Let’s keep Old City Hall — and build on it

Just before noon Monday, Toronto city councillor Janet Davis exited a city hall committee room where our elected councillors had been trying their best to stifle the ridiculous notion of the Old City Hall Mall.

“Phew. We put that one back in the bottle, for now,” she said, rolling her eyes.

Oh, we are not talking about a mall in the sense of a, well, ah, mall — y’know, like the Eaton Centre next door, but, y’know, the “highest and best use for Old City Hall would be conversion to a retail centre that contains a mix of food service, leisure, event and civic uses,” according to the staff report that created the kerfuffle.

The same report recommends city council remove a clause that reserved the inner courtyard segment of the building for a museum. The removal would, y’know, give the real-estate guys more flexibility in finding a suitable tenant to run the mall that is not a mall.

Granted, not even the city’s realestate division, looking through dollar-green lenses, would suggest tearing down the building. Torontonians fought that battle and the Friends of Old City Hall saved it from demolition to make way for the Easton Centre. In 1989 it was named a historic site by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada.

But there’s more than one way to destroy a landmark. Subsume its civic and public purposes with filthy lucre and before long the contaminants overpower the essence of the place, rendering it obsolete.

The recently restored building, matching the beauty of Queen’s Park and Casa Loma and too-few such structures in our city, is the kind of treasure even a Philistine could cherish, given the necessary indoctrination and exposure to its charms.

Hence, the Urban Barbarian from the northwest (figure it out) grudgingly acknowledged the “beautiful building” to the government management committee Monday. Then he spoiled it all with, “It’s a little too rich to have (only) a museum there. We have to see what it could get on the open market . . .”

Wisely, the committee shut down the nonsense and directed staff to seek out the potential for a museum and other civic and public uses for the treasured site when the provincial courts leave by 2023.

City council approved the construction in 1884 after an international architectural competition. It would take 15 years of normal Toronto wrangling and construction before it opened in September 1899 and ushered in the 20th century as the largest municipal building in North America. Mayor John Shaw wondered out loud why humans spend large sums of money on great buildings:

“Great buildings symbolize a people’s deeds and aspirations . . . Where no such monuments are to be found the mental and moral natures of the people have not been above the faculties of the beasts.”

Inspired, local architects started agitating for civic improvements, and when a huge fire destroyed much of the central business district in 1904, their efforts spawned a “City Beautiful” campaign.

Civic parsimony — otherwise known as Toronto cheap — scuttled the efforts to create a grand boulevard from Union Station, running roughly between Bay and University and spilling into a grand civic square at Queen St. The First World War didn’t help either.

More than a century later, citizens sitting on the remade Nathan Phillips Square, the Peace Garden relocated, can’t help but be moved by how old and new city halls play off each other.

The Old City Hall, its sculpted façade restored to its glory, is a breathtaking backdrop to Toronto’s favourite meeting place.

Instead of looking to denude, if not demean, Old City Hall, an enterprising, confident city might seek out ways to further enhance the precinct.

Why not acquire the Bell building, just north of Old City Hall, with a long-term vision of integrating that into a Civic Campus?

Instead of constantly beating back the threat of Big Commerce, represented by the retail giant that is the Eaton Centre, push Big Civic east and north to form an even mightier fortress and protection of the civic realm.

Toronto is blessed with world-class urban planners, architects, museum specialists, cultural connoisseurs and the attendant expertise needed to manage such a process.

Wish someone would slip that kind of thinking into the mix of madness that swirls around city hall every day.

A city bureaucrat, looking to maximize the city’s real-estate holdings, got citizens questioning their own hearing and sanity this past week. We need others looking to maximize the city’s cultural heritage; sharpen its vision.

Old City Hall reminds us of an exquisite past. New city hall is our brilliant nod to modernism. We could imagine something futuristic to complete a virtuous civic campus, north from Queen and Bay. Royson James usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Email: rjames@thestar.ca