To quote The Big Lebowski, that's just, like, your opinion, man. You obviously you don't understand the whole r'aison d'etre of the Heritage Act if you think the fact a building was used as a boring warehouse disqualifies it. It's only a warehouse? The Distillery District was just a place where they made booze; including
a bunch of warehouses which I guess wouldn't be on your list.
South Street Seaport? It was a pier. All those 17th century buildings in Boston that were just built as offices or general stores or whatever? Yawn - a dime a dozen! Some building in Rome or Jerusalem that was once where they made pottery for 5 years, 2,000 years ago. Hardly the Coliseum!
Whether you think the building "says something," is not the purpose of heritage preservation.
http://www.mtc.gov.on.ca/en/heritage/heritage_designation.shtml
A building doesn't have to have singularly remarkable history to be a heritage property. The mere fact that it's typical of what King Street used to look like makes it significant. If you destroy all the buildings that "say nothing," you get a street that's just a hodge podge of modern stuff, most of which won't be up to the design level of M&G. The whole point of heritage designation is to preserve all those boring buildings....To use another movie reference, there's the bit in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Belloq explains to Indy that if he buries his ordinary watch in the desert it will become hugely valuable in a few years just because of its antiquity. So, the point is not that Belloq can go out and get an amazing Rolex, and therefore his watch is useless. No, the point is that if you throw out all the watches there won't be ANY more watches. The continued existence of his watch renders it valuable to those who value something other than the next big thing.
There is a public process for designation and this building went through that process and was deemed significant. And Mirvish didn't oppose it. It's a fait accompli. That's its legal status so arguing it's not significant is like arguing you're really still married to the wife who divorced you.
No, stupid is not understanding the value of heritage itself, nor the role old buildings play in a city which is like Chapter 1, Page 1 of Jane Jacobs. It's present use is utterly immaterial. If "current use" was a factor I can only imagine what you'd think of a
vacant building that's falling apart because it hasn't been preserved. Let's go back to the old
Empress Hotel. What was in there? It used to be some bar and it had like Salad King on the ground floor.
Burn it down! Says nothing to me - because I don't know anything at all about it, never really noticed it, and don't care to learn. We can put something shiny and new and awesome in its place.
If you want to destroy it you'll have to do better than saying it "says nothing," to you and that it's only being used as a Tim Horton's. Those things are immaterial to the process at hand. The quote above outlines why we preserve buildings and Toronto spent way too long destroying buildings that "didn't say anything" to the point where all we're left with is a few "ordinary" warehouses. Their continued presence alone makes them significant, is what many people are missing. But I guess if our sense of what we "value in the present" is that "great architecture" and the needs for more and more condos trumps our city's history, by all means, tear down that boring donut shop.
