With the Royal Ontario Museum's lease on the iconic, domed building running out in 2014, the race is on to save one of Toronto's most recognizable—and sorely under-utilized—structures the from radical redevelopment.
In the 27 years it was open to the public, the McLaughlin Planetarium played host to five million people. Now, two years before time runs out for the dome nestled behind the Royal Ontario Museum, a new five-person working group named Planetarium Toronto is in the early stages of trying to save it.
“We need this, need this, need this in Toronto,” says Philip John Kuntz, Planetarium Toronto’s founder. “Every single day, there’s a reference to some new development in space, be it a killer asteroid or a plunging satellite or a mass solar ejection, or the threat of aliens and new worlds. This is a library of the sky.”
The planetarium, once “a proud appendage of the ROM,” as the Star‘s Martin Knelman put it, closed to the public in October 1995 and, by 2008, it was being used as storage and office space for the museum. When the University of Toronto purchased the McLaughlin grounds from the ROM in January 2009, they leased the space back to the museum until March 31, 2014. By then, the idea was, they’d have some plan for what to do with it. But as of right now, says U of T spokesperson Laurie Stephens, they still don’t: There’s no developer, and no plan beyond eventually using the grounds “for academic and institutional purposes.” (That, at least, means no 46-storey condo tower like the one featured in the ROM’s widely panned 2005 plans for the site. Or, as Stephens puts it, “institutional and academic purposes are not expected to include residential uses for non-students.”)
“What we need to do,” says Sarah Thomson, another member of the Planetarium Toronto working group, “is use the planetarium as something that allows us to dream. That’s where I see the planetarium going. Not the kind of old-style wow-you-go-look-at-stars. It could be so much more than that if we had the proper programming—if we really put some of our creative minds in Toronto on it.”
If Planetarium Toronto can’t prevent the McLaughlin Planetarium from being demolished, they’ll push for one like it elsewhere in the city. In the mid-2000s, Kuntz was a board member of the GeoSpace Planetarium group (chaired by CBC Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald), which had a $150-million plan to “build a greenhouse facility on the waterfront that houses a star theatre alongside commercial retail space,” according to a Globe and Mail article from the time. But those plans were fizzling by the time the McLaughlin changed hands, and, given how complicated moving the ROM out once and for all will be, 2012 could well be the decisive year for the Planetarium. ”If we’re going to be moved out by the end of March 2014,” explains Brian McCrady, the ROM’s Vice-President of Facilities, “we will start packing in 2013. At a minimum, it’s about a year process to package, catalogue and move [everything].” The ROM is waiting on U of T’s word.
For Planetarium Toronto, the timing couldn’t be better. Says Kuntz: “We just want to come in and say, ‘Well look, before tearing the place down, look what we can do with this.’”
PLANETARIUM TORONTO’S MEMBERS
Philip John Kuntz, artist. In 2007, he built SpaceTime Star Theatre on the ceiling of the Bloor Cinema, a 1,600 square-foot map of 7,000 stars. He has been working actively since 1997 (“almost daily, one way or another,” he says) to get something like the McLaughlin back open in Toronto.
Sarah Thomson, former mayoral and MPP candidate and current Women’s Post publisher. Of the McLaughlin Planetarium, she says: “it’s an amazing asset to the city and we’d hate to see it just torn down or something like that.”
Bob Barnet, architect.
Frederick Peters, OCAD instructor and PhD candidate in political science at York University.
Richard Bornet, president of IT company Enterprise Software Testing Systems.
