City council told now-former Yonge-Dundas Square won’t have signs designating it as Sankofa Square for months at least
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The square with no name won’t get new signs any time soon.
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City council learned Wednesday that the space at the southeast corner of Yonge and Dundas Sts. won’t have signs designating it as Sankofa Square for months at least – and the old ones are in the trash.
“The new physical signage for the square is still in development” and production has not yet begun, Julian Sleath, general manager of Sankofa Square, wrote in a document submitted to council. That document came in response to an administrative inquiry from Councillor Stephen Holyday.
“A public consultation took place from September to November last year to inform the new design,” Sleath wrote. “Designs are expected to be presented at a Sankofa Square board meeting on May 15 for their approval.”
Sleath said his expectation is final signs will be above the public space by the fall.
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Minor signage denoting the space as Sankofa Square has been in place downtown since last summer, such as overhead signs on the PATH system. It’s unclear what any logo or branding for Sankofa might look like, but a recent community study found roughly a quarter of respondents thought red, blue or white would be good colours.
The square has a budget of $105,000 to replace the signs that carried the venue’s old name, Yonge-Dundas Square. A little more than $10,000 of that has been spent to take down the old signs.
Bad news for anyone thinking the easiest solution would be to put those signs back up: Sleath said they’ve been thrown out.
“The previous lettering was removed from the supporting structures in May 2024,” he wrote. “The letters were in very poor condition and it was determined by the sign contractor that they were not worth keeping for reuse either at the square or any other location and were disposed of.”
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Sleath’s written response was received by council on Wednesday morning without discussion.
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A year ago, a statement by city manager Paul Johnson, in response to another inquiry by Holyday, said the signs were expected to be in place by the end of 2024.
Johnson said there was an estimated $300,000 to $600,000 in “additional potential costs associated with renaming the square,” such as branding, programming and DEI initiatives.
City council’s decision to rename Yonge-Dundas Square to Sankofa, which comes from a Ghanaian word that refers to a reflection upon the past, has drawn fierce criticism. A poll last year by Liaison Strategies found 72% of respondents disapproved of the renaming with just 16% in favour. Meanwhile, an online petition urging city hall to change course had drawn more than 30,000 signatures.
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Chris Moise, the councillor for the ward that includes the Yonge-Dundas intersection and a member of the Sankofa Square board, previously told the Toronto Sun that some of those critics need to be educated about the importance of the change and some of the others “will get it when they see it.”
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As the Toronto Sun recently reported, the committee tasked with coming up with a new name for Yonge-Dundas Square repeatedly spoke about consulting the public about the change – something that ultimately never took place.
Mayor Olivia Chow attended a meeting of that committee for the first time in December 2023, just days before the Sankofa renaming was announced at city council.
At that meeting, concerns were expressed that the board hadn’t been looped in. Shortly after the change was made public, that board’s leadership quit – and Moise told the Toronto Sun they never spoke to him about their exit.
The renaming took place while a company called Sponsorship Canada held a contract to find sponsorship deals for the square. That contract expired last year and a city document said the “implications for any revenue agreements, like sponsorship,” represented a loss of about $1 million.
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