The Globe and Mail

Visions of New York's Central Park and the Champs Élysées in Paris are not what first leap to mind at the site of a proposed new park in Toronto's underused Port Lands. Instead, the scene at Cherry and Commissioners Streets is all industrial: low-rise warehouses, refinery tanks and the occasional rumble of dump trucks. A faint aroma of industrial sludge rises from the nearby Keating Channel. In the distance, the elevated Gardiner Expressway bisects the summer skyline. But the urban icons of New York and Paris are just what landscape architect David Leinster conjured up when he wowed the board of the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp. in a recent progress report on the design of the 16.7-hectare park.