Tag Archives: heritage designation
Does a 34-storey building belong in the Distillery District?
Patty Winsa – Toronto Star
The proposal to transform a historic six-storey Gooderham and Worts building into a boutique hotel in the Distillery District isn’t what has city planners shaking their heads.
It’s the 27-storey condo above it.
Designed by famed Flatiron architect David Roberts Jr. and built in 1875, the red brick building on the northeast corner of Mill and Trinity Sts. is protected by a heritage designation and zoning that restricts any additions above its 16.5 metre height. The combined hotel-condo would be 34 storeys.
“There are going to be issues around the height, adding on and introducing a tall building at this location,” said Gregg Lintern, director of community planning for Toronto and East York district. “When you’re inside the Distillery and look north, the perspective you see is a heritage district and this would be at the top.”
But he says the city isn’t against a hotel. “The issue isn’t the use. It’s how it gets executed.”
A staff report outlining issues with the proposal will go to Toronto and East York Community Council in early January with a recommendation for a community meeting Jan. 23.
Mathew Rosenblatt and John Berman, two of four partners in Cityscape Development, which co-owns the Distillery with Dundee Realty, say they need the sale of condos to offset the costs of transforming the historic rack house into a boutique hotel. The storage house still has its original dirt floor and six storeys of timber racks that once held 22,000 barrels of aging whisky.
For years, Cityscape tried to find hotel investors, constraining proposals to meet the zoning requirements. About a year ago, they started putting together a new plan that included a six-storey hotel with 27 floors of condos above and an amenity floor in between.
“Everyone has come to the realization that it’s a very challenging project,” said Rosenblatt, noting it’s much more expensive to repurpose and restore a heritage structure than to build a new one.
Rosenblatt and Berman say the hotel is not only a strategic decision in a neighbourhood under-serviced by hotels, but critical to the long-term vision of the Distillery.
“The historic precinct has been restored, but it needs life day and night. The hotel will add life and energy,” said Berman.
“This is important to the Distillery’s long-term success as well. Look at how the Gansevoort has reinvigorated (New York’s) Meatpacking neighbourhood,” he said, referring to the luxury boutique hotel which opened in 2004.
Gansevoort is also the hotelier most closely associated with the Distillery project. Berman said they have had extensive talks with the company, but “haven’t made any firm commitments.”
The hotel is one of Cityscape’s last developments in the Victorian-era Distillery District that dates back to 1832, the year author Charles Dickens turned 20. The company purchased the precinct in 2001 and has since restored 44 buildings.
Future plans call for a new five-storey structure at the site of the south parking lot, which will move underground.
Part of the problem is that development of the Mill St. property was never included in a master plan for the area created in the 1990s, before the current owners purchased it, said Lintern. In the meantime, a certain amount of highrise development has been allowed in exchange for the heritage conservation and revitalization undertaken by Cityscape.
Lintern acknowledged “it’s a difficult building to repurpose without gutting it or adding height. But is this the right way to do it? We need to have a community meeting about it.”
For his part, Rosenblatt argues that the hotel proposal should be considered on the basis of “planning and what’s better for the Distillery,” which attracts around 2 million visits a year.
About 200,000 people recently came through the Lowe’s Christmas market.
“It’s not Black Creek Pioneer Village,” said Rosenblatt. “This is where people live, work and visit. If these areas are encased and preserved, who will want to go and see them?”
A plan to build a 34 story hotel/condo in the Distillery district is drawing fire.
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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.
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Heritage struggle over Dawlish Ave. home
Paola Loriggio – Open File
Another Lawrence Park home is fuelling the debate on property rights after city officials put it on a heritage list against the owners’ wishes.
City council voted July 6 to include 79 Dawlish Ave. in Toronto’s inventory of heritage properties, effectively mandating staff to keep tabs on the house and lot.
But the owners, Leonid and Milena Estrah, want to demolish the 1928 two-storey house, which was deemed structurally unstable last month by the engineering firm in charge of the inspection. They have argued the building’s history was never mentioned when they bought the property, which is assessed at $1,600,500, according to city records.
Theirs is the second house in the neighbourhood to shine a spotlight on the sometimes murky regulations governing land use, and the struggle when city, community and private interests clash.
Another property on the same street, 209 Dawlish, has become the focus of a neighbourhood campaign to stop the owners from building on land that many consider part of a ravine.
