The real thing is moving downtown
Bottler abandoning Thorncliffe Park HQ
Entering the Coca-cola Canada headquarters on Overlea Blvd. in Thorncliffe Park, it doesn’t take much to imagine scenes from TV’S Mad Men being filmed there.
You can easily picture dapper ’60s ad man Don Draper striding across the front lobby’s terrazzo floor and admiring the classic wood panelling as he smiles at the receptionist and looks for an ashtray in which to butt out his cigarette. You can also see him making his pitch in the upstairs boardroom, with its vast conference table and walls lined with Norman Rockwell prints.
There are no ashtrays these days, of course. And at least one of the Coke bottles lining the lobby’s wall might have struck Don’s sensibilities as peculiarly futuristic. For the most part, however, the building is as representative of its time as Toronto City Hall, which opened the same year.
“It is one of the best remaining examples in Toronto of a suburban corporate headquarters, which was a new and important building type during the postwar period,” says Robert Moffatt of Moriyama & Teshima Architects.
“It’s a classic, clean-lined modernist design, executed with high-quality materials and workmanship, and immaculately maintained in original condition.”
When Coke opened its doors in Thorncliffe Park on July 22, 1965, the Mathers & Halenby-designed office building was emblematic of the city’s shifting, suburban, automobile-era dynamic. With the company planning to move downtown by early 2013, the building’s future status is uncertain. The bottling side of the operation migrated to Brampton a decade ago.
The headquarters relocation is part of what the company calls its “Live Positively” emphasis, a response to the stated desire of employees to walk, bicycle or take public transportation to work. The new digs, a three-storey addition to the Toronto Sun building on King St. E., will provide bike racks and showering facilities, as well as other amenities.
“As great as this community is, it is more limited in terms of access to the subway and the GO train,” says human resources vice-president Tova White. “The new facility will also have a more open concept, with lots of natural light coming in.” What it might or might not have is artist Walter Yarwood’s signature bronze sculptural tower of interlocking Coke bottles, an example of Warhol-esque pop art in both the literal and figurative sense. “We are doing research to find out whether it belongs to the community or it belongs to (Coca-cola),” says White. “It is obviously an iconic piece that was created especially for this building, so it will be entrusted in some way to either the community or our new facility.” Either way, the building is worth preserving, says Michael Mcclelland of ERA Architects, a firm that specializes in heritage preservation and restoration. “There are a lot of very interesting postwar buildings,” Mcclelland says. “It’s possible we might lose a lot of them before we even notice it. “This is a spectacular building. When you’re looking at buildings that have been designated for preservation elsewhere in the city, this one would stand the test. It warrants being valued as a heritage building.”