elle
New Member
Late to the party here....
I used to live in the building circa 2002. Due to the threat of the double cohort, us University College students were put up in that building while the more fortunate ones get to stay at the Delta Chelsea.
The year I left residence was the year they bought the chestnut hotel. I always thought it was silly for the university to have bought the Chestnut instead of the Residence College Hotel. The RCH is a real residence with shared bathroom and shared kitchen, and not a HOTEL. While the Chestnut hotel from what I remember was a decent hotel and had a great Chinese restaurant. Plus it is further two blocks away from the main campus.
The RCH is an ugly building but could have been a great student residence had the university taken over with a stable student occupancy and don supervision; the shared facilities like kitchen, tv common room on every floor, swimming pool and gym really creates that university community feel. As a student who lived there, I had a good experience aside from a few iffy aspect of the building (more details below). I imagined that the University Health Network (UHN) weren't so keen to give up such a prime real estate to UofT back then?
But unfortunately Residence College Hotel under UHN management as a budget hotel/hostel suffered from poor management, lack of maintenance, disrepair (toilets keep flooding) and was constantly plagued by questionable guests/tenants. The UC students who stayed there the year before me were terrorized by a crazy guy call Paul who scream and bang on students doors in the middle of the night. It took ages for the management to evict that guy. In my year, we had a fellow student who had to move out his room after they found out his terminally-ill-next-door neighbour was shooting up drugs. We also overheard staff at the building mentioning that they found rooms with used condoms scattered around. (Not the freshmen experience we were expecting but whatever).
In the years after I left I also heard about the place being infested by bedbugs including one occasion four five years when I saw a hand-scrawl paper that said "They have Bed Bugs here" taped to the side entrance. Otherwise the only positive contribution the RCH served was providing cheap accommodation to out-of-town parents with kids who need to stay at Sick Kids for long and short term, ESL students from Mexico and people who otherwise can't afford to live alone in downtown Toronto.
It's really a lost opportunity that if they renovate the place a bit, replace the fixtures, and turned it into a residence as it was originally intended, it would've been a great use of this otherwise awful building. (They turned a couple floors into offices, but I suspect those plans didn't turn out so well) However when my friend who still lives there told me about the impending demolition to make way for a lecture hall, I don't think it ever occur to me that it's even in the realm of possibilities. All long term tenants are made to move out with some financial incentive, so I'm thinking that by "one storey" in the permit they really mean one storey (correct me if I'm wrong).
It seems like such a waste to tear down a standing building with no structural problem like that as horrible and ugly as the building is in its current state. If you ask me, they could at the very least turn that place into a homeless shelter and run it down for another 20 years before it needs to be knocked down. The most astounding thing to me is that they already have a lecture hall in the basement of the building!! It's quite small and shabby and maybe not something you want to show off to foreign medical researchers, but it hardly justifies razing the building to the ground (Can't they rent a hall nearby?). Unless there's some serious donors in the background who insist on a massive vanity project to have his name plaster all over a shiny brand new building (Lee Ka-shing?), I think there's some explaining to do pertaining to the cost of demolition and construction.
Plus there are talks that there are asbestos in the building. I have no idea how they can safely removing them from the building (they can't just put a wrecking ball through it I imagine). Any experts here? I just hope that it doesn't end up as one of those empty lots after the original building were cleared and the funds to build a new one either dry up or vanish.
And to end this long-winded reminiscent/rant, I have just been informed by my friend who's still living there that, 2 1/2 months before the scheduled demolition and 1 month before he moves out, the management is going to replace the lock on his door. WTF?? Please explain!
I used to live in the building circa 2002. Due to the threat of the double cohort, us University College students were put up in that building while the more fortunate ones get to stay at the Delta Chelsea.
The year I left residence was the year they bought the chestnut hotel. I always thought it was silly for the university to have bought the Chestnut instead of the Residence College Hotel. The RCH is a real residence with shared bathroom and shared kitchen, and not a HOTEL. While the Chestnut hotel from what I remember was a decent hotel and had a great Chinese restaurant. Plus it is further two blocks away from the main campus.
The RCH is an ugly building but could have been a great student residence had the university taken over with a stable student occupancy and don supervision; the shared facilities like kitchen, tv common room on every floor, swimming pool and gym really creates that university community feel. As a student who lived there, I had a good experience aside from a few iffy aspect of the building (more details below). I imagined that the University Health Network (UHN) weren't so keen to give up such a prime real estate to UofT back then?
But unfortunately Residence College Hotel under UHN management as a budget hotel/hostel suffered from poor management, lack of maintenance, disrepair (toilets keep flooding) and was constantly plagued by questionable guests/tenants. The UC students who stayed there the year before me were terrorized by a crazy guy call Paul who scream and bang on students doors in the middle of the night. It took ages for the management to evict that guy. In my year, we had a fellow student who had to move out his room after they found out his terminally-ill-next-door neighbour was shooting up drugs. We also overheard staff at the building mentioning that they found rooms with used condoms scattered around. (Not the freshmen experience we were expecting but whatever).
In the years after I left I also heard about the place being infested by bedbugs including one occasion four five years when I saw a hand-scrawl paper that said "They have Bed Bugs here" taped to the side entrance. Otherwise the only positive contribution the RCH served was providing cheap accommodation to out-of-town parents with kids who need to stay at Sick Kids for long and short term, ESL students from Mexico and people who otherwise can't afford to live alone in downtown Toronto.
It's really a lost opportunity that if they renovate the place a bit, replace the fixtures, and turned it into a residence as it was originally intended, it would've been a great use of this otherwise awful building. (They turned a couple floors into offices, but I suspect those plans didn't turn out so well) However when my friend who still lives there told me about the impending demolition to make way for a lecture hall, I don't think it ever occur to me that it's even in the realm of possibilities. All long term tenants are made to move out with some financial incentive, so I'm thinking that by "one storey" in the permit they really mean one storey (correct me if I'm wrong).
It seems like such a waste to tear down a standing building with no structural problem like that as horrible and ugly as the building is in its current state. If you ask me, they could at the very least turn that place into a homeless shelter and run it down for another 20 years before it needs to be knocked down. The most astounding thing to me is that they already have a lecture hall in the basement of the building!! It's quite small and shabby and maybe not something you want to show off to foreign medical researchers, but it hardly justifies razing the building to the ground (Can't they rent a hall nearby?). Unless there's some serious donors in the background who insist on a massive vanity project to have his name plaster all over a shiny brand new building (Lee Ka-shing?), I think there's some explaining to do pertaining to the cost of demolition and construction.
Plus there are talks that there are asbestos in the building. I have no idea how they can safely removing them from the building (they can't just put a wrecking ball through it I imagine). Any experts here? I just hope that it doesn't end up as one of those empty lots after the original building were cleared and the funds to build a new one either dry up or vanish.
And to end this long-winded reminiscent/rant, I have just been informed by my friend who's still living there that, 2 1/2 months before the scheduled demolition and 1 month before he moves out, the management is going to replace the lock on his door. WTF?? Please explain!
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