It's also interesting to look at the attitudes to preservation in the four King/Bay bank developments.
The earliest of the developments, the TD Centre (first tower completed in 1967), eliminates all the buildings on the lot, though the Bank of Toronto Building could have been retained without affecting the site plan or locations of the towers.
Well, it would have affected the site plan in one critical way: the present banking pavilion wouldn't exist, at least not in its present configuration. It's not that the complex would have been worse without the old B of T; just that it would have been "different".
The second development, Commerce Court, (1972) retains the 1930 Bank of Commerce Building, which becomes an integral element in the site plan.
Then again, the tallest-in-the-Empire skyscraper scale of the 1930 building would have made demolition an inadvisably diceyer option here than with the low-rise Bank of Toronto, anyway. As a result, I personally feel the "preservationist" impulse behind Commerce Court is overrated; or at least, the art is more in
how they integrated CCN into the complex, than in the fact that they retained it at all. (And other than CCN, everything else "of age" on the site was demolished--not that it was on a level equal to the Bank of Toronto; but, still, imagine if the scheme went through in 2009 rather than 1969.)
Subsequently, First Canadian Place, is announced in 1972, the same year David Crombie becomes mayor. Ironically, as the first major development under the auspices of the new reform council, it is a step backwords in terms of historic preservation, demolishing The Toronto Star Building, the Globe and Mail Building and the Bank of Montreal (which could have been retained on the King/Bay corner without affecting the towers).
I'd rather view FCP in terms of last-of-the-old and a fait accompli by the time that Crombie took power (late in the year, remember), even if most of the actual demolitions happened during Crombie's regime. And if one
must play devil's advocate a la Hipster Duck, Toronto Star was "lesser stuff" than Commerce Court North, anyway.
The final corner, Scotia Plaza, was proposed and designed in the early 1980's and finished in 1988. It's not exactly accurate, adma, to say that there was little to destroy on site. There was the 1951 Bank of Nova Scotia Building, which the developer Robert Campeau could have proposed demolishing. However between the time of FCP and SP, the zoning world had changed as a result of the implementation of the new Central Area Plan (i.e.Official Plan). For the first time, the gross floor area of a designated historic building could be exempted from density calculations, a huge advantage under a planning regime that allowed a maximum of 12.0X coverage in the Financial District. In a sense, the GFA of the old building became "free", and the 12.0X coverage could be used totally in the new tower.
I think it would be fair to say, that if these "bonuses" had existed in the 70's, the development of the FCP block could have been very different, with at least the Bank of Montreal building integrated into the plan. No developer likes to turn down "free" density. Urbanistically, what a different the retention of that building would have made to the Bay Street "canyon" and to King.
True, one can give due credit to the dry truth of zoning-bonus acrobatics; but symbiotically speaking, it proved how the notion of heritage became "good business" by the 1980s, to the point where from a good-corporate-citizen standpoint, it was all but inconceivable that the old Scotia would have been demolished without a fight under
any circumstance (even if--lest we forget--it was only as old as Commerce Court is now). Of course, looking at facadectomies elsewhere on the Scotia block, it was also a moment when heritage came to be
trivialized in the name of "good business", too.
And when it comes down to the what-coulda-beens re the FCP block, IMO it would have seemed painfully token and self-serving to
only retain the old Bank of Montreal, while letting the Star and the Globe go...