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Ireland Park: Arrival Point

Toronto’s history does not reveal itself willingly. The city’s steep ravines, carved over millennia by coursing water, fall away suddenly below street level and so escape the notice of the untutored eye. Man has seized upon nature’s cue, putting in place tracks and constructions that follow a similar clandestine psychogeography. Look around corners and beneath towers in Toronto, and you will find surprises and places of meaning.

Ireland Park, located less than a hundred metres from the Porter Airlines terminal, at the foot of Bathurst Street across from Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, is one such place. Walking east along the water and away from the terminal parking lot, past the old offices and disused silos of the Canada Malting company, one encounters a massive wall of stratified Kilkenny limestone. Step through the entranceway in the wall, or along the waterside path that runs around it, and Ireland Park appears. It is a small sanctuary that features fl at walkways of stone extending into a grassy corner, where fi ve sculpted-bronze figures face the city.

Ireland Park is the context for The Arrival, an installation by the renowned Dublin sculptor Rowan Gillespie that remembers the arrival of steamers and barges that landed in Toronto in 1847, carrying some 38,000 enfeebled immigrants fleeing Ireland’s Great Famine. The small gem of a park was conceived by the Torontonian Robert G. Kearns, an insurance adviser who migrated from Dublin in 1979, and designed by the architecture fi rm of his brother, Jonathan Kearns, who preceded him in 1975. A circular column of glass blocks, mimicking the silos behind it, acts as a beacon and lights up at night. The imposing wall, built by three Toronto-based Irish stonemasons, is made of 14 stout, irregular columns. Their exterior is rough, but in the narrow gaps between them, the stone faces are polished and migrants’ names have been chiselled in as they have been discovered—cargo in the wall’s unintended suggestion of the prow of a ship. Six hundred and seventy-five names have been engraved to date. (Jonathan, whose firm, Kearns Mancini Architects, recently co-won Toronto’s Fort York Visitor Centre Design Competition, was actually inspired by the rocky cliffs of West Ireland, but is pleased with the ship comparison—as he is with the “magnificent exaggeration, by accident” of the overly heavy stone lintel that spans the wall’s entranceway, its supporting column reinforced with concealed steel rods after the contractor set the opening too wide.)

“Who was going to deal with the memory of the migrants, if not the descendants?” asked Robert, who, along with the board of directors of the Ireland Park Foundation, which oversaw the project, raised a total of $3.7 million for the park. The Ireland Fund of Canada provided a leading gift of $500,000, the Province of Ontario $200,000, Ottawa contributed $500,000 and—“incredibly, really”—the government of Ireland put in a further half million. (Its president, Mary McAleese, attended the opening of the park in June, 2007.) “Robert is very good at getting people to donate to causes,” said Jonathan wryly.

The idea for the park came about in 1996, when Robert Kearns met the sculptor Rowan Gillespie in Dublin. At the time, Gillespie was finishing Famine—a set of seven bronze figures and a dog that was later installed, marching towards the water, on Dublin’s Custom House Quay—the place that was the point of departure for so many. “No other Irish artist,” said Robert, “had actually created a sculpted form of men and women in the late stages of malnutrition. It was just too difficult to come to terms with.” Kearns returned to Toronto with plans to buy the sculptures but the proposal failed to gain the approval of the city’s public-art committee.

“Take the long view,” said Robert Kearns of the decade it took him to circumvent city bureaucracy and build the park. “We live in a society where we expect instant gratification, but if you are willing to work for ten or 15 years, then any challenge can be addressed.”

Robert, who is particularly pleased that he was able to rally all the fractious communities of Ireland behind his idea, realized that a park was the solution: sculptures within parks are not deemed public and are therefore not subject to the whims of a city committee. He convinced Gillespie to fashion new figures if he found a suitable context for a Famine memorial in Toronto. At the time, Philadelphia and Boston were in the process of selecting artists for similar projects but, said Gillespie, “I was more interested in the Canadian story.” Robert and Jonathan walked along the waterfront looking for a suitable location, one that would allow a quiet, contemplative experience with unobstructed views of the city skyline. Gillespie visited it in 2000 after the city had approved the site for the park and was sufficiently moved that he sculpted the upraised arms of the figure that has come to be known as the “Jubilant Man.” The Kearns brothers and Gillespie were in agreement: the park should be a sacred space consecrating history but also serving as a place of reflection for not just Irish, but all migrants.

“I’ve always imagined Ireland Park as a quiet, resonant place commemorating triumph over adversity,” said Robert.

“There are so many in Ireland who think of the Famine as a holocaust or an act of genocide,” said Gillespie. “Certainly there was gross neglect, but you only have to think of Dickensian London to see that such terrible poverty was occurring all over the place. I’ve always tried to be precise about what I am observing and to be respectful of the facts. My ‘Golden Rule,’ I suppose, is that there should never be any exaggeration, and so I don’t think one should be apportioning blame. I am quite explicitly trying to fashion the figures as they would have looked, while not making a political statement at all.”

Gillespie casts his bronzes himself rather than sending them to a foundry. His figures are slightly larger than life but eminently approachable. With loose clothes hanging off their emaciated frames and rope for belts, they appear drawn and tired; behind them, the suggestion of abundant grain in the tall silos emphasizes the shock that the New World must have presented to migrants from the Old. The figures’ subtly flaked, mottled appearance and reflective streaks add a guise of frailty and a rusty, yellowed patina to their “stretched” bodies and impart to their faces an astonishing complexity. The Jubilant Man seems tormented and exhausted—but also full of hope and wonder. Another man has his hands tightly clasped—in desperation or in gratitude? A pregnant woman, a young boy and a dead migrant curled up on his plinth complete the ensemble, but it is the Jubilant Man who is the linchpin of the monument—at once a memorial and a declaration of imminent possibility. Gillespie’s figures gaze toward the Toronto skyline as if looking to the future. And as the city’s skyscrapers vault towards the sky as if there was only ever a tomorrow, Toronto’s secret history circumambulates their foundation, refusing to be forgotten.

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