Tag Archives: Darling & Pearson
On Toronto’s Yonge Street, a condo tower with a sensuous embrace
John Bentley Mays – Globe and Mail
In last Friday’s column, I described a condominium complex (Context King West) that will be ingeniously shoehorned into a complicated downtown Toronto location. The 60-storey edifice called Massey Tower is another challenge along the same lines: An infill project proposed for a tough, tight spot in the urban core.
The new building is slated (if the city goes along with the scheme that Gary Switzer’s MOD Developments Inc. has put forward) to rise at 197 Yonge St., across from Eaton Centre and just north of Queen Street. Fans and guardians of Hogtown’s historic architectural fabric will instantly recognize the address.
The becolumned, long-vacant bank standing there today is a significant relic of the classicism that flourished in our inner-city districts during the decade before the First World War. Fashioned by the Toronto firm of Darling & Pearson and raised in 1905, the staid temple is also a valuable trace, well worth saving, of the vogue for anti-modernist Beaux Arts styling among the city’s Edwardian elite.
Indeed, if Mr. Switzer’s plan is realized, the classical facade will be restored (by E.R.A. Architects), and given a new career as the principal entrance to the tower beyond. The intention is not, by the way, to spare a little fancy stonework from an otherwise useless building, then paste the salvage on something contemporary – a move that, to my mind, is preservationism run amok. In this case, the shallow four-storey office structure behind the bank’s decorated front will be refurbished and redeployed as a warren of studios for (the developer hopes) musical practice or some other cultural enterprise. This solution is probably the best we can expect under the circumstances.
These circumstances are determined by the crowded, very eccentric property Mr. Switzer owns. It includes, in addition to the bank, a small, derelict park, and is hemmed in by the loading dock of the building next door, the Victoria Street extension of the Elgin Theatre (another Edwardian landmark) and the rear of Massey Hall. Twisting through this dense chunk of city is a tiny system of laneways that provides vehicular access to the core of the block.
David Pontarini, founding partner of Hariri Pontarini Architects (and the designer of the similarly cramped Context King West), will sculpt the very tall, slender building Mr. Switzer wants to drop behind the bank. There is no room on the site for open-air parking. Cars will enter through the lane, be scooped up at grade by elevators, carried aloft and mechanically deposited into compartments on floors three through eight. In order to accommodate the old edifice immediately to the south, the foot of the new high-rise will stand clear of its garage entrance and loading area. And, in another neighbourly gesture, MOD is planning to give Massey Hall “the property interest they need to build their addition and renovate the Hall,” Mr. Switzer told me.
Along with its antiquarian Yonge Street entrance, Massey Tower has other features that promise to make it different from the usual soaring condo stacks in downtown Toronto. One is what happens in the park. In a bid to bring more retail activity to the east side of Yonge Street, Mr. Switzer has asked Mr. Pontarini to put an elegant glass pavilion into this gap in the streetscape. The transparent building will contain high-end shops, if all goes according to plan.
It’s hard to applaud this aspect of the project. Downtown development need not create new green spaces, but it surely shouldn’t eliminate old ones. Previous landlords, however, have allowed the little park to deteriorate into a muddy vacant lot. If there’s no determination to turn this private place into a public resource – and there doesn’t seem to be any – then perhaps the time has come for it to become a setting for interesting architecture. The park could have a worse fate. It could merely go into the future as the blighted spot it is today.
The most conspicuous facet of this proposal, however, is Mr. Pontarini’s romantic treatment of the tower’s exterior. There, rounded corners and undulating glazed balcony-fronts will mellow the cut of this big structure against the sky.
Massey Tower will not be the first place the architect has done something like this. While every tall-building designer is pressured by plain economics to produce yet another squared-off steel and concrete box, Mr. Pontarini has recently taken to modelling and carving the skins of his structurally conventional high-rises, generating sensuous, luxurious surfaces. We’ll have to wait and see if this strategy works here. But I’m guessing that Massey Tower will be the talented architect’s most coherent, aesthetically successful exercise of this kind so far, and another good example of artistic imagination turned loose on the hard-to-fill nooks and crannies in Toronto’s urban fabric.
—————————————————————————————————–
Contact the Jeffrey Team for more information – 416-388-1960
Laurin & Natalie Jeffrey are Toronto Realtors with Century 21 Regal Realty.
They did not write these articles, they just reproduce them here for people
who are interested in Toronto real estate. They do not work for any builders.
—————————————————————————————————–
Incoming search terms
Related posts:
- Uncovering the beauty under bird poop on Toronto’s Yonge Street Dave LeBlanc – Globe and Mail all him Mr. Yonge Street....
- Homebuyers rush to embrace GTA condo market Ten thousand is a lot. When you’re talking about condos,...
- Trendy Toronto tower a colourful addition to skyline The neighbourhood around King and Peter needs no introduction. Busy,...
- Construction begins on city’s tallest condo tower Construction of Toronto's tallest condo tower - Aura at College...
- Trump Opens Canada’s Tallest Condo Tower With $6 Million Toronto Suites The $500 million Trump tower is the first of three...
Uncovering the beauty under bird poop on Toronto’s Yonge Street
Dave LeBlanc – Globe and Mail
Call him Mr. Yonge Street.
