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Ask Torontoist: What’s Happening With the TD Centre Cows?
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Reader Kathleen Anderson writes:
They’re gone. The big metal cows. When did that happen?
The big metal cows in question are the ones that, until recently, lounged on the lawn behind the Royal Trust Tower, in the TD Centre Plaza (77 King Street West). Don’t worry, they haven’t been turned into little bronze sculptures of skirt steaks and leather wallets. They’ve just moved temporarily to the lawn of the TD Waterhouse Tower, a little south across Wellington Street. Signs on the plaza lawn say (and TD Centre senior property manager David Hoffman confirms) that the move was made in order to protect the cows as Cadillac Fairview, who own TD Centre, complete their ongoing renovations of the property. The cows will be returned to the plaza once work is complete. This is not the first time they have been uprooted.
Collectively known as The Pasture, and sculpted by Joe Fafard, the seven cows were moved onto the plaza some time after originally being installed across the street, in 1985, next to the then–newly completed IBM Tower, now known as the TD Waterhouse Tower―which, not coincidentally, is where they are currently waiting out the renovations. The TD Waterhouse/Ex-IBM Tower, though separate from the plaza, is owned by Cadillac Fairview, and is considered part of TD Centre.
On the day of the great unveiling of both the cows and the IBM Tower on October 10, 1985, the Star extracted this quote from then–IBM chairman Lorne Lodge: “I think those cows will be the talk of the town. It’s the kind of art everybody can identify with and they make our little park such a peaceful place.”
John Bentley Mays, then an art and architecture critic for the Globe and Mail, wrote at least two columns effusively praising Fafard’s bronze herd. In describing the cows, Mays’s operative phrase was “gently humourous.” He was of the opinion that they were an appropriate, lighthearted counterpoint to the high seriousness of Mies van der Rohe’s stark black modernist towers and grey granite plaza.
In 1989, the Star’s Christopher Hume called the cows “marvelous bovines,” and “ideally placed.”
The critics liked the The Pasture, but, as Lodge correctly intuited, the sculpture’s popular appeal, rather than its art-world cachet, would end up being key to its success. John Warkentin, a professor of geography at York University, who just published a compendious book-length study of public art in Toronto, observes that Toronto’s love for the cows is a year-round phenomenon:
They are popular in all seasons. TV weathermen have used them for animating their forecasts; fashion models pose next to them; in summer people, usually children, climb on their backs, or lie on the grass beside them…In Toronto public relations photographs, the cows are increasingly used to represent the congenial side of the city.
The popular appeal of the cows might also have been key to their longevity. Another piece of artwork was installed at TD Centre at the same time as The Pasture: Al McWilliams’s The Ring―a relatively spare, not-even-gently humorous sculpture, which consisted of huge bronze slabs arranged as the name would suggest, with three large bronze chairs set at angles around them. It occupied a space on the plaza granite, in front of the TD Bank Tower. Mays was just as enthusiastic about The Ring in his columns as he was about The Pasture. Warkentin cites The Ring for special praise in his book.
The Ring was removed from the plaza in 2008. As with the The Pasture, this was a direct result of the plaza renovations―except The Ring‘s removal was permanent. It’s now in storage, and its fate is uncertain.
It may simply be that public artworks are harder to discard when they can be looked in the eyes.