Toronto’s Gray Coach Terminal provides an elegant art deco welcome to the city’s core. With soaring ceilings, decorative travertine walls and chandeliers, it’s a sophisticated gateway for arrivals and departures. But as car and air travel became easier, the terminal began to decline. Within the next five years or so its operations will move to a new mega bus terminal beside Union Station. The terminal building – with its huge area of bus docking land – will then be available for adaptive reuse. Done well, revitalization of the coach station will revitalize and re-populate the Ward, Toronto’s famous “slum” that was once the City’s most vibrant and multicultural neighbourhood.

Charrette proposals included conversion of the site to a hi-tec electronic recycling centre and combinations of residence, markets, green space, retail and business space that would revive the lost vitality and cultural richness of the Ward, without its squalor. In a city where the need for affordable housing is desperate, the Gray Coach Terminal’s bus-docking land and the empty parking lot north of it offer wonderful opportunities, in a location that is perfectly located, for housing people of all, incomes: Hospitals to the west, retail to the east, Ryerson University, University of Toronto, Queens Park, City Hall, law courts, the financial district - all are within walking distance.

For more see: Toronto Coach Terminal could use some inspired ideas for its reuse, by ACO NextGen, Pauline Berkovitz.