On the weekend, after a walk in the ravine behind the Evergreen building at the Don Valley Brick Works (there is a farmer’s market here, come May, on Saturday mornings, and Margaret Atwood set a part of her novel, The Edible Woman, here), my friend Albert Schultz, the artistic director of the Soulpepper Theatre Company and the Young Centre for the Performing Arts in which it is housed, took my wife and me down Cherry Street to a desolate part of the docks.

Now the city has been talking, uselessly, about what to do with Toronto’s waterfront for years—at least for as long as the decade I’ve been here—and in that time ten or twenty condo towers have gone up, putting Lake Ontario even further out of reach.

Toronto is a city that stumbles, not least, because it does not know how to do anything by increments—connect the ravines, build wooden pedestrian overpasses for them, and so on—and when it thinks big it has a tendency to compromise and lose out. So the Four Seasons Centre that is the city’s opera house has marvelous acoustics, but except for its glass front, it’s drab outside (though Diamond & Schmitt, the firm that designed it, is apparently being considered for the new Marinsky Theatre in Russia’s St. Petersburg, so perhaps I should eat my words). And Daniel Libeskind’s so-called “crystal” addition to the ROM is grey and opaque and with lousy seams and looks like a collapsed warehouse and not like a “crystal” at all.

The successful ventures tend to be the ones that are bold, but not overreaching. So, for instance, the new Art Gallery of Ontario, which I visited for the first time this last weekend, is a joy. On the North side of Grange Square, above Queen Street (Grange House, integrated into the backside of the AGO, was built in 1817 when this was among Toronto’s wealthier neighbourhoods), this is one of the most striking blocks in the city. Beside the museum is the fantastic Ontario College of Art and Design building, the white and black-chequered Sharp Centre for Design that sits suspended over the streetscape on colored stilts. For a long time I thought that whatever Frank Gehry had planned for the AGO would not compete, but then the long sail-like glass and cedar front, above the Dundas Street entrance, was revealed last year and, walking home, I’d be stunned when it caught the golden end-of-day light.

Being inside is even better. Gehry’s celebrated staircase winds up and out of a courtyard that used to be dark, and hidden, and opens it up to the light. The museum is airy now, and the room that houses the Henry Moore sculptures is entered unexpectedly and, subsequently, has an air of discovery. The Galleria Italia, so named because the city’s Italian families are the ones who funded it, is on the inside of the sail that is Gehry and the building’s hallmark, and the sensation it provides is of being inside a great canoe, or possibly the rib cage of some imaginary whale. Wonderful, because it integrates the streetscape, too, level as it is with the townhouses’ top storey.

But the real surprise, here, is the Thomson Collection of Ship Models, an extraordinary set of model ships including many built, from memory, by prisoners of the Napoleonic Wars, and that have been housed in wonderful wood and glass cabinets that undulate and flow like the waters of the ocean—and that were specially built for the museum by Glaswegian craftsmen. (There is also a very interesting ‘Remix’ exhibition of North American First Nations art, installations and video on, until August 23rd, well worth the visit.)

But back to those docklands. My friend Albert has “reached” brilliantly. The Young Centre for the Arts is a magnificent theatre complex, where an acting school (the George Brown College Theatre School) is resident and in which the building’s theatres and many rooms reflect Schultz’s unbridled appetites and a vision that refuses to be reined in. He plays the slippery Ricky Roma in the Soulpepper Theatre Company’s terrific production of David Mamet’s play of testy salesmen, Glengarry Glen Ross (it runs until May 9th) and clearly he’s in the part as, before us, he explained his idea of a new arts centre where we were standing, on this grassy lot with its tremendous view of the city and the lake, and a freighter idle in the lock. The sort of thing that Montreal manages so much more easily than Toronto does. Would that the city had his vision, though perhaps it comes a relief, to Albert anyway, at least that the AGO did not—for this is where some thought the revamped AGO should have been built rather than reconceiving the old building as brilliantly as Frank Gehry has done. Now what future waits for this scrubby lakeside field?

Noah Richler’s Our Man In Toronto column appears regularly on Rover.

Photo by Barbara Stoneham.