On a sunny July afternoon, the Don River flowed into Toronto Harbour. Its banks were lined with lake sedge, switchgrass and Canada anemone. Paths and bridges laced through the landscape, which looked as if they had always been there.
In fact, this stretch of river and its surrounding lands − now known as Biidaasige Park − are entirely manufactured. They are not a work of nature but a feat of civic imagination.
They are the product of a $1.5-billion effort known as the Port Lands Flood Protection Project, which has redrawn the mouth of the Don and conjured vast new public spaces from what had long been a civic afterthought.
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On Saturday, the project reaches a major milestone: the opening of the first 50 acres of Biidaasige Park. Visitors will encounter ziplines, a vast water playground and a giant owl sculpture that houses a children’s amphitheatre − a whimsical monument to fantasy and function.
They will also be able to step down into the river and launch a canoe, something that hasn’t been possible here for 100 years.
“This project is one of a kind in the world,” said Herb Sweeney, a partner at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, the landscape-architecture company that led the design of the parks and the flood-protection project. “It’s a good opportunity to show other cities what can be done.
“On day one, people will be able to see the layers that were built in the last seven years,” Mr. Sweeney added. “But there’s so much to the story that’s hidden from view. There’s a lot under the surface.”
In Biidaasige Park’s playground, a giant owl sculpture houses a children’s amphitheatre.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
The newly opened portion of Biidaasige Park lies along Commissioners Street on Ookwemin Minising (formerly known as Villiers Island).
Here, during a recent tour, construction crews were working to install granite cobblestones, and a landscape architect was choosing the spots for a few new extra cypress trees, adding to the thousands of trees, grasses and shrubs already planted on the site.
Workers were framing out a 1920s firehall, preparing its washrooms and meeting rooms to serve park visitors.
Nearby stood one of the park’s centrepieces: a massive water-play area, where children will work together to activate fountains and send flows of water across a rugged surface. A few steps away, a 10-metre-tall raccoon towered over a new playground, as picnic tables and barbecues spread out between ranks of new plantings.
Just to the south, a pedestrian pathway was ready to welcome visitors to the south bank of the new river, a largely naturalized zone between the main course of the river and an inlet designed to provide wildlife habitat. On this south side of the river, it was possible to actually get your hands and feet wet.
“Ecologically and socially, it’s a remarkable thing to get people back in touch with the water,” said Emily Mueller De Celis, another partner at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates who has worked for years on the project.
The park and the larger flood-protection initiative reflect a particular effort to renew the ecological and Indigenous past. Biidaasige is an Anishinaabemowin word that means “sunlight shining toward us,” a phrase that could describe the landscape and the intention of the project.
“It represents a place for Indigenous people to reconnect with the land and the water within their city,” said Fred Martin, a senior project manager in Toronto’s Indigenous Affairs Office.
“It’s often said that the water that enters a marsh isn’t the same water that exits − it’s purified in the process. We’re hoping that people will come here and be transformed and changed.”
Since construction began in 2018, the Port Lands project has reshaped the landscape.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
The landscape itself has changed enormously. Prior to European settlement, the Don River slipped into Lake Ontario through a teeming, verdant marsh of more than five square kilometres, a place of importance to local Indigenous peoples. British settlers named it Ashbridge’s Bay Marsh, and by the 19th century it was heavily polluted.
Starting in 1912, the area was filled in to create Toronto’s Port Lands, but the port was never especially busy.
For a century, this area was a weedy, half-vacant stretch of warehouses, oil tanks and equipment lots. The Don River ran straight south and then made a hard 90-degree turn into the concrete-lined Keating Channel. When the river flooded, as it frequently did, water overtopped its banks. That threat rendered the entire Port Lands, roughly 400 hectares, vulnerable, and essentially undevelopable.
Since heavy construction began in 2018, the Port Lands project has reshaped this landscape. The Keating Channel remains, but now the Don has another route as well: The river loops through a restored wetland and bends westward toward a newly created mouth. Along the way, inlets, embayments and naturalized banks provide flood resilience, habitat and public access.
Most of the existing buildings and roads have been removed; a new set of streets and bridges allows vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists and a future LRT across the landscape.
Cyclists bike through the Commissioners Street Bridge on Thursday, passing part of Biidaasige Park.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
This design emerged from a 2007 international competition. Chris Glaisek, chief planning and design officer at Waterfront Toronto, explained that earlier flood-protection ideas would have rerouted the Don alongside the nearby Gardiner Expressway.
“Now, it’s front and centre,” he said. “We’ve moved nature out where it can breathe.”
This work was extraordinarily complex. Builders led by EllisDon moved 1.2 million cubic metres of soil to create the river channel; much of that soil was contaminated by industrial pollution and had to be treated or contained.
An interdisciplinary team managed the depths and densities of soils, placed great hunks of stone with centimetre precision and lined the riverbank with great trees − their root balls left intact to provide homes for wildlife, including the salmon, which are already showing up in the river.
“This is a completely engineered landscape, but one that works like nature,” Mr. Glaisek said. “It’s infrastructure, but it’s also a public space − and that’s what makes it special.”
That combination is unusual and represents a triumph of governance in creating Waterfront Toronto, said Gabriel Eidelman, director of the Urban Policy Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School.
For decades, Dr. Eidelman explained, the Port Lands were in bureaucratic limbo: “There were overlapping and often conflicting claims between the federal, provincial and municipal governments, and nothing ever got done.”
Workers at Biidaasige Park on Wednesday ahead of its public opening.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
The creation of Waterfront Toronto, a partnership of Toronto, Ontario and the federal government, allowed those tensions to be resolved in a pro-active manner. Now, the Biidaasige Park opening, he said, “reflects a shared consensus that this area should be part of the city.”
“It’s the beginning of the end of the industrial waterfront in Toronto,” Dr. Eidelman said. “It’s the beginning of a completely new idea of what the Port Lands can be.”
Dr. Eidelman notes that the presence of a playground welcomes families into the area, which would have been inconceivable 50 years ago.
And indeed the area is slated to become a dense new neighbourhood of Toronto. Immediately next to the park, on Ookwewin Minising, evolving plans call for 9,000 housing units and 3,000 jobs. The adjacent East Harbour district has provincial zoning for 12 million square feet of development, and owner Cadillac Fairview is pushing for a mix of housing and office.
Nearby, the Hearn Generating Station has a major private development proposal.
Whether the city is ready is another question. But the park is. Toronto’s parks department has lined up months of weekend programming to lure people across the bridges and into the wild.
“We’re taking a visitor-centric approach,” said Dave O’Hara, head of park design at Toronto Parks Forestry and Recreation. “We’re thinking about what people are going to need − including a food strategy.”
Infrastructure is still catching up: temporary parking, drop-off points, food-delivery logistics. Even the access points are being fine-tuned.
The second and final stage of Biidaasige Park is scheduled to open next year, with future amenities to include a larger playground and a food pavilion. The Lassonde Art Trail, a circuit of 15 public art sites through Biidaasige that includes a commission by Kent Monkman, is scheduled to launch in 2026.
But with the first stage ready, the city gets not only a major piece of infrastructure but a place where history, nature and city life can meet − and where the future of Toronto’s waterfront is already taking shape.
A runner goes by the new park on the Commissioners Street Bridge.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that evolving plans call for 6,000 residents to occupy Ookwewin Minising. The plans call for 9,000 housing units.