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Despite its beloved
familiarity, it's been easy to not take the Old
Mill all that seriously; even the whimsically, sentimentally generic
name plays an enigmatic peekaboo with history, though it's come to
lovingly adorn the entire neighbourhood where Bloor St crosses the
Humber. It's been nothing but an old mill --but more than that, it's
"The Old Mill", Toronto's archetypal romantic ruin. Like the Taj Mahal
or the Tower of Pisa, its eternal "pop object" status has come to
delightfully overshadow the actuality of how it came to be.
Close
to the site of the pioneering 1793 King's Mill --recently the subject
of an informative booklet by Carl Benn-- William Gamble's massive,
seven-storey 1848 flour mill was itself the third on its site; burnt
in 1881, it was left a hollow rubble shell, and set forth on its post-industrial
life as a romantic idyll on the banks of the Humber. Such "accidental"
idylls are not always permanent; but what cemented --should have cemented-- the
Old Mill's eternal iconic stature was when it was bought out by developer/enterpreneur
Robert Home Smith, who in 1914 built the adjacent Old Mill Tea Garden
and Restaurant (the core of the current complex) as a centerpiece
for his residential developments hereabouts.
The Home
Smith motto of "Angliae pars Anglia procul" --a little bit of England
far from England-- was evident not only in the bourgeois "Old English"
garden-suburb character of his neighbourhoods (most notably the pending
Heritage Conservation District of Kingsway Park), or in the half-timbered
medievalizing of the Tea Room (which also housed Home Smith's administration
office facilities), but in the conscious decision to retain Gamble's
mill as a ruin --a picturesque ruin, an objet among the riverbank willows,
a romantic park folly. In fact, this folly became the symbol of the
whole Home Smith enterprise-- it was the central feature in their logo.
Evidently, to "de-ruin" it, to adapt it into a working building, was
totally beside the point --and it still ought to be today, in spite
of the successful restaurant/inn adaptations of ruinous mill structures
in places such as Elora and Alton. Thanks to Home Smith, the Old Mill
was enshrined as a ruin; to build within it would be like building
within Fountains Abbey (itself a pre-existing ruin adopted as a picturesque
park folly).
Paradoxically,
the Old Mill's ruinous "uselessness" led over the years to neglect
and desultory treatment; at best, it was like the revered but senile
family patriarch kindly left to his corner of the dining table. For
a while, its walls were covered with ivy, which presumably did little
for the stonework's stability (though it was able to withstand calamities
like Hurricane Hazel). In later times it was "wired" for spotlighting
and prone to other eccentric highlighting, like the senile patriarch
"adorned", sometimes absurdly, for birthday and holiday snapshots.
It starred in films, in videos, in an Anne Murray TV special. Deeply
ingrained, it was loved --perhaps more by outsiders than by the flux
of management-- but not really maintained (inasmuch as a ruin can be
"maintained") or regarded all that seriously; in fact, the Old Mill
was somewhat taken for granted as the beloved old crock it was. And
oddly, despite its floodplain location (especially in the aftermath
of Hurricane Hazel, when much floodplain land fell into the jurisdiction
of the Conservation Authority), it continued in private hands, as
an adjunct of the Tea Room complex. At one point, close to when the
concrete apartment tower was erected on the bluff overhead (1960s),
it was even proposed to sweep the whole property clean, mill and all,
for further apartments --but a little community protest and new ownership
saw against that. Instead, the Tea Room and Restaurant was expanded
in the 70s into a small conference/community centre complex, continuing
quite successfully the "Old English" architectural theme (though not
without a little contemporary neo-Arts & Crafts/Prairie flair). The
Old Mill itself remained fundamentally untouched, but not necessarily
for eternity; there was some consideration toward adapting its structure
into a museum --an abortive and perhaps, at least for the earlier date
and dependent upon execution, more apropos precursor to the current
scheme.
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