HERITAGE FOMENT
Is architectural form alone enough to make buildings worthy of being designated for preservation?
The first time I saw the Leaside commercial strip along Bayview Ave. back in 1995, it took me by surprise.
On a day trip to Toronto to drop off a friend at Seneca College at Finch and the 404, we headed downtown. It was the days before GPS and we didn’t have a map, so coming across a street named Bayview we assumed it would take us to the lake — a utility it only partially lives up to — where we could easily find downtown.
Passing through what seemed like endless suburban and semisuburban landscapes we came upon Leaside, just south of Eglinton Ave. Though far from downtown, it was an unexpected bit of pint-sized “downtown-ness” I had never heard of. Back then I was more familiar with Toronto’s tourist areas and places like Queen West where you could get all the used punk rock cassette tapes you needed. On Bayview, people were walking around, the stores were plentiful and the streetscape pleasant. All of it made Toronto seem even more interesting than it already was.
A big part of that strip of Bayview is now part of a Toronto Preservation Board report that recommends 258 midtown properties be added to the city’s Heritage Register. All of them are “Main Street” properties located along Eglinton Ave., Mount Pleasant Rd., Yonge St. and this strip of Bayview. It’s Phase 1 of a “batch list” and another list is expected in the coming months. In putting them on the register, the city would be protecting these properties from redevelopment.
Because much of the single family home neighbourhoods around these streets already prevent new development — part of what’s been called the “yellow belt” because of the colouring of these neighbourhoods on planning maps — it would mean the main streets are mostly off limits too, though this is where the city designates new growth. That’s an awful lot of Toronto immune to change, something other neighbourhoods will have to pick up the slack for.
Batch lists are controversial even without Toronto’s tremendous growth pressure. Some business owners were upset to learn they were part of the midtown batch this week. Usually buildings are considered for heritage designation on a case-by-case basis, ideally done long before there is any threat to the property, whether perceived or clear and present, but because Toronto’s Heritage Preservation Services department is, like the rest of the planning division, understaffed, the backlog of buildings to assess is considerable.
The result is panicked rushes to designate heritage when under imminent threat like we saw a year ago when a developer sent midnight bulldozers in to demolish an old industrial building in Mimico after heritage staff had hastily recommended designation. This midtown batch list was precipitated, in part, by the demolition earlier this year of a110-year-old Bank of Montreal building at Yonge and Roselawn Ave.
To get an idea of what this batch looks like, I spent the large part of a day this week walking all of it; it’s a lot of territory, around five kilometres of streetscape altogether. With a few exceptions, the buildings on the list are humble two-storey structures with retail on the main floor and either an apartment or office in a converted apartment on the second. It’s typical of so many of Toronto’s main streets built in the 1930s and 1940s.
Number 1489 is the first Bayview building on the list when arriving from the south and is currently home to a Subway restaurant. Next door is a nail spa. Further up is a gourmet food shop, convenience store, jewelry store and a gift shop. This kind of pattern continues on Bayview and the other streets. Sometimes nearly a whole block is on the list, other times it’s piecemeal, a few here and there, with newer, one-storey or old dowdy buildings in between not on the list of recommended properties. At Yonge and Eglinton there’s a large gap as the area around that intersection is already under quite a bit of redevelopment now, and much of this style of building has been replaced.
To an untrained or unsympathetic eye they’re fairly nondescript, everyday city buildings, and small ones at that. Spend some time lingering around them, walking the blocks and their charms reveal themselves: beautifully worn terrazzo tile, elegant if subtle brick work on the facades and elegant vintage Vitrolite glass panels that were once so plentiful here. What to make of these then? Are all of them worthy of heritage designation for their architectural form alone? Did anything of note ever happen in these buildings? Manifestos drawn up? Declarations declared? Births or deaths of note? Was the 234 billionth Meatball Marinara sub sold at the Bayview Subway? Another question is, why preserve so much of this particular era?
Nearly every city I’ve been to, whether Edinburgh or Los Angeles, I meet people who say their city is the “worst” for heritage preservation. Toronto is no different, but if too much of a city is designated it becomes a museum, and as nice as museums are, it’s hard to live in one. A city is a living, breathing, evolving thing, so there’s an innate tension between cities for people who live here now and preserving enough of what came before.
All these strips in question are quite pleasant, ideal urbanism perhaps, complete with cute restaurants and cafés, if uniformly upscale: there are few if any cheque cashing joints and the like. Those apartments on the second floors are also good. The problem is, these are major corridors and could have many more people living on them. On Yonge there’s a subway, and we’re spending billions on the Eglinton Crosstown, all to keep it at two storeys?
People keep moving to Toronto, and we share in the prosperity of being a city in demand. If these neighbourhoods are now off limits, other parts of the city — hero neighbourhoods such as Yonge and Eglinton itself — will have to shoulder an additional share of the growth burden while real estate values skyrocket in places under the preservation blanket.
While historic preservation is a good thing, it’s troubling if done for the wrong reasons. Let’s hope the “yellow belt” doesn’t also mean cowardly belt when it comes to Toronto’s future.