[LINK] "The little hub that could"

[rfmcdonald]

I've good reason to be acquainted with the midtown neighbourhood of Yonge and Eglinton that Shawn Micallef describes in his latest column. He has it bang on.

[T]his intersection is still a contentious place as it continues to grow tall and dense. The giant memorials to the recent growth spurt are the Minto twin towers — nobody seems to call them by their James Bondish official names, Quantum North and Quantum South, perhaps because even the as-advertised lifestyles of occupants can’t live up to that much fiction. The anti-tower crowd point to them as the neighbourhood killer. In an article in the National Post back in February, Councillor Michael Walker called them “monsters” and said “you have to feel for the residents of Yonge-Eglinton” — a strange sentiment because he represents a lot of folks that seem quite happy living tall and, perhaps more importantly, the area already went vertical over 40 years ago.

During the growth of the 1960s, many residents were all for it. An archival collection of letters to City of Toronto planners, in response to the 1964 plan that called for the blocks surrounding the main intersection to be high-density apartments, were largely positive, lending an admittedly weird feeling to reading them, conditioned as we are by decades of consultation where the predominant word is “no.” True, some of the homeowners were likely for the plan because they could sell their property at top price. Today there are only four or five blocks of apartments that transition easily to solid single family homes, typical of many Toronto neighbourhoods.

Wandering the surrounding blocks today is to travel through a kind of modern wonderland. Low-rise and (very) high-rise buildings with names like “Lord Elgin,” “Imperial Manor,” “The Rosemount,” “Place de Soleil” and “Americana” capture both the optimistic modern thinking of the day while still being connected to our colonial past. Two magnificent 1970s concrete buildings found behind the rather ugly and austere RioCan buildings on the northwest side of Yonge and Eglinton — the RioCan Centre is in the midst of renovation plans — are called “Berkshire House” and “Canterbury House,” that, like the Foundation House before them, have much in common with brutalist buildings in Britain that have traditional “house” names.

Lingering by the fountains in the Anne Johnston Courtyard between the two Minto towers — named after the local city councillor who gave her political life up to defending Toronto’s right to skyscrapers — you can easily forget there are many storeys above. Done right, tall buildings aren’t wastelands at the bottom, and aren’t an eyesore on the horizon, but what is wasted is the opportunity to put tall buildings where they belong: in the middle of a major hub. That the Minto towers are shorter than they should be is one of Toronto’s latest failures to recognize that it is a vertical city. The latest failure in this long, drawn-out “fight” that was over when Trudeaumania began are the abandoned TTC yards adjacent to Canada Square, where a proposed development was what tweaked the perpetual kink in Councillor Walker’s neck back in February. Tall buildings are coming. Why not let them be as tall as they can be, and let Yonge and Eglinton be the metropolitan centre it’s been turning itself into for decades.