The Globe and Mail

Toronto city planners call Philosopher's Walk at the University of Toronto "a unique linear park," and the mourners who gathered there last Saturday to remember the women killed in the 1989 Montreal Massacre consider it a holy place. Students and strollers cherish it as an escape from the city's concrete blight, and for the renovators of the Royal Ontario Museum and the Royal Conservatory of Music, the thin strip of urban forest has proved the perfect neighbour: Both institutions plan to open up their buildings toward the park and take advantage of the natural light and the impressive forest canopy. And yet architect Paul Gogan, who is directing the ROM project, doesn't mince words about the park's disturbing decline. "It has greater splendour in people's minds than it does in reality," he says. "This is a great place that can be even greater. I hesitate to use words like decay and afterthought, but if it's left untended for many more years it's going to become that."