How much longer for this hole in our heart?
Somebody please purchase this key piece of downtown real estate
In the summer of 2001, they started knocking down the six-storey Royal Bank headquarters on James Street South, next to the Pigott building.
Mayor Bob Morrow had been furious and said people should stand in front of the bulldozers. But the lowceilinged 1955 building was said to be too hard to renovate.
Andrea Horwath, then Ward 2 downtown councillor, took it in stride.
“There are times when you need to pull things down in order to rebuild,” she said at the time. “You have a hole in the streetscape and that’s never good … but I don’t want to jump to the conclusion that the hole will be there forever.”
It’s not forever yet. But 17 years is a long time.
Things are sparking downtown, at last. Beautiful old buildings being restored, condo towers going up, new restaurants everywhere.
But on James South between King and Main, heart of the core, we have a yawning asphalt-and-gravel plain. Half is surface parking, the other half a no-go zone — because when the Royal came down, a new bylaw said demolished buildings downtown can’t be replaced by parking lots.
The entire parcel, from the Pigott building to the CIBC tower, was owned then and still is by Yale Properties (also known as First Real), which owns Jackson Square, too. Yale didn’t want that land on James, but it did want the Royal as a tenant in the mall. So it agreed to buy the land from the bank.
At the time the Royal came down, Yale senior vice-president Gordon Parker said “the demolition of this building says more about the problem of retrofitting old buildings than it does about the problems of downtown Hamilton.”
Parker is still in that job. And he says the empty land may well stay that way for a while yet.
He agrees things are better downtown. At Jackson Square, retail vacancies are down. And there’s more mall traffic in off hours, with more people living downtown.
But there’s still subdued demand for conventional office space in the core. At Yale’s Stelco tower, there are 16 floors at least partially occupied. However, that leaves six big floors empty.
Yet if Yale were to build something on that empty James South land, office space would be the go-to option.
“We’re not residential developers,” Parker says.
He says the parcel is hindered “because it’s midblock. That site is going to be last to fill in.”
And that’s apparently not a problem for Yale.
“We have land across the country,” Parker says. “We don’t need to sell it … We’re patient investors.”
Downtown councillor Jason Farr rhymes off some projects in his ward — two 30-storey towers on the Kresge property, more towers on the Royal Connaught lot, another tower coming to King and Caroline. All are residential.
And you might soon hear about apartments rising on the city-owned parking lot at King and Bay. It’s all an effort, Farr says, “to cap and bond missing teeth all over downtown proper.”
That west side of the James South block was once anything but a dead zone. Wander through old photos and witness the bustle. Robinson’s department store was there. So was The Spectator.
David Blanchard has been a key player in the downtown commercial real estate scene for decades. He agrees with the Yale assessment that it would be hard to build an office tower on that empty land today, “unless you had a tenant who would take the whole building. I’ve been waiting for that to happen for 30 or 40 years.”
But he likes that long-empty parcel.
“It’s a great location,” Blanchard says, “at the centre of everything.”
He sees a hotel, or condos, or mixed use.
Hats off to Yale for being such a patient investor in Hamilton. But less patience would now be a good thing.
Yale — either alone or in partnership with an outfit that knows residential — should develop that promising parcel. Or sell it to someone who will.
Blanchard says a good price for the land would be $12 million. Somebody, somehow, please do the deal.
I’ve been waiting for that to happen for 30 or 40 years ... “It’s a great location at the centre of everything.” DAVID BLANCHARD