Toronto's Biidaasige Park: Light, Water and Memory
- Jul 27
- 9 min read
Updated: Jul 29
Ten new acres.
Two decades of vision.
One island reborn.
On July 24, 2026, the eastern edge of Toronto changed shape once again. Ten new acres of Biidaasige Park opened along the city's waterfront, extending a stretch of reclaimed shoreline that, only a few years ago, was scrap yards, rail lines and fenced-off industrial land. Today it is a landscape of paddling coves, wildflower meadows and open-air sculpture, sitting on an island that did not exist a decade ago.
The opening is more than a ribbon-cutting. It is the latest chapter in one of North America's most ambitious waterfront transformations. This project treats flood protection, ecology, art and Indigenous placekeeping not as separate line items but as a single, connected design idea. Government ministers, the Mayor of Toronto and Chief Margaret Sault of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation stood together to mark the milestone, a fitting image for a park built, from its very first sketch, on partnership.
Every great park needs patience, and Biidaasige has had it in abundance. Landscape architecture studio Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates has led the design since the earliest planning stages, nearly twenty years ago, shepherding the project from concept through construction. That kind of timeline is almost unheard of in public landscape design, and it shows in the layered, unhurried quality of the finished spaces.
The park sits on Ookwemin Minising, a new island created as part of the Port Lands Flood Protection project, a $1.4 billion tri-government undertaking shared by the Government of Canada, the Province of Ontario and the City of Toronto. The engineering behind it is enormous: 174 hectares, or roughly 430 acres, of the city are now protected from extreme flooding, including existing neighbourhoods like South Riverdale and Leslieville. Yet none of that infrastructure announces itself. It simply becomes ground for a park to stand on.
With this expansion, Biidaasige now totals around 60 acres, with five more still to open in future phases. When finished, the former rail yard will reshape the city's identity and become a global symbol of what civic ambition can build. Toronto's version tells a quieter, more layered story, one where infrastructure, ecology and culture were designed together rather than bolted on afterward.
"Our government has been a consistent partner in the redevelopment of the Port Lands, and today marks another exciting milestone for Toronto’s waterfront. Residents and visitors now have even more opportunities to enjoy this extraordinary public space. We are proud to be investing over $465 million into the Port Lands Flood Protection (PLFP) project to protect communities, restore natural spaces and create vibrant places where people can connect with nature and one another.” – The Honourable Julie Dabrusin, Minister of the Environment, Climate Change and Nature and Member of Parliament for Toronto – Danforth.
Rather than erasing the site's working past, the design keeps it in view. The Atlas Crane, a 300-ton marine cargo crane installed in 1961 and long since decommissioned, still stands over the new western section, a hulking piece of industrial machinery now framed as a landmark rather than a leftover. Nearby, fragments of the old Marine Terminal 35 building have been folded into the landscape, and Old Fire Hall 30 has been kept for community programming rather than demolished. Nothing here pretends the Port Lands were always beautiful. The design lets their working history sit alongside the new.
That honesty extends to how people are invited to use the water itself. Canoe Cove, a sheltered paddling course with a pebble landing, gives non-motorized boats a gentle point of entry to Lake Ontario, something the industrial shoreline never allowed. A 3,000-person event lawn provides room for concerts, markets and simple picnicking on the grass. And a new 250-metre stretch of the Water's Edge Promenade extends the walking route along the shore, leading up to a promontory where the land lifts just enough to open a full, sweeping view across the inner harbour to the downtown skyline.
According to Waterfront Toronto's chief planning and design officer, the new western section was deliberately designed to offer a different kind of recreation than the park's first phase, one that complements rather than repeats what already exists. It is a small but telling detail: even at this scale, the design team was thinking about texture and variety, not just square footage.
“Today marks another major milestone in the transformation of Toronto’s waterfront. What was once industrial land is now becoming one of the most ambitious waterfront revitalization projects in North America. People can paddle along the shoreline, enjoy public art, connect with nature and experience the city from an entirely new perspective. Together with our federal, provincial and Indigenous partners, we are building not only a world-class park, but complete communities with new homes, jobs and public spaces that will benefit generations to come.” – Olivia Chow, Mayor of Toronto.
The most quietly radical part of Biidaasige Park is how deeply Indigenous knowledge and authorship run through it, not as a finishing touch. Still, the entire design was built on that foundation. The park's own name reflects that. Biidaasige, pronounced "bee-daw-si-geh," means "sunlight shining toward us." The island it sits on, Ookwemin Minising, pronounced "oh-kway-min min-ih-sing," means "place of the black cherry trees." Both were gifted through an Indigenous-led naming circle convened by the City of Toronto, a process that shaped the identity of the park long before construction began.
That collaboration continues throughout the landscape itself. A Fire Holder and a set of Teaching Signifier Sturgeon Stones, designed by artist Solomon King together with Brook McIlroy, are embedded directly into the park's pathways and gathering spaces. Two Row Architect contributed Directional Compasses and Marker Trees that help orient visitors while nodding to older ways of reading the land, and interpretive signage developed with NVision Insight Group tells the site's Indigenous past and present in visitors' own words rather than a museum plaque's. The Drum, a permanent structure built for community gathering, ceremony and celebration, anchors much of this work, alongside plantings of sacred and medicinal species chosen in direct consultation with Indigenous partners.
