Toronto’s parks now come with their art

Most of what the atlas measures is what you would expect: tree canopy, paths, amenities, how a park connects to the streets around it. But a lot of the reason people go to a particular park is something a facilities list cannot count. It’s the Coupland canoe at Canoe Landing. It’s the bronze Berczy family in Berczy Park. It’s a statue you have walked past a hundred times and finally stopped to read.

So this week the atlas started showing public art on park pages.

What you’ll see

Open a park page and, if there’s art in it, you’ll find a new section called “Public art in this park.” Each work gets a card with the title, the artist, the year, what kind of work it is and what it’s made of, plus a photo when the City has one. Every card has a number, and that number matches a pin on the park map, so you can see where in the park each piece actually sits.

Canoe Landing is a good place to start. It has four Douglas Coupland works inside the park: Tom Thomson’s Canoe, Bobber Plaza, the Iceberg Benches and The Terry Fox Miracle Mile. Berczy Park has the William Berczy family sculpture, Luis Jacob’s Jacob’s Ladder and Derek Besant’s Flatiron mural. Queen’s Park has more than a dozen works in and around it, most of them statues of people Toronto decided were worth casting in bronze, from Edward VII to the poet Al Purdy.

The park with the most is Exhibition Place, with 37. Biidaasige Park, the new one in the Port Lands, has 19.

There’s also a second section, “Near the park,” for work within 30 metres of a park’s edge. That is there because of murals. A mural is almost never painted inside a park. It’s painted on the wall that faces one, and if you’re standing in the park looking at it, it’s part of the experience whether the property line agrees or not.

Where the art comes from

Two sources. The first is the City of Toronto’s Public Art dataset on the open data portal, which lists 459 works from the City’s own collection and its percent-for-public-art program. The second is OpenStreetMap, where volunteers have mapped another 534 artworks around the city, including a lot of what the City doesn’t own: provincial monuments, murals, memorials.

The two overlap a lot, and not neatly. The City calls something “The Sundial Folly” and OpenStreetMap calls it “Sundial Folly.” One says “Edward VII,” the other says “Equestrian Statue of Edward VII.” Matching those up so each work gets one card, not two, took more care than anything else in this feature. After merging there are 922 distinct works, and 442 of them land in or beside a park: 136 parks have art inside them and another 100 have art only nearby.

It isn’t perfect. A couple of works still show up twice because the two sources describe them in ways that share no useful words. And if you know of art that’s missing, the best fix is to add it to OpenStreetMap. It will show up here on the next data refresh.

The photos

The City’s photos live on toronto.ca. The simple approach would have been to load them from there, but that would hand the City the IP address of everyone who opens a park page, and our privacy page promises that doesn’t happen. So the photos come through the atlas’s own server instead, with nothing stored and every photo credited.

Art counts toward the score

We went back and forth on this, but landed on yes: art is a reason to visit a park, so it should count. It sits inside the Amenity Diversity part of the score. A work inside the park counts fully, a work nearby counts half, and the bonus levels off after about three works so that Exhibition Place doesn’t run away with it. It can only raise a score, never lower one. Across the city, 159 parks moved up by half a point or more.

Transit, by mode

The other change this week is to how transit is scored. Until now a bus stop counted the same as a subway entrance, which isn’t how anybody actually thinks about getting to a park. Now subway and GO stops count three times as much as a bus stop, and streetcar and LRT stops count twice as much.

We also fixed a quieter problem. OpenStreetMap often maps a single stop as several points: the platform, the pole, the shelter. The atlas was counting each of those separately, which meant a park next to one well-mapped stop could look better served than a park near three. Grouping those points brought 12,913 transit points down to 7,430 actual stops.

Put together, the biggest mover was Victoria Memorial Square, which went from 51.5 to 58.4.

The rules behind both changes are on the methodology page, and the sources are on the data sources page.

Go find some art in a park this weekend. And if your favourite piece isn’t on the map yet, now you know how to fix that.