Cloud Gardens or "Bay Adelaide Park" and "Cloud Gardens Conservatory" is a small park in downtown

Toronto Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the anch ...

Ontario Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central C ...

, Canada. It extends from the south side Richmond Street to the north side of Temperance Street, between

Yonge Street Yonge Street (; pronounced "young") is a major arterial route in the Canadian province of Ontario connecting the shores of Lake Ontario in Toronto to Lake Simcoe, a gateway to the Upper Great Lakes. Once the southernmost leg of provincial H ...

and

Bay Street Bay Street is a major thoroughfare in Downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is the centre of Toronto's Financial District and is often used by metonymy to refer to Canada's financial services industry since succeeding Montreal's St. James Stre ...

, on of land. The park is currently closed for construction and repairs.

Origin

The site was given to the city in the 1980s as part of a deal that allowed the

Bay Adelaide Centre The Bay Adelaide Centre is an office complex in the Financial District of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The first phase, a 51-storey skyscraper known as Bay Adelaide West, was completed in July 2009. The second phase, the 44-storey Bay Adelaide Ea ...

to be higher than official plan limits. The developers thus gave a small portion of the lot to the city and spent $5 million to build a park.

Landscape design and art

Designed by Baird Sampson Neuert Architects, the MBTW Group/Watchorn Architects, and two artists— Margaret Priest and Tony Scherman—the park features elaborate landscape design. The western part of the park includes a network of pathways and is edged by cluster of trees around a semicircular lawn. The eastern portion is marked by series of walkways climbing past a

waterfall A waterfall is a point in a river or stream where water flows over a vertical drop or a series of steep drops. Waterfalls also occur where meltwater drops over the edge of a tabular iceberg or ice shelf. Waterfalls can be formed in severa ...

. Rising above this area is a monument to Toronto's construction workers designed by Margaret Priest and constructed by the Building Trades Union. It comprises squares that each illustrate one of the building trades. Thus one shows a network of steel

rebars Rebar (short for reinforcing bar), known when massed as reinforcing steel or reinforcement steel, is a steel bar used as a tension device in reinforced concrete and reinforced masonry structures to strengthen and aid the concrete under tension. ...

, another, a cluster of wiring. The namesake feature of the Gardens is a small greenhouse set to the cool and moist conditions of a cloud rainforest. A walkway runs from the lower-level entrance to an upper-level exit by the waterfall. Cloud Gardens won Baird Sampson Architects a Governor General's Architecture Award.

Construction

The park was closed in November 2018 for construction to replace the waterproofing under the park, and is estimated to reopen in 2023 after the construction of a new building west of the park is complete.

References

External links

* {{Parks and squares in Toronto Parks in Toronto

Origin

Landscape design and art

Construction

See also

References

External links