David Crombie Park is a park in downtown Toronto that is the spine of the St Lawrence Neighbourhood.[1][2]
While not a destination for visitors from outside the neighbourhood, the park is well used by residents, and by tourists using it as a corridor to walk from downtown to the entertainments found in the nearby Distillery District.
Namesake
The park is named after David Crombie, who, during his successive three term as mayor of Toronto, had taken a leadership role in the redevelopment of the neighbourhood that surrounds the park. The efforts of Crombie and his colleagues, to preserve the human scale of the neighbourhood, and keep it liveable, are widely praised, in retrospect. The neighbourhood has been called "the gold standard for mixed development" and "the best example of a mixed-income, mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly, sensitively scaled, densely populated community ever built in the province."
References
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Dave LeBlanc (2013-02-06). "35 years on, St. Lawrence is a template for urban housing". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 2016-03-18. Those of us on two legs should tip our hats to Mr. Crombie also. While it's not quite perfect and bigger than tiny, the neighbourhood that surrounds the park, St. Lawrence (also incorrectly referred to as "The Esplanade"), which extends in places from Front Street to the Gardiner Expressway and from Yonge to Parliament Streets is, more than 35 years later, the best example of a mixed-income, mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly, sensitively scaled, densely populated community ever built in the province.
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Marco Chown Oved (2015-04-11). "Three paths to more mixed-income neighbourhoods". Toronto Star. Retrieved 2016-03-18. To this day, the area around David Crombie Park is held up as the gold standard for mixed development. Replicating its success, however, will be impossible because it relied on a federal public housing fund that no longer exists.
