CafeTO Main Street Pavilion Project

The CafeTO Main Street Pavilion Project grew out of our thinking on the Market Bridge Project, where we began to reimagine - post-COVID-19 pandemic - how we could rebalance the needs of transportation, the public realm, flexible retail, and community space on our main streets to create greater variety, vitality, and a sense of occurrence in our neighborhoods.

Like many cities during the pandemic, the City of Toronto developed a program for restaurants to occupy space normally reserved for street parking with outdoor dining areas, thus keeping people out of enclosed indoor spaces. The program became very popular, transforming neighborhoods and streetscapes into busy and dynamic destinations for residents, and it continues today as a permanent city program from April to November each year. However, the initial temporary nature of the intervention, with concrete construction barriers and orange warning cones, left much to be desired when the goal changed to creating a visually engaging and enduring environment.

We teamed up with a local business improvement association for one of the city’s primary high streets, along with an innovative Canadian timber block fabricator called GRIPBlock, to create prefabricated canopied street pavilion models to house retail and restaurant experiences, as well as to provide for various fitness and community uses, along the main streets. Studying street pavilions from some of the great avenues of the world, we developed a range of modular pavilions, including a one-storey pavilion with internal and street-facing seating, and a two-storey, double-decker bus–inspired pavilion, with an upper level that offers a good perch from which to watch city life pass by.

Similar in concept to the Market Bridge Project, the Main Street Pavilions Project reflects our belief that it is time to move beyond temporary interventions and create permanent, reimagined ways that residents of high-density neighborhoods can spend more of their daily lives out on our high streets, thereby strengthening community health and well-being.