Seferian Design Group undoes years of additions and urban encroachment at a historic green space. 

By Zach Mortice

Waterloo Park was established in 1893 in Waterloo, Ontario, to serve as a pastoral retreat from city life, but in the intervening century, much of the city infiltrated the park. Located near the central business district and adjacent to two universities, the park was increasingly being taken over by extraneous service buildings and parking lots, especially surrounding one of its signature attractions: the nine-acre Silver Lake, a stormwater retention pond that once hosted swimmers leaping off diving platforms and anglers casting for speckled trout.

Brad Smith, ASLA, a senior landscape architect at Seferian Design Group (SDG), called the park’s previous state “cold and sterile,” and in 2018 it fell to his firm, alongside engineers at WalterFedy, to develop a plan to deurbanize the park and reestablish its sylvan experience.

Getting to the most accessible sections of the lakefront required crossing broad swaths of concrete and hardscape. “The spaces were very segregated, like an old house,” says Caroline Amyot, a senior project engineer for the City of Waterloo, who worked on the project. From the lakefront northward, a 3,600-square-foot splash pad at the water’s edge dominated the site. A large washroom and mechanical building, as well as a park shelter building, blocked views to the lake, culminating in a parking lot.

SDG’s plan removed four buildings and radically shrunk the splash pad to fit within a narrow strip of water features. An oval promenade leading to the lake is divided into four lawns, with three water features leading to Silver Lake on a gradually sloping, accessible path. The water features terminate in a sculptural tree-shaped fountain with misting nozzles and ground jets. Dramatically reducing the splash pad was a way to “give that space back to the public for four seasons of the year,” says Anna lee Sangster, the manager of parkland, capital projects, and stewardship for the city.

Smith says there’s approximately 25 percent less hardscape than previously. A thin line of bioswales on the southern edge of the new parking lot, planted with red oak, aster, and milkweed, further softens the remaining hardscape. Another part of deurbanizing the park was clearing the lake itself of the city’s detritus. The park restoration added a sediment forebay to filter out accumulated matter and removed piles of sediment that were peeking above the surface. To balance active uses on the lake’s north end, the southern edge is more naturalized, planted with dogwood, serviceberry, and sumac and lined with a riprap shore and boardwalk.

The park restoration was completed in June 2023, and since then, it’s regained some of the pastoral calm that expanses of concrete had formerly blotted out. “It really doesn’t matter how busy it is or what time of day it is,” Sangster says. “There’s a sense of peace that comes over you when you’re visiting the shoreline.”