The Bentway

The Bentway takes its name from the concrete "bents," the repeated column-and-beam support structures that hold up the elevated Gardiner Expressway, and turns the roughly 1.75 kilometres of previously unused space beneath them into public parkland. The project was made possible by a $25-million donation from philanthropists Judy and Wilmot Matthews, at the time one of the largest private gifts ever made to a Canadian public space project, and opened its first sections to the public in January 2018.

A year-round use for dead space

Rather than treating the highway overhead as a liability, the Bentway's designers built programming specifically suited to the sheltered, weatherproof space it created, including a winter skating trail that makes use of the underpass's cover from snow and rain. The park connects several neighbourhoods along the waterfront that the elevated highway had previously cut off from one another, and it has become a widely cited example of adaptive reuse of highway infrastructure, turning what was purely a structural liability into deliberately programmed civic space.

Sources

• The Bentway — About
• Wikipedia — The Bentway

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