For many, the Village of Yorkville Park may just seem like a nice place to eat lunch on the bistro-style tables, but it is one of most unusual and intriguing outdoor public spaces in our city.
After a Cumberland Street block of Victorian row houses were demolished to make way for the new east-west subway line in the 1950s, the razed site remained a parking lot for 40 years. Then in 1991, after much lobbying by local residents and business owners, the City of Toronto agreed to transform the one-acre lot into a park, Not just a standard patch of grass with a couple of trees and benches, but a new kind of urban public space.
