Agreed, Downtown Plaza would've been a wonderful addition to the area. Shame it never went ahead.
Huh? Downtown plaza would have been a cheaply built concrete slab with some faux historical pastiche thrown in as part of Stinson's Marketing ploy. This design was chosen hot on the heels of the construction of 1 King West, which attracted buyers with its historical features.
If you look at his record with the upkeep and detailing of 1 King West, while a beautiful project in it's design, you would know what I mean. When 'The Harry' was in charge of his only "successful" tower development, he cut costs by such measures as painting over cracks in the building with black tar, doing panting/carpentry/repairs himself to save on the contractor fees, etc. The entrance of this building was meant to have a reconstructed historical facade inside, which Stinson cancelled and put up some modern art instead.
Despite these radical "savings" he still owed David Mirvish, his partner in 1 King West, like $12 million when all was said and done.
Now imagine one of the most prominent locations in the core ruined by a giant slab adorned with a few concrete pillars and decorative tiles a-la the Stinson Design school. On top of this, Harry had plans to stick a large communications antenna on the top of this thing to generate extra revenue. Mysteriously, this extra 'feature' never made it into the renderings. Harry himself used this tower design as a threat of what we would be stuck with if the city didn't grant him the right to build higher.
The Canada tower, however, has great potential to be very striking and attractive. It is sharp looking, while utilizing the design language of our current era rather then a hack-kneed attempt at the grandeur of the past (which is never truly successful without the use of real stone cladding, IMO). I do agree with the marketing video's point that this is one of the last prime development locations in the core, so they shouldn't have that difficult of a time moving units.
As a side note, I have never seen a project team in this city put out a marketing video of that slick level of quality and not get their project built.