None of this reads as decoration layered onto a finished design. It reads as the design itself, shaped over years of relationship-building between Waterfront Toronto, the City and Indigenous rights holders, Elders and knowledge keepers. Few large public parks anywhere have made that kind of collaboration so structurally central to the finished place.
"Biidaasige Park is more than a beautiful new gathering place; it is a reflection of what can be achieved when we work together to honour our Treaties, the land, the water, and the stories that have always belonged here. This park is located on Toronto Purchase Treaty lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit. We are proud to have contributed our knowledge, history, and teachings throughout the development of Biidaasige Park, and we hope that everyone who visits will gain a deeper appreciation for the history of this place and the importance of protecting and restoring the natural world for future generations." – Margaret Sault, Chief of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.
Running through the length of the park is the Lassonde Art Trail, a four-kilometre open-air gallery that now holds fifteen permanent and rotating installations, with two more arriving this fall. Its founders have described the ambition behind it simply: an art experience anyone can walk straight into, with no tickets and no doors. That idea is easy to state and hard to build, but Biidaasige Park makes it feel effortless.
The new western section alone adds seven works. British artist Ryan Gander contributes a series of sculptures that appear to emerge from massive blocks of armourstone, each modelled on a timekeeping device from a different era, a quiet meditation on human measurement of time set against the site's far older glacial history. Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka's flagpole sculptures send a school of fish streaming through the air, modelled on species returning to the restored Don River alongside the invasive carp now found in the lake, and inspired by traditional Japanese koinobori streamers. Lisa Hirmer's Lodestar takes the form of a mirrored, text-covered marker, its polished surface reflecting the changing landscape around it as its words trace the site's past, present and possible future.
Virginia Overton offers something gentler: a working weathervane wrapped in an ornamental juniper, a tribute to a tree species native to Ontario and now newly planted throughout the park. And along the harbour-facing promenade, Hank Willis Thomas's two sculptures, shaped like an oversized speech bubble and thought bubble, invite visitors to step inside a frame of the city skyline literally. This fall will bring two further, highly anticipated additions: permanent sculptures by Cree artist Kent Monkman and by Monira Al Qadiri, adding still more voices to a trail already global in scope.
“From the beginning, we imagined an art experience people could simply walk through— no tickets, no doors. With the Lassonde Art Trail now running throughout the remarkable new landscape of Biidaasige Park, that vision is finally whole: sculpture in open conversation with water, nature, and city, free for everyone to enjoy." – Pierre Lassonde, Founder, Lassonde Art Trail Foundation and Julie Lassonde, Chair, Lassonde Art Trail Foundation.
Beneath the art and infrastructure, Biidaasige Park is also a large-scale ecological experiment, and an early success by most measures. Across the wider site, more than one million plants and roughly 5,000 trees have gone into the ground, restoring wetlands, naturalized shorelines and fish habitat where none had existed in a century. The Don River itself has been given an entirely new, naturalized mouth, a one-kilometre stretch now known as the Don Greenway, replacing a straightened industrial channel with something closer to what the river once was.
The results are already visible. Early ecological monitoring has recorded increased bird and pollinator activity across the site, including the return of Great Blue Herons and Razorbills, species not commonly seen on this stretch of shoreline in generations. Native fish, turtles and waterfowl are following. It is a reminder that ecological restoration, done properly, is itself a form of design, one measured not in square footage but in which species choose to come back.
The formal opening on July 24 brought an unusually wide circle of leadership together on the same stretch of shoreline: federal Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin, Member of Parliament Chi Nguyen, Ontario's Acting Infrastructure Minister Todd McCarthy, Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow, Councillor Paula Fletcher, and Chief Margaret Sault of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. It was Chief Sault's remarks that gave the day its centre of gravity, speaking to the honouring of treaties, land, water and the stories that have always belonged to this place, and expressing hope that everyone who visits will come away with a deeper appreciation for the site's history and the importance of protecting it for the generations still to come.
That spirit was never going to be confined to a single afternoon of speeches. It is built into the park's bones: the ceremonial fire pit near the entrance to the new section, designed by Indigenous artist Solomon King, exists specifically to host Indigenous fire-keeping and ceremony when needed, while doubling as an everyday gathering spot the rest of the time. The permanent Drum structure serves the same dual purpose elsewhere in the park. These are not backdrops for a single event; they are working spaces meant to hold ceremony, gathering and celebration for as long as the park stands.
The celebration itself carried on well beyond the ribbon-cutting. Toronto opened the weekend of July 25 and 26 to free public programming across the new section, including guided walking tours exploring the Indigenous leadership and environmental innovation behind the park's transformation, alongside Indigenous cultural workshops, hands-on art-making and paddling activities on Canoe Cove. Free shuttles ran between the park and Evergreen Brick Works to make the site easy to reach. It turned what might have been a brief civic photo opportunity into an open invitation for the whole city to walk the ground being dedicated, a rare instance of a park's opening ceremony extending its welcome for two full days rather than one.
“Completing the Port Lands Flood Protection project work, opening Biidaasige Park and the new mouth of the Don River has marked a turning point for the city’s relationship with the lake. We have now moved from setting the stage for revitalization to bringing the next wave to life. People can now experience one of North America's most ambitious waterfront transformations firsthand—from new trails, public art and gathering spaces to restored natural habitats and access to the water. Toronto’s eastern waterfront is no longer a promise on paper; it is a place taking shape in real time, with new parks, new connections, and future neighbourhoods.” – George Zegarac, President and CEO, Waterfront Toronto.