Councillor Cliff Jenkins (Ward 25, Don Valley West) was one of the strongest voices pushing to list 79 Dawlish on the heritage inventory. He says the change isn’t as restrictive as an official heritage designation under the Ontario Heritage Act, which would prevent any alteration of the building.
As it is, the Estrahs can still modify the house, provided heritage staff approve their plans, Jenkins said in a phone interview. And there’s a chance the pair will be able to go through with the demolition, the councillor said.
“I don’t want to presume to know the outcome,” he said. “If they can come to an agreement (with staff), they can go ahead.”
When contacted by OpenFile, homeowner Milena Estrah declined to comment.
Some have argued it is unfair to list the property after the owners have bought it, because it reduces its development potential. But the provincial law doesn’t take that into account, Jenkins said.
“I believe the law should be changed to provide some compensation in exchange for being stewards of a heritage property” in the form of property tax rebates or caps, he said.
With its steeply pitched roof, sash windows and asymmetrical massing, the house combines elements from Georgian and Cottage styles, architectural historian Marta O’Brien said this spring in a letter to council.
“In my experience, the design of this house is unique in our city,” O’Brien said. “In addition, it was designed and lived in by a very important 20th-century Toronto architect, Forsey Pemberton Page.”
Page and his partners designed many homes in Lawrence Park. His firm, Page and Steele, was behind many of the city’s landmark buildings, such as Benvenuto Place and the Queen Elizabeth Building.
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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
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Bye-bye, big smoke
By Michael Murray – Openfile.ca
Dupont is probably not the first street in Toronto where people dream of buying a home. Cars rather than people thrive there, and the street has a broken and hard feel to it, like the callused knuckles of a fist. An accidental ode to generations past, it cuts through the city like an industrial scar, coming to a kind of exclamation point at Lansdowne Ave., where the Canada Foundry smokestack stood as a totem to big-city industry.
Once one of the tallest structures in Canada, the smokestack rose more than 200 feet. It served the interests of the Canada Foundry Co., an enterprise that made the blunt instruments of an emerging nation — railway tracks, bridge parts, staircases and such. It’s probably not overly dramatic to recognize that this foundry was emblematic of movement and progress, and the smokestack, always billowing, was not merely a symbol but the functioning instrument of industry.
Suggesting a limitless future, it seemed a permanent expression of optimism and confidence that towered above the still-developing metropolis like a parent over a child. It was reassuring, suggesting that we were always moving forward and that there was no problem that couldn’t be solved — we’d just keep shovelling stuff into the furnace, and from that we would sculpt our universe.
Well, the foundry smokestack is no more.
In spite of a heritage designation and protests within the community that its demolition would release dangerous toxins into the environment, the smokestack built in 1903 was torn down earlier this summer.
The former industrial site is gradually being transformed into a residential development. Rows of townhouses have been built nearby and a locomotive factory has been converted to condominium lofts.
Maintaining the iconic brick smokestack would have been expensive; as well, a special road would have had to have been built around it, cutting into planned parkland, and so the past came down.
There was an inescapable melancholy in watching the destruction of the smokestack. Cranes and dumpsters dominated the abandoned and decaying structures that were scattered about fields of dirt and debris.
Hydro towers hummed ominously in the background and the only person around, apart from the crane operator, was a heavy foreman who sat in the shade at a makeshift table drinking from his Thermos.
On this hot summer day, only about 30 feet of the tower remained, with likely another 20 feet underground, and there was a palpable sense of loss in watching the prosaic work unfold.
The crane sprayed streams of water onto the tower as it pulled down the bricks, in an attempt to keep clouds of debris from forming. This seemed oddly considerate, as if an attempt to keep the smokestack cool beneath the sun, thus easing the passage of the massive structure as it fell into dust.
The enforced optimism of the residential development was on display on a billboard that had been erected on the site. Happily advertising the proposed city park that was to comprise a portion of the foundry property, an illustration depicted, against a backdrop of shiny townhomes, a man walking a dog and some kids playing on a jungle gym. An affordable suburban ideal right in the city! A paradise of sorts, at least for some.
It’s a façade, of course, meant to conjure the spirit of the meat-and-potatoes foundry district without actually generating any meat and potatoes.
They’re removing everything that authentically characterized that area, content to reflect back into the community a visual echo of the past. The heavy industry that built the city now gives way, crumbling into a bulldozing present where real estate is king.
Toronto, the Big Smoke, is no more.
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Contact the Jeffrey Team for more information - 416-388-1960
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