The making of Toronto’s University Ave.
Canada Life Building and its weather beacon lit the way for transformation downtown
Exactly 64 years ago, long before condos and office towers clogged the skyline, you could have looked up and seen the weather forecast flashing on a downtown spire.
It was Aug. 9, 1951, when the beacon atop the Canada Life building on University Ave. at Queen St. began emitting colour-coded light patterns to indicate clear, cloudy, rain or snow, and the rise and fall of temperatures.
Throwing the switch on the country’s only visual weather-forecasting beacon was big news in itself.
“We feel it should create a real interest besides being a useful service to the people of the city,” company president E.C. Gill modestly told the Toronto Daily Star. But of greater significance was the then 20-yearold building on which the beacon was erected.
At 15 storeys, the impressive structure was the city’s tallest when it was built in 1931. (Footnote for trivia hounds: You’d have to stack 5 1⁄ of
2 the 98-metre building-with-beacon to reach the height of the CN Tower.)
But the Canada Life building still stands as a monument to what might have been had the stock market crash of 1929 not occurred.
The city had grand plans for a massive makeover of the downtown core centred around University Ave. But when the cold hand of austerity gripped the piggy bank, the privately financed Canada Life building became one of the few landmarks to actually materialize.
Construction began in 1929 on what was to be the new head office of the Canada Life Assurance Co., the country’s first life-insurance firm, founded in 1846.
Citizens gaped at the largest hole in the city after some of its most fashionable homes were demolished and excavation started along 750 feet of both University Ave. and Simcoe St.
Completed in 18 months, construction provided much-needed jobs for tradesmen during the first years of the Great Depression. And how uplifting that must have been as daring workers, perched high above the city, took in unprecedented views.
An optimistic Toronto Daily Star trumpeted the new build as “another note in (the city’s) remarkable growth” that underlined the need to expand the principal north-south boulevard.
An editorial in late1930 paid tribute to the firm “for erecting a beautiful structure of splendid proportions” that would lend dignity to the area.
Indeed, while other belts tightened, the insurance company had pulled out all the stops, hiring top architects Sproatt and Rolph to design a stunning beaux-arts building. Tuscan columns of Georgian granite, goldleaf-adorned ceilings, travertine and marble floors: the place oozed opulence.
Move-in was no less impressive as an army of 200 took 40 hours to relocate lock, stock and money bags from Canada Life’s old headquarters at Bay and King Sts. Three Brinks trucks accompanied by cops on motorcycles spirited several million dollars in policy holders’ funds into the new vaults early Sunday morning.
When 700 employees sat at their desks in the “palatial building” the next day, it concluded what the Star called “one of the greatest overnight treks this city has ever seen.”
But the building would welcome few new neighbours for many years after city planners got cold feet about spending $19 million (roughly $263 million in today’s funds) on a visionary project that would have transformed University Ave. into a beautified, well-oiled hub for cars and commerce.
The plan was to improve downtown and ease traffic congestion by widening and extending several streets and building two new roads radiating from a large traffic roundabout at present-day University Ave. and Richmond St. Called Vimy Circle, the round intersection would be anchored by a war memorial. University Ave. itself was to widen and extend south to Front St. and the newly built Union Station and Royal York Hotel.
The Star supported the concept, comparing the Vimy Circle roundabout to the one “in front of Buckingham Palace” and calling it a magnet for tourists. Residents who object, the paper said, “do so ignorantly.”
But the project had citizens’ heads spinning, as illustrated in a lengthy discussion in the Star that sounds all too familiar today.
“I can see where this is going to be a great thing for the motor car owner, for it is going to get him into and out of the centre of the city far more rapidly and with less congestion. But what about the poor streetcar user?” said one transit rider. Meanwhile, another commuter was riding a different train as she railed against newly fashionable lower hemlines that dragged the “germladen filth of the streets” into the house.
“You can’t keep a long skirt clean getting on or off a streetcar unless you hold it up almost knee high,” fumed the Star reader in her letter to the editor.
Fashion styles aside, works commissioner R.C. Harris, one of the main drivers of the downtown transformation, maintained “the city had everything to gain and nothing to lose” from the big-scale improvements.
“This plan is being built for the next 100 years,” he told a council meeting in November 1929.
Councillors, understandably, engaged in marathon debates and much hand-wringing over how to pay for it.
The plan became a political hot potato in the 1930 election, which saw supporter mayor Sam McBride defeated by critic Bert Wemp, who argued the $19 million could be better spent.
That year, approval was given to a vastly scaled-back plan that eliminated Vimy Circle but allowed the extension of University Ave. at a price tag that was roughly one-quarter of the original project.
Eventually, neighbours arrived for the Canada Life Building that lit the way.
“The city had everything to gain and nothing to lose.” R.C. HARRIS WORKS COMMISSIONER ON BIG-SCALE IMPROVEMENTS