Assuming of course that youth hostel/homeless place on Gerrard, the Evergreen centre for street kids, the male strip joint next door, sex shop a few doors down and oh, the Zanzibar move out en masse in 5 years..then, yeah, it will be less scuzzy. Stranger things have happened :)

A little dodgy perhaps, but not scuzzy and certainly not threatening.
 
Isn't there a funding agreement between the builder and Evergreen, so the centre can be relocated off Yonge Street. Does anyone recall this info?
 
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/toronto/story.html?id=2457341

Skyline unlimited
Recession can't slow city's big-tower boom

Adam McDowell, National Post


A crane was assembled at the corner of Bay and Harbour streets in recent weeks, and Scott Dickson rejoiced.

Tower geeks such as Mr. Dickson had feared that the fourth tower of the Pinnacle Centre development, kitty-corner from the Air Canada Centre, had been felled by the recession. Its name, which seemed ironic at the time, was Success Tower II.

Like virtually the entire complement of Toronto's planned mega-skyscrapers, which includes 18,400-metre-plus monoliths under construction at the moment, Success II survived the rough winds of the recession without its financing toppling over.

"I think Toronto's been largely immune [to the recession],'' Mr. Dickson said yesterday. ''Look at house prices; bidding wars are happening again. I don't know what's going to happen, I just know we're going to have cranes in the air for the next five, six, seven years."

Whereas the early 1990s recession killed off many high-rise projects both commercial and residential -- memorably leaving behind the famous Bay and Adelaide stump in the core for years -- observers are emerging from the most recent one, and noticing that the skyline of a few years from now remains as tall and shiny as ever.

"Toronto looks like a boom city," said Mr. Dickson, the owner of a boutique firm called Upside Down Marketing & Design, who used Photoshop to cook up a rendering of Toronto's skyline as of 2014, as seen from Marina Del Rey, next to Etobicoke's Humber Bay Park.

"It's kind of an exciting time to be a skyscraper geek. Everything is getting bigger in Toronto. I remember when 30 storeys was a big deal. Now 50 storeys is the norm."

Twenty-three of Toronto's 65 buildings standing 122 metres (400 feet) or taller have been completed during the past five years, and at least another 15 are scheduled to be added to the total by 2014.

The city's collection of skyscrapers, in other words, will have almost doubled from 42 to 80 in the space of a decade.

Mr. Dickson said the coming 75-storey Aura condo tower at Yonge and College, now at the excavation stage, is the one to watch for. "It's a big boy. That's going to change the skyline the most, I think. There's still a chance they're going to ask for another 10 floors, too."

Shawn Micallef, a senior editor at Spacing magazine, managing editor of the new online magazine Yonge Street and a pioneer "psychogeographer," observed that the mad building boom will not truly be felt until the buildings are actually built.

"Skyscrapers just sort of seem to appear," he said.

"In our peripheral vision, we see all these cranes and towers going up but they don't register until someone moves in and flicks on a light switch. All of a sudden there's a light where it doesn't belong. That's why I'm always struck by the sight of them. 'Oh, there are more people in the sky.' "

One tower that will need to be removed from Mr. Dickson's future sky is One Bloor East, a project that got as far as clearing the southeast corner of Yonge and Bloor before shutting down. The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers erased developer Bazis International's financing arrangement. Now the site belongs to Great Gulf Homes, but no tower design has been released.

"All the geeks are sitting on their hands waiting for something," said Mr. Dickson. "There was a rumour that it was going to be in the 65-storey range."

Success Tower II, in the meantime, simply changed names and is now being marketed as 33 Bay. It will rise up to 46 storeys; tall, but not colossal by the standards of 2010s Toronto. If all goes well, the lights will go on in October of next year.

This spring, its developer, Pinnacle International, will open a sales centre for its next project, a 46-storey condo tower at Adelaide and John, said sales and marketing director Anson Kwok yesterday.

It will be one of several major Entertainment District projects to come in a localized mini-boom over the next decade. As Mr. Kwok said, "Stay tuned."

amcdowell@nationalpost.com---------
 
Jan 20 Visited

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How much longer then? I'm afraid my lady love is going to beat me over the head soon because I talk to her about this project too much.
 
It's part of the shoring system, either soldier pile (the steel part) and lagging (wooden slats) or an interlocking caisson (concrete) wall. Generally soldier pile and lagging is considered flexible while interlocking caisson walls are considered rigid. Rigid shoring would be used where adjacent structures cannot tolerate any movement (ie existing College Park buildings). There might be soldier piles along College Street, where slight movement isn't as critical. Caisson walls also have the advantage of being more watertight.

In either case Deep Foundation (DFC) will auger to the required depth, insert the steel pile and fill the hole with concrete. If they are constructing Soldier Pile and lagging, they will space the piles about 3 metres apart and then fill in the gap with horizontal pieces of wood as they excavate. If they are constructing a caisson wall they will auger the piles close enough together that they connect (ie interlock). Once all of the piles are in they will start to excavate.

Hello Celvidge,

Thanks for your descriptions of the shoring process - I had seen both types of shoring in use, but not know the criteria for selection of one over the other. A quick question, for deeper holes, would tie-backs be used in either case, or just for the Soldier Pile and Lagging, and secondly, on the east side of the Aura site, where the subway would be under Yonge Street, I would think that if stabilization of the shoring is required tie-backs would not be an option. How might the shoring be stabilized where there are adjacent structures?

Thanks,

AHK
 
Wow. Amazing to watch this one take off. There are a few projects in Toronto that I think have the opportunity to really alter the urban fabric in a given area; this is one of them for sure.
 

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