May 2, 2005

Coming Up - An Interview with Jerry Gain -
European Tour Expert and Urban Visionary

Human connections are strange sometimes. Through a friend of a friend I heard about Jerry, who lives just about 5 minutes from me. I heard that, through his company A Perfect Tour, he runs specialized unique tours to places like Tuscany and Greece, and I also heard that he is involved in an initiative to revitalize Toronto's Waterfront, something that the citizens of Toronto have waited decades for to come to fruition.

So I thought I'd track Jerry down to do an interview with him and sure enough, last week, he was able to squeeze in an hour long meeting with me in his packed appointment calendar.

Jerry filled me in on the fact that through his job with Air Canada he got connected with a travel agency for which he now runs a variety of unique tours to Europe, to places like France, Greece and Italy and that the tours are usually a week long, include unique luxury accommodation in private villas and contain a customized sight-seeing and activities program.

Travel is obviously part of Jerry's soul. But in addition to foreign countries, Jerry also loves his home town and as a single concerned private citizen, Jerry has put together a team of people to develop a multi-stage multi-decade revitalization plan for Toronto's Waterfront.

Personally, I sure hope that Toronto is going to move soon on a Waterfront Redevelopment Plan, since at present Toronto has huge tracts of former industrial land (the "Port Lands) by or close to the water that have been waiting for many years to be developed, and federal, provincial and municipal governments are still debating about what plan to pursue.

Other places like Barcelona, Chicago, San Francisco or even San Antonio, have also undertaken major waterfront redevelopments, and they have done some quite amazing things with their ocean/ lake/ riverfront areas, making their waterfront areas a major attraction for locals and tourists alike.

Unfortunately Toronto has had some lapses in this area and some of Toronto's downtown areas, particularly Harbourfront, have become concentrated areas of upscale residential highrise developments dominated by concrete condominium buildings, with little space dedicated to green zones or public recreational areas.

My personal hope is that Toronto will choose a wiser plan for redeveloping the Port Lands so that there is a healthy mix of residential, commercial and recreational land use that will make that part of the city more livable and more attractive as a destination for local citizens and visitors from out of town.

In this spirit and simply as a concerned private citizen, Jerry has put together a consortium of experts over the last few years, including architects, consulting engineers and graphic designers, who together have developed a multi-stage proposal that is supposed to redevelop Toronto's waterfront over several decades. Let's hear how Jerry came up with this idea, what it entails and how close it is to implementation.