Landscape Information
Situated on Lake Ontario south of Queen Quay, this 5.5-acre park incorporates dual rectilinear quays created with infill in the twentieth century and separated by an approximately 200-foot-wide basin. In 2007 the eastern quay (Peter Street Slip) and a portion of the western (Maple Leaf Quay) were rehabilitated and designed by a team, including Claude Cormier + Associés, Janet Rosenberg + Associates Landscape Architects (now Janet Rosenberg & Studio), and Hariri Pontarini Architects. The project marks the first of four urban beaches designed by Cormier over an eleven-year period.
Inspired by the painting, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884) by Georges Seurat, the park brings visitors close to the water’s edge, offering harbor views. Both eastern and western sections gently rise toward their respective centers, before gradually sloping south towards the water. The subtle change in grade screens views of the adjacent street and buffers the sound of traffic.
Each section includes a network of curvilinear paths that frame organically shaped turf mounds intended to be viewed from the ground and the neighboring high-rise towers. Evocative of dunes, the mounds are planted with silver maples and weeping willows, providing shade.
A wedge-shaped beach interspersed with moveable chairs and yellow, sheet-metal umbrellas parallels the southern end of Peter Street Slip. The beach is framed by a generous concrete walkway marked by irregularly placed, oversized, backless benches. The slip includes a fire station and a monument, Last Alarm (2000) by Yolanda vanderGaast, which commemorates fallen Toronto firefighters.
The project received the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects’ Regional Honor Award in 2008 and the American Society of Landscape Architects’ Honor Award in Design in 2009.
