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| Corktown Underpass Park |
The bigger cities get, the more traffic
congestion is created and one of the ways to help this is with
expressways to whisk people in and out of the city over top of the
stop and go local traffic. When you build expressways they work best
without stoplights and intersections, so they have to go over other
roads. This creates overpasses, and many of them become unsightly
areas that no one likes. They collect garbage and sometimes slightly
unsavoury segments of society. We visited an area of Houston Texas
that developed a park under their highways, and it was apparently a
constant struggle to clear the homeless from these sheltered areas.
Toronto has taken a different approach to utilizing highways
'underpasses'.
In a neighbourhood of Toronto called
Corktown, two of the cities major expressways converge, creating a
tangle of elevated roadways and the related underpasses beneath them.
Rather than hiding them away behind fences to keep people away, they
invited local street artists to decorate the concrete support columns
and created a park there. Some of it is used to provide parking
commuters and a skateboard park was build in another area along with
a basketball court. Apparently the area is also used once a week for
a local farmer's market.
The result is a clean and attractive
area used by the local people. Even the garbage cans have been
decorated by street artists. We went there on a weekday, so it was
not busy, but there were still people there playing basketball,
skateboarding and just enjoying the art.
What a great way to utilize a unwanted
area of the city!
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| Mirrors on the roof |
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| Immortalized on Concrete |
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| Even garbage Cans get Painted |
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| Go Fish |
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Skateboard Park
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