someMidTowner
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Apparently, Studios of America (and I guess now the Hearn) is part-owned by Mario Cortelluci of Cortel Group: https://www.thestar.com/news/city_h...lls-hearn-waterfront-site-for-16-million.html
|
|
|
A derelict, contaminated industrial site that was hated by just about everybody when it was in operation but now a beloved heritage structure? Give me a break.
A derelict, contaminated industrial site that was hated by just about everybody when it was in operation but now a beloved heritage structure? Give me a break.
It was a coal fired generating station not Old City Hall. Now it's a contaminated site surrounded by a switchyard and a gas fired plant. Other than an industrial-looking, wide open movie set, what use is it as it stand? Artists studio? Give tours? Is it beloved for what it was, is or could be?
I won't argue the amount it was sold for, I have no idea what it is worth on the open market, but to do anything with it will require somebody to spend a pile-o-dough, and it will still be surrounded by the other facilities unless public money is spent to move them.
It's not the R C Harris plant - few public infrastructure buildings are.
Correct.It sounds like you’ve never been in there.
It sounds like you’ve never been in there.
What I find really interesting is the, for want of a better word, distain for commercial/industrial properties while they are still there. You will often see views that Redpath or Downsview or some rail yard shouldn't be there because it stands in the way of progress, condos, new urbanism or whatever.
Battersea...I'm sanguine on it structurally and and as a testament to glorious engineering at its inception, but be very careful using it as a comparator:If we're lucky they'll hold on to the site for a couple of decades and do something similar to London's Battersea Power Station.
... but I wouldn't bet on it.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/propert...r-station-desperate-times-or-still-desirable/Battersea Power Station: desperate times or still desirable?
UK Telegraph
Anna White
1 OCTOBER 2016 • 4:04PM
You would expect an unspoken comradery to exist between central London’s property developers. Not a bit of it. More than one has quietly branded the vast 500-acre construction site stretching from Battersea Power Station (BPS) in south-west London to Vauxhall as “the Nine Elms disease” after the area on the south bank of the Thames where it is found.
The main criticisms being fired from inside the industry are an oversupply of luxury homes flooding Zone One at a time of slowing demand and a disjointed approach to “placemaking” by the different building firms, from Barratt Homes to the Chinese construction company Wanda.
Commentators are also fixated with a lack of affordable housing and the sale of homes to overseas investors who won’t live there. There could also be a new enemy at the gate: last week, London Mayor Sadiq Khan launched an unprecedented inquiry into the extent of foreign money piling into the city’s housing market.
Amid the furore, Nine Elms has become the poster child of everything that is perceived to be wrong with the luxury central London property market, with the conversion of Battersea Power Station, an internationally cherished landmark, bearing the brunt of the crescendoing discontent.
The project, which was approved in 2010, has cost its Malaysian backers £9bn, including a contribution of £211m to the extension of the Northern Line which will bring two new tube stations to the area.
It is also of historic importance. The once crumbling power station, which was closed in 1983 and left uninhabitable apart from peregrine falcons living in the Doric chimneys, is now being transformed into a 42-acre miniature town.
In a meeting in the temporary visitors’ centre, surrounded by laser-cut perspex models of the site, Tincknell pours scorn on much of the speculation surrounding BPS, calling it “tosh” and “myth”. He also tackles the issue of falling sales.
Once completed, the site will deliver 4,353 new homes and, of those launched, 85pc have now been sold. Of phase one, or Circus West, which runs to the west of the power station, 75pc of the 865 homes were sold in the first week of the 2013 launch. There are 353 units in the power station itself, phase two, and again only “a few are left” – although exact numbers are not forthcoming.
Efforts are now being concentrated on selling the first half of phase three: Battersea Roof Gardens, designed by Norman Foster, of Gherkin fame, and Prospect Place. Of the 500 units on offer, two-thirds have been sold.[...]
Though, disdain from whom? Redpath's actually basked in 50s modern icondom for quite some time now--in its very name, Sugar Beach is a tribute to its presence. Likewise, re the hangars et al at Downsview in that there've been actual heritage guidelines in place (albeit inconsistently applied); and re rail yards, there's a reason why the roundhouse is still there next to Skydome.
And if such disdain is prevalent on UT, it might just reflect the fact of message-boarding skyscraper/development geeks who aren't all that conditioned t/w appreciating pre-existing conditions.
Yes, the rail spur going west to the former Toronto Cruise Terminal area at Cherry & Unwin does go through the site and yes the Ports Toronto people paid to have it repaired a couple of years ago and, yes there have been no trains actually using it for about 5 years. (Recently trains only use this spur as far as the Water Treatment Plant on Leslie and even that service is currently blocked as the new Post Office sorting building being erected Leslie blocks it and there is no sign of the 'promised' relocation of that part of the rail to run along Leslie itself.) I will not be surprised if the line is quietly abandoned.Does the sale impact the rail network? I recall seeing that the track from Lakeshore to the “port” goes through the power plant property.
https://urbantoronto.ca/forum/threa...l-lines.25310/#lg=_xfUid-6-1543305342&slide=0