Well, right now, call him Mr. Cautious: “Feel this floor right here,” says Gary Switzer of MOD Developments as he probes a section of warped, decaying floor with the toe of his shoe, “that feels like you could go right through.”
Illuminated by a sliver of sunlight pushing past dirty double-hung windows, Mr. Switzer stands proudly (and somewhat precariously) on the third floor of his company’s newest purchase, Darling & Pearson’s 1905 Bank of Commerce at 197-199 Yonge St.
In a few months, the bird-pooped but beautiful Beaux-Arts building – abandoned since 1987 – will become the sales office for the striking Massey Tower condominium. Once the proposed 60-storey tower is complete, a concierge will greet residents on the first floor of the bank, the second floor might house soundproof rehearsal rooms, and the ceiling between the third and fourth floors may come down to join the two, since the gloomy fourth is lit only by skylights.
But about that “Mr. Yonge Street” thing. While it may be too early to crown Mr. Switzer – Sam Sniderman, the current title holder, has only been in retirement for a little over a decade, after all – in three short years MOD is making an impact on the city’s most storied thoroughfare. Up the street at Yonge and St. Joseph, the company’s first project, FIVE, is under way with partner Graywood Developments. There, a row of heritage storefronts and a warehouse built by Rawlinson Cartage is being saved, put to good use as the retail component of a residential complex, and, not surprisingly, winning awards.
The Yonge and Queen site, while also a massive exercise in heritage restoration, is completely different; Mr. Switzer compares the insertion of a tall tower into the cramped space behind the bank to “micro-surgery.” Boxed in by the other heritage bank’s long rear end (an unoccupied E.J. Lennox building), the loading docks of the old Heintzman Piano building (HomeSense) and Elgin/Winter Garden theatres to the south, and Massey Hall to the north-east, this is no exaggeration: “This is going to cost an absolute fortune,” he laughs. “This is a lot more complicated than saving a façade or five Victorian stores; this is on the level of the Summerhill train station.”
Luckily, the features identified by the city as retention-worthy make sense to Mr. Switzer, who switches easily between his developer’s hardhat and the graduation cap he received from the University of Toronto’s school of architecture. Besides the ruins of a once-proud fireplace and a few partition walls, there isn’t much to consider on the third floor. Descending to the second, we find there isn’t much left in these old offices either – a neat 1950s mint-green sink a long-ago dentist washed up in, a few bare-bulbed wall sconces, and “creepy in a Blair Witch kind of way” peeling walls covered with graffiti – so it’s down one more flight to the first floor.
This is more like it! From floor to ceiling, there is much to savour. First, there’s the staircase that deposited us here: pink marble treads and risers are flanked by a sculpted metal baluster and carved wooden handrail. In the foyer under a small domed ceiling is a gorgeous mosaic tile floor medallion underneath multiple layers of brittle vinyl tile that Mr. Switzer chipped away one weekend until the old glue resisted: “I couldn’t stop,” he laughs. Behind that, there are the big original front doors and the massive Ionic columns outside. “To walk into a building through these columns, that’s what really makes this whole thing so amazing,” he says.
To the right of the foyer over a cluster of small offices, an ornate plaster ceiling sporting a recessed ellipse framed by egg-and-dart moulding and rhythmic modillions awaits repair (ERA Architects are on the case); the showstopper, however, is a rounded wooden pediment supported by two wooden Ionic columns that anchors a span of dentil moulding running the width of the building. Somehow, it has remained pristine.
Beyond the carved wood, however, there is nothing worth saving. At some point in time, the high-ceilinged, one-storey room was completely gutted, leaving only a tiny vintage water fountain and a locked safe.
This is good, since Mr. Switzer can have a clear conscience when this is razed for the Hariri Pontarini-designed condo tower. Had he purchased the bank next door (which wasn’t for sale anyway) he never could have done this, since its interior was fully restored by the city in 1992.
What will keep him up at nights, however, is the responsibility associated with this much heritage: “It’s a bit daunting, you know,” he says quietly. Brushing some dust off his coat, he reassures himself with the memory that, even at the tender age of 16 in 1970, he watched with disgust as the 1895 Temple Building came down. Our collective lack of enthusiasm for the city’s built heritage has bugged him ever since.
“What does it say about our city to have a building like this empty right on the main street?”
If this project is as successful as FIVE – and there’s every reason to suggest it will be – perhaps Mr. Switzer will turn yet another neglected piece of Yonge’s past into our future…and, along the way, earn the right to call himself Mr. Yonge Street.
—————————————————————————————————–
Contact the Jeffrey Team for more information – 416-388-1960
Laurin & Natalie Jeffrey are Toronto Realtors with Century 21 Regal Realty.
They did not write these articles, they just reproduce them here for people
who are interested in Toronto real estate. They do not work for any builders.
—————————————————————————————————–
Related posts:
- Chutzpah and change on St. Nicholas Street The Jesuit Fathers of Upper Canada Holding Corp. two years...
- Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like Yonge But if this stretch of Yonge demonstrates the failure of...
- Yonge Street defines Toronto’s best return on investment neighourhoods in 2007 Central core homes ‘first and foremost’ in market performance Unprecedented...
- Outdoor living a priority at Merton Yonge Condominiums The Davisville project from Cresford Developments is expected to appeal...
- Toronto Condos — Panache at Yonge and Eglinton From New Dream Homes and Condos Magaizne Yonge and Eglinton’s...
