Overall much better than I thought which is a relief. Having a community centre there is great - it'll be great for the office workers as well.

Pipe dream, but a PATH like underground network would be really nice to have.
 
Agreed, but if as this is a mixture of office and residential, it won't just be workers who live elsewhere; there will be a contingent of folks who have at least some sort of stake in living there. And yet... the massing as it's proposed is daunting; not a lot of meaningful variation.
Given the time this is gonna take to build out fully, we may get lucky that the rather bland massing becomes more varied as planning rules and market conditions change.
 
Overall much better than I thought which is a relief. Having a community centre there is great - it'll be great for the office workers as well.

Pipe dream, but a PATH like underground network would be really nice to have.
Agreed, however the team mentioned that they want that PATH type experience at-grade, to ensure people congregate in the public realm more.
 
Placing an advance order for lots of generous canopies and colonnades along podiums (add in a sprinkling of urban "trees").

6d9d85488c8cdc9dcc9842c37c81cb34.jpg

Link
 
Sorta has that mall vibe from Stranger Things going for it...
 
Last edited:
Overall much better than I thought which is a relief. Having a community centre there is great - it'll be great for the office workers as well.

Pipe dream, but a PATH like underground network would be really nice to have.
There used to be a whole underground shopping and path connection to all of the buildings along the Broadview extension. I haven't read anything since I worked on it keeping it. So I assume it was scrapped as it was costly.
 
I prefer to have vibrant streets with a high-quality public realm. I always wonder how nice the public realm would be in the most expensive part of town, the Financial District, if all the granite that went into cladding the corridors of PATH went into paving the streets and sidewalks, if all the towers had elegant retail along the street, and if all the businesses pressured the city into maintaining a world class public realm. New York's Financial District has numerous areas where the road is paved in granite and pedestrianized.
 
We could certainly do with more like that! In this town we seem to lack the political will.
Is it because so much construction build is condominium and there isn't as much leverage as in commercial development where there is a reason to add signature value, the opposite of value engineering. The corollary in Toronto's case in terms of quality to "a rising tide raises all boats", might be the opposite case when the bar is set too low to keep a boom going.
 
Is it because so much construction build is condominium and there isn't as much leverage as in commercial development where there is a reason to add signature value, the opposite of value engineering. The corollary in Toronto's case in terms of quality to "a rising tide raises all boats", might be the opposite case when the bar is set too low to keep a boom going.
This is perhaps slightly off-topic, but it seems to me this is part of a larger set of conditions wherein we have people demanding improved public goods while not necessarily wishing to pay for them. Our oft-cited "shabby public realm" is the direct result of an insufficient tax base (and, I suspect, a corpulent, hide-brown bureaucracy that sucks up money like nobody's business). Toronto's residential taxes have been kept to a historic low for a long time now and in the end, we get what we pay for. Any ambitious politician who calls for raising land taxes is flat-out asking to lose an election. So, barring a bold new paradigm, we're stuck with what we have here in Toronto. World class it ain't.
 
There used to be a whole underground shopping and path connection to all of the buildings along the Broadview extension. I haven't read anything since I worked on it keeping it. So I assume it was scrapped as it was costly.

The below-grade PATH kind of connection was planned when the subway was proposed below-grade. With the Ontario Line now above grade, there's no reason to be underground.
 

Back
Top