Old City Mall?
Grand building deserves better than shopping centre,
It just seems wrong.
To take a landmark civic monument like Old City Hall, which has served the people of Toronto as a place to conduct official government business pretty much continuously since 1899, first as the seat of municipal government and then as the home of the provincial courts, and turn it into a mall. Or, as the staff proposal the city’s Government Management Committee will consider next week puts it, “a retail centre that contains a mix of food service, leisure, event and civic uses.”
At first blush, standing at the corner there of Bay and Queen, it’s hard to see why anyone would say that “the highest and best use” of the building would be more retail space — at least not if the needs and wants of the people of the city are a criteria.
I mean, directly next door to the building is the Eaton Centre, the largest and busiest mall in the city. The space is above the underground PATH system, the world’s largest underground shopping complex.
A few blocks west along Queen you have one of the most famous shopping and entertainment strips in the city.
In other words, if you’re at Queen and Bay today, and you’re in the mood to put your credit card to use, you don’t lack options.
And the neighbourhood doesn’t lack public celebrations of commerce, either. Just to the northeast is Yonge and Dundas Square, a public space that has been consciously transformed over the past decade and a half into a civic monument to unapologetically crass commercialism. So we’ve already got that covered.
The building we call Old City Hall (Toronto’s fourth municipal headquarters), however, has always served as a different kind of monument — one to Toronto’s growth and ambition as a city.
When it was built in 1899 (after three years of design by E.J. Lennox and 11 years of construction), it was the largest building in Toronto and the largest municipal building in North America. Its grandeur extended even to the details: tiled mosaic floors and doorknobs embossed with the city’s coat of arms. It was built to serve a city whose population was about 200,000, but one that had been growing fast and was expected to grow even faster (as it did — the population doubled by 1911).
It was a physical representation of the seriousness of our civic purpose and the extent of our civic ambition. (It is one of those fun blips of history that seem symbolically important that R.C. Harris, the great city-building works commissioner who built the Bloor viaduct and much of Toronto’s sewer and transportation infrastructure, once lived with his family in an apartment in the city hall building as a young man.)
Today, its clock still looking out onto the square in front of our current city hall, Lennox’s ornate Romanesque Revival building continues to serve its grand purpose. And now that the Ontario Court system has made it clear they need to find a newer home for their justice pursuits, the city will need to find a new use for the grand old building.
But somehow a mall doesn’t feel like an appropriate evolution of the building’s tradition.
I suppose, on the other hand, that one virtue of malls is that people actually visit them. The place would continue to be used and open to the people of the city. It’s a better idea than a corporate office building or (God forbid) a condo conversion.
Heck, they took Maple Leaf Gardens, the hockey shrine that connected the pitiful team of recent decades to the legitimate glory of the past, and turned it into a grocery store. And as grocery stores go, it is nice. There’s a marking on the floor where centre ice used to be, that you can visit while you’re picking up a jar of pickles. It is less terrible than many nostalgic Leafs fans thought it might be.
But is it too much to ask that we consider aiming for something more reverent? The long-discussed plan to situate a city museum in Old City Hall, which is still included in the mall plan in an apparently scaled-back way, seems appropriate. Such a museum could be the dominant feature of the main floor public areas. And one imagines that there must be a municipal use for the office and meeting space sitting there adjacent to the current City Hall — it may be less modern than the city’s office space at Metro Hall, but it is closer to HQ and comes with a sense of history and gravitas that is hard to replace.
Putting the place back to work as a city municipal building wouldn’t draw the kind of revenue renting a portion of it to Walmart or Banana Republic would — an estimated $9.5 million a year. But how much is a civic landmark of Old City Hall’s stature worth to us, as a space of our own, that tells us something about who we are and how we got here? And perhaps, as we adapt it, tells us where we are going? Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire
There must be a municipal use for the building, considering that its gravitas is impossible to replicate