Bricks work, seeds grow, and sustainable urban development germinates

By Robert Furtado

Though muddy, ramshackle, and only beginning to assume its architectural identity, Evergreen Brick Works is nevertheless ripe for metaphor. Built in a defunct Toronto brickyard on the Don Valley network of ravines, the Brick Works was brought back to life when Evergreen began stewarding the land in 1991. Since then, through careful adaptive reuse, over 95 per cent of the brickyard’s 16 remaining structures have been converted and will once again contribute to Toronto’s development.  This time the development is radically new, but no less fundamental. In its way, the Brick Works intends to rebuild Toronto and serve as a paradigm-shifting model for sustainable urban development worldwide..

The words “Toronto Brick Company” stamped into a brick of one building at the Brick Works are some of the only the remnants of the third and last major brick company to occupy the site since 1880.

Ravines like bricks are equally well made for metaphor. On a floodplain between Mud Creek and the Don River, amid a variety of waterways and river valleys left behind by the last Ice Age, the Brick Works, like the ravine system itself, unites eclectic forces. The people, ideas and ambitions gathered around the project are so staggering in their diversity that it can be difficult to describe the overall idea in a word.

Perhaps, local author Robert Fulford’s notion brings us closer to what the Brick Works could mean, certainly to what it hopes to accomplish, in the coming years. Lamenting Toronto’s inability to recognize the richness of its own unique topography, he wished the presence of ravines would “force Torontonians to redraw the mental picture of the place they live.”

The germ of the idea for bringing together bricks and ravines began with seed planting. The Gardening and Greening portfolio is one of four projects tucked into a larger, more ambitious undertaking. Alongside Innovation and Discovery, Food and Community, and Natural and Cultural Heritage, according to Evergreen, these projects are designed to educate visitors about the origins of food, plant life cycles and food preparation through gardening, kitchen and eating experiences.

Native plant cultivation is among the centre’s more unique community-building strategies and part of the Gardening and Greening portfolio. The program aims to spread plant species that have originated locally, as these are best adapted to the local climate and soil, and have the best chance of increasing biodiversity, creating a local seed source, and connecting green spaces that provide migration corridors for urban wildlife. The Native Plant Database includes, by region, species of wild flower, trees and shrubs which have grown and evolved in North America since European settlement. The program offers practical benefits to consumers as well. Native plants, which can thrive in poor conditions, don’t require watering or chemical fertilizers to survive. Growing native plants can also stop the spread of unwanted, invasive species.

After a decade of seed planting on the site, in the fall of 2002, Evergreen submitted an unsolicited proposal to the City of Toronto to redevelop the Industrial Pad at the Brick Works into a large-scale native plant nursery. Two years later, it concluded a Memorandum of Understanding, unanimously approved by City Council, which gave Evergreen the option to lease the Industrial Pad for $1 per year for 21 years, once the organization had raised the funds needed for the adaptive reuse of the buildings.

Gardening and greening initiatives are now supported in those buildings by an infrastructure of locavore-dream-proportions: food gardens, indoor and outdoor teaching kitchens, bake ovens, greenhouses, composting, beehives, food and gardening education space, multi-purpose gardening rooms, Marché community pavilions and the local Farmers’ Market.

From earth to plate, part of the locavore dream, is topped off at March é —a 14,000 square foot garden nursery and sustainable food hub, which will house food businesses year-round, whetting Toronto’s appetite for accessible local fare. MarchÈ will be important to the Brick Work’s self-sustaining operating model. By May, 2010, when the centre is scheduled to open, Evergreen will have sunk roughly 75 per cent of the money raised through its capital campaign – over $41 million dollars – into site redevelopment.

This kind of inspiration and change will be the Brick Work’s primary operating mechanism.

If the space is going to transform the city on a large scale, its visitors will have to translate educational interactions with the facility into sustainable food action in their homes, backyards and gardens.

The food gardens, located in the Children’s Nature Playground, Welcome Court, the Garden Centre, and in various nooks and crannies throughout the site will be used to teach gardening methods suitable for urban spaces, such as trellising, espalier, permaculture and companion planting. The indoor and outdoor teaching kitchens will house cooking and food preparation demonstrations for schools. Approximately two classrooms are expected to pass through per day, as well as summer camps, families and the public.

There’s no telling whether or not Evergreen Brick Works will satisfy Fulford’s wish to redraw the mental picture of the place we live. What mark it leaves on Toronto and the psychology of its residents, of course, remains to be seen. But there’s promise in the city’s willingness to support an experimental project of such size and breadth. Already, with its doors shut and buildings still fenced off, the Brick Works has taught us that a deep love of the land does not imply a rejection of the city.

Evergreen Brick Works Farmers’ Market

The Farmers’ Market first opened to the public in 2006, and has since become de rigueur among the city’s celebrity chefs, as well as its environmentally conscious shoppers. Brad Long, the Brick Works’ resident chef, is no slouch in the kitchen himself. He appeared on the Food Network’s hit TV series Restaurant Makeover, and made sustainable food both elegant and profitable at Veritas, his former King Street restaurant.

Robert Furtado, a Toronto-based writer, blogs for Toronto Life.