I’ve been asked to write a bit of a backstory — after all, just how does one get into the “gondola” business?
Nothing less than a few crazy ideas and some random luck, I can assure you.
But generally the story goes something like this.
After finishing school in Chicago and attempting to enter a plummeting job market with a serious degree and a less than serious wish to dress up and plop down at a desk, I up and applied to a post graduate design program in Toronto. I got in and figured, cool, let’s go to Canada!
At the Institute without Boundaries one of our first projects was to figure out how to get more people to and involved with the Evergreen Brickworks, an abandoned brick factory turned community/tourist/sustainability center. At the time the site consisted mostly of a weekend farmers market and a grand vision. (Since then it has transformed into an incredible urban destination with youth and adult programs, a restaurant, a garden shop, an ice rink, a bike repair shop, offices, an auditorium, as well as trails and historical relics spread throughout).
So that was the task at hand. While most of our team focused on what to do on site, I took a stab at the transportation to the site. I was new to the city, had no car, and little idea how to get anywhere except by bike, foot, or transit. Because the Brickworks was located in the middle of a large valley with a highway running down the center, I felt options for getting to there were limited.
Now, I had ridden gondolas before … on mountains, but had never really seen a gondola in a city. That’s actually not completely true. I had ridden the old Madrid Teleferico once. I remembered it traveled from somewhere in the city, over a highway, and into a huge park that I otherwise would probably have never even known existed. It was cheap (i think), it was direct, and I saw the city from a totally new perspective. Basically, it was awesome.
So jumping forward. I was in school, back in Toronto, looking at this site in the city, with almost no way to access it except by an intermittent shuttle bus from the subway. I must have just blurted out “let’s use a gondola” during some meeting, then sort of melted away as I considered how ridiculous I must have looked in front of all my new classmates.
But looking around I knew some of them got it. Sure we’d not really seen one of these or heard of one used for this, but we were trying to be insightful and creative. So low and behold, the idea stuck. We figured … yeah, a gondola. I mean, why not a gondola?
I drew some lines on maps, then life took its course, and a year later a friend sent me the Toronto Star article with Steven’s image of a gondola running through the Don Valley and I knew that maybe, just maybe, there was some logic behind this crazy, ridiculous idea of cable transit in cities.
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