LowPolygon
Senior Member
i didn't know there was a synagogue on the site of the Pillage by the Grange...
quite a large and beautiful one at that:
old worker's housing on west side of street, south of OCA:
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In the late '70s OCA had the chance to buy the Brinks building ( the low modernist structure on the right of the synagogue photo ) and, foolishly, their Governing Council turned down the offer.
When I started at the College in '71, the east side of McCaul was mostly an open lot with a bit of rubble strewn about - Willage by the Ganges didn't appear for several more years.
Indeed, the Brinks and Experimental Arts - when Gus Wiseman ran it - were a fine match compared to the Stewart building. Coughtry, Kubota, Tiley, Solomon, Hodgson, I remember them well. My first year was when Ascott arrived and I had a wonderful time during the chaos of '71/72. The Bev was going strong, just down the street, and there were quite a few OCA bands ( the Diodes and, later, Martha and the Muffins ) from that era.
otis bought the building after OCA decided against it. i think they bought the Stewart building in 1982-83.
Yeah, an elevator company in a single-storey building. How droll. (At least now, you can see the old Brinks ID uncovered.)
As far as its being a vacant lot in the early 70s: wasn't this one of those benchmark blockbusting/redevelopment superblock sites nipped in the bud by the Crombie revolution? At least, until VBTG finally materialized at the end of the decade, suitably midrised/urbanized/Jane-Jacobized. (Patricia McHugh panned VBTG with a little too much gusto in her guide to Toronto architecture; sure, it still might have been bad-old-superblocking with a politically-correct urbanizing makeover, but it could have been far, far worse...)
Would the synagogue have been demolished in concert with the rest of the block, or much earlier?