkman’s larger-than-life beavers will be installed in Septembrer and a nod to the mistahi-amiskwak, the giant beavers of traditional Cree stories and the Castoroides of Pleistocene era. They feast, sing, dance, and celebrate, evoking Indigenous ceremonies, as well as the opulent baroque sculptures of the gardens at Versailles. The Colony is Monkman’s first permanent public sculptural project.

Over 200,000 herbaceous plants–77,000 shrubs, 5,000 trees–have been planted in Biidaasige Park, including juniper trees. Virginia Overton’s Untitled (Juniper) (2014) is a fully functioning weathervane adorned with the ornamental feature of a juniper tree. Juniperus virginiana, or the eastern red cedar, is native to Ontario where Overton grew up. The work is an ode to the artist’s relationship with this tree species and to those newly planted across Biidaasige Park.

“Art is able to tell stories in a way that other things can't,” Catan said. “We were always thinking when this park was being built, and all the engineering was done, and the hydrology, we thought once it's built and people are walking in this beautiful park, they're not going to understand that underneath them there's these layers of bioengineering that people can't see. It's a man-made park, but it doesn't look like it, it looks like the river's always been here. How are we going to tell those stories? Through art. It's a much more meaningful way of learning than reading a sign.”

Art From The Start

Public art is essential to public life. Public art contributes to public enrichment and engagement and education and beautification and public safety.

“It's the magic,” Catan said. “It's an essential, a core element, it's not an afterthought. It creates a healthy, vibrant neighborhood. It creates a space for dialog, different perspectives so people can see themselves reflected.”

Art was figured in to Biidaasige Park from the get-to.

“The art trail is very much integrated into the park system,” Catan said. “This is not something like, ‘Well, let's design a park, and then art will just come in later.’ This was thought about from the start… integrating art into the park system came from a master plan developed at Waterfront Toronto.”

As Waterfront Toronto planned and developed the revitalization project, Catan’s role when working there was designing how public art could be placed into the new parks and neighborhoods. How to make it simpler and easier. How to build infrastructure from the beginning that would allow for ambitious art commissions.

“We worked very closely with the landscape architects to figure out, holistically, how an art trail could follow the path system, what places around the park made sense to have art, how to have a good variety of locations, having all these locations mapped out, and then integrating invisible infrastructure–some of those locations, under plazas, might have a hidden concrete pad underneath the pavers, so that all we have to do is pick up the pavers and anchor things in, then put the pavers back, as opposed to constantly pouring in concrete and being invasive,” Catan explained. “It's more sustainable and cheaper as well. Some places have electrical plugins or water hookups, so that we say to the artists, ‘This is what there is and you can use it or you cannot use it.’ There's no empty plinths.”

Pierre Lassonde

Canadian billionaire Pierre Lassonde built his fortune starting, investing in, selling, and generally capitalizing on mining interests and opportunities, particularly gold in America.

Back in her Waterfront Toronto days, Catan remembers touring the industrialist/philanthropist around the unfinished Ookwemin Minising project by boat.

“He saw the sheer scale of the engineering happening to build a new river and an island. He was like, ‘I cannot believe this is happening right downtown,’” she remembers. “Not that many people knew about it a few years ago. It wasn't being talked about as much as we had hoped. It was such a massive scale, and he's trained as an engineer–he's in mining so he’s used to big, ambitious projects–and I think he saw that and felt the ambition and wanted to be a part of this. When he heard that there was going to be an art trail, this combines a lot of things that he loves.”

In 2022, Lassonde gave a $25 million gift supporting both permanent landmark commissions and a long-term program of rotating artworks on the trail. At that point, Catan left Waterfront Toronto, taking over a new foundation established to manage those dollars and oversee the art trail in conjunction with the City.

“Having museum-quality art free for everyone to enjoy, and having Canadian artists, international artists, local artists showing on the same platform… an interesting mix of artists, very thoughtful and high quality, all incredibly talented who are thinking about the site,” Catan explained of the vision.

There was a Toronto before its revitalized waterfront and there will be a new city after.

Projects this big are scary and take time. They require vision and patience and money. But projects this big are also exciting. Thrilling in the case of Toronto’s Waterfront.

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