TORONTO STAR, May 18, 2000

There's No Future in Destroying Our Past

Toronto's heritage policy is a thing of the past.

By CHRISTOPHER HUME
Toronto Star Architecture Critic

While cities around the world are rushing to preserve what's left of their architectural history, we're still handing ours over to developers.
      That was made painfully clear yet again when city council voted last week to allow Oxford Properties to demolish the Concourse Building, one of a tiny handful of Art Deco towers that remains in Toronto.
      Oxford hopes to construct a 41-storey slab on the site at 100 Adelaide St. W. In return, it will be expected to retain minimal aspects of the original structure - the mosaic over the main entrance and other parts of the front facade - but it amounts to little more than cheap facadism.
      But that's enough for the majority of city councillors, most of whom were content to capitulate one more time to their development buddies.
      Developers, unfortunately, are rarely city-builders. In fairness, Oxford Properties is no different from any number of dinosaur developers whose corporate arteries have been blocked for a dangerously long time.
      The truth, however, is that Oxford isn't to blame. Its behaviour is true to form - motivated largely by profit fever and untroubled by any larger awareness, it carries on regardless. Its responsibility goes no further than its shareholders.

A similar travesty is being staged nearby at the northeast corner of Queen and Yonge streets, where Olympia & York is getting ready to wreck the elegant Bank of Montreal building. Designed in 1909 by Darling & Pearson, a distinguished Toronto firm that produced numerous banks, it is exuberantly decorated and richly urban.
      According to a report prepared by Heritage Toronto, the bank is "an excellent example of the Renaissance Revival style, derived from Italian Renaissance prototypes and popular for commercial buildings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries."
      As with the Concourse Building, elements of the facade will be incorporated into O&Y's 18-storey structure. The entire interior will be gutted, though the vaulted ceiling will be rebuilt. The bank was designated in 1988.

Aside from developers, who is responsible? First, there's city council, which is unwilling to stand up for Toronto and refuses to exercise leadership. But more significantly, there's Queen's Park, which has failed to enact serious preservation legislation.
      The Ontario Heritage Act allows such projects to be delayed, but not stopped. It's no coincidence that despite the boom, Toronto has not held its appeal among tourists and conventioneers. Visitors are coming here in smaller numbers and The City That Works is becoming The City That Needs Work.
      Other recent architectural losses include the University Theatre on Bloor St., the Anglo-Canada Insurance Company on St. Clair Ave. W., and the Union Carbide Building on Eglinton Ave.

In the case of the 1929 Concourse Building,
the prospect of demolition seems an
especially cruel fate...

By contrast, from London to Barcelona, New York to Savannah, urban and regional governments have awakened to the enormous value - social, artistic and economic - of urban preservation. Those cities have opted to keep old buildings, to refurbish and give them new life. A building designated in Barcelona, for instance, cannot be altered with written permission from civic authorities.
      In Manhattan, architectural preservation has had the full legal weight of the U.S. Supreme Court behind it since it ruled the city could stop demolition of Grand Central Terminal in 1978.
      And it's not as if Toronto had much to save in the first place; we've been tearing down our past for so long, precious little remains intact. Here, the Oxford approach has been the rule, not the exception.
      Perhaps that's what makes this city such a useful movie location. It's so generic, so profoundly anonymous, it could literally be anywhere.
      Like so many local developers, Oxford feels more comfortable starting with a blank slate. What it prefers is an empty site - in other words, a parking lot. There's no shortage of those. Indeed, we suffer from an over-abundance of parking lots. Let's give one to Oxford.
      Why does any building in Toronto need to be torn down as long as the downtown is filled with dozens of gaping asphalt carparks?
      In the case of the 1929 Concourse Building, the prospect of demolition seems an especially cruel fate, given that other developers have expressed huge interest in buying and fully restoring the 16-storey structure. That would mean refurbishing the marvellous modernistic lobby long buried beneath acres of beige, cleaning the mosaic by J.E.H. MacDonald, best known as a member of the Group of Seven, and the extensive exterior decoration.
      When the Concourse was designed by the Toronto firm of Baldwin & Greene, architecture possessed more expressive potential than today. Few local towers communicate a more exciting sense of the future than this one.
      The future may not have turned out as well as expected, but that's no reason to destroy a building.