[URBAN NOTE] "The rebirth of Howard Street"

[rfmcdonald]

I quite like Dave Leblanc's feature in The Globe and Mail describing efforts to revitalize the stretch of downtown Toronto where Parliament Street meets Bloor Street East.

Toronto, it is widely known, is a movie stand-in for Chicago, New York, and even Southern California (The Bridle Path has played Beverly Hills). Until recently, a long, triangular patch of land near Bloor and Parliament was a shoo-in for Detroit: a shabby Victorian stood alone in a weedy field, and, half a block away, a dead-end street sported a row of falling-down, boarded up semi-detached homes.

The area bounded by Sherbourne, Parliament, Howard and Bloor streets had been that way for two decades, give or take. In 2006, The Globe’s Alex Bozikovic wrote that the stub of Glen Rd. between the Bloor Street overpass and Howard Street was rife with hookers, drug dealers and crackheads. One home had a “large hole” in its roof; another had a tree taking root on its rotting, wet shingles. “I feel that the city has abandoned this neighbourhood,” one Glen Rd. resident told Mr. Bozikovic at the time.

It was a rare spot of neglect in an otherwise prosperous city. A few years later, however, Lanterra Developments handed heritage superheroes ERA Architects an assignment: Make something out of this.

“They wanted to do this development at the outer parts of the site, but they couldn’t really do anything with the centre just rotting,” remembers ERA’s Scott Weir, “so the first phase of this was ‘let’s make a beautiful district, whatever it takes to do that,’ so they did restoration on all of these almost un-repairable buildings.”

One of those “almost” dead buildings was the hulking, three-storey Victorian home that stood alone at 76 Howard St. After years of planning, Laurie McCulloch house movers pulled it, slowly, to its new digs at No. 28 just a few weeks ago. Hello, neighbours!