You can view the page at http://urbantoronto.ca/news/2010/05/quick-pic-five-st-joseph-condo-treats-st-nicholas-respect
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- Thread starter Edward Skira
- Start date
cfloryan
Here
A beauty!
UrbanPhile
New Member
St. Joseph yes, Yonge St. no!
True, the former nightclub I recall fondly from the 80s is a terrific, quality building and the proposed treatment looks good. But what's with keeping the "heritage" buildings on Yonge? In the 60s, former National Gallery of Canada head Alan Jarvis, credited with bringing the gallery into the modern art era in the 50s, was known for his caustic remarks about architecture. He earned a parliamentary rebuke for describing St. John, NB as "a shantytown". His opinion of Yonge St: "ten miles of outhouses leaning up against Eaton's."
Developer Gary Switzer in the Star: “'We’re going to preserve those old buildings,' he explains, gesturing towards a series of gritty brick-clad storefronts along Yonge St."
Why? Even if you clean them up, they're still awful. Their small-town scale is wrong as well, and surely among the reasons that stretch of outhouse alley is particularly squalid. Why not build something new and big there? Four or five stories of modern boldness would jump-start the area, preserving the mediocrity of the past will not.
What we'll get: a coffee shop (perhaps Coffee Time?), plus that bane of condo-retail, a dry cleaner, and a rotating succession of failed businesses - scented candles, fashion t-shirts, bric-a-brac - in the other two pokey storefronts in the cleaned up outhouses of one of the ugliest stretches of Yonge St. - which an artist friend once referred to as "Dung Street".
Preserving ugly old buildings for the sake of preservation is as foolish as tearing down buildings that deserve to be preserved.
True, the former nightclub I recall fondly from the 80s is a terrific, quality building and the proposed treatment looks good. But what's with keeping the "heritage" buildings on Yonge? In the 60s, former National Gallery of Canada head Alan Jarvis, credited with bringing the gallery into the modern art era in the 50s, was known for his caustic remarks about architecture. He earned a parliamentary rebuke for describing St. John, NB as "a shantytown". His opinion of Yonge St: "ten miles of outhouses leaning up against Eaton's."
Developer Gary Switzer in the Star: “'We’re going to preserve those old buildings,' he explains, gesturing towards a series of gritty brick-clad storefronts along Yonge St."
Why? Even if you clean them up, they're still awful. Their small-town scale is wrong as well, and surely among the reasons that stretch of outhouse alley is particularly squalid. Why not build something new and big there? Four or five stories of modern boldness would jump-start the area, preserving the mediocrity of the past will not.
What we'll get: a coffee shop (perhaps Coffee Time?), plus that bane of condo-retail, a dry cleaner, and a rotating succession of failed businesses - scented candles, fashion t-shirts, bric-a-brac - in the other two pokey storefronts in the cleaned up outhouses of one of the ugliest stretches of Yonge St. - which an artist friend once referred to as "Dung Street".
Preserving ugly old buildings for the sake of preservation is as foolish as tearing down buildings that deserve to be preserved.