Peter Street Basin Master Plan

Peter Street Basin is a large (about 60m long) trapezoid-shaped concrete pool connected to Lake Ontario. It was abandoned, and filled with so much garbage that the water was often not even visible under the layers of garbage, with its ownership being as murky as its waters. It is unclear who actually owns it, despite it being part of a marked park that consists almost solely of the Basin itself. Peter Street Basin is surrounded by luxury rental apartments facing what was a garbage dump rife with the terrible stench of dead rats, rotting raccoon corpses, condoms, tampons, etc., and was also a dumping ground for discarded appliances. We undertook a 3-year long project to clean up the Basin, removing thousands of pounds of garbage and cleaning the water to the point where it now meets safe swimming water-quality standards by more than a factor of ten. We propose “MoBase” = Mobility Basin = Base for accessibility, research, and teaching, including paddleboard rentals, and an outdoor teaching and research lab that we call the “TeachBeach”. It is our intent that MoBase will serve as a role-model for freshwater stewardship, advocacy, and outreach to the other Great Lakes and from Atlantic to Pacific coasts and beyond. We envision MoBase as the latest addition to other water-based entities located within a 150m (500ft) radius (20 seconds on-foot) providing a “campus” of safety and accessibiity we name Queens Quay Mobility corridor/campus/cluster/base...  (abbrev. “MoQuay”).

This article appeared in Mersivity/Waterhci-2025, December Edition, on pages 11-20.