Keesmaat’s biggest showdown came in fall 2012, when theatre producer David Mirvish announced he’d hired the architect Frank Gehry to create a trio of 80-plus-storey Jenga towers on King West, with six floors of commercial space in the podium and a gallery to house Mirvish’s collection of colour field art. The spires would stretch almost double the height of any neighbouring buildings and entail the demolition of the Princess of Wales theatre and four early-20th-century warehouses Mirvish owned. He skipped the pre-app meeting and hired a PR firm, announcing his project with the kind of grandeur you might find in one of his musicals. “They said, this is what we’re doing, like it or leave it. I think he’d agree now that didn’t work out so well,” Keesmaat says with a whiff of smugness. Her deal-breaker was the loss of the heritage buildings—she said she wouldn’t discuss the height, density or usage until that issue had been resolved. Her other big problem was the shadow his buildings would cast on Queen West, the heritage commercial conservation district (which she planned herself in her private sector days).
Keesmaat was staunch throughout the negotiations, eventually releasing a report to council urging that the height be reduced and the warehouses salvaged. Council sanctioned her recommendations and rejected Mirvish’s proposal. He was incensed. Keesmaat countered that such “bird poop architecture”—colossal, clumsy behemoths that developers plunk down in the middle of a streetscape—paid little attention to the surrounding urban fabric. By spring 2014, nearly two years after filing his original proposal, Mirvish returned to the planning department with a new design: two narrower, stacked towers, still shooting above 80 storeys, but no longer occupying the entire city block, freeing up sky views and sunlight for the Queen West heritage buildings behind it. The Princess of Wales Theatre and two of the four warehouses would be saved. “Frank Gehry sent me a thank you note after it was all over,” Keesmaat told me with the preening satisfaction of a kid who gets a gold star on her homework. “He told me how much better I’d made his project.”
