Why would anyone want to protect the mill? It's hideous and does not fit the character of the cottages and the street.
Sure it's an old building, but that's about all it is. There are plenty like it with the exact same architecture found in every single small town in Ontario. We're not losing a piece of history by demolishing this square eyesore.
Now the cottages, I agree, save them. But they aren't even in the cards to be taken out. Just those two buildings on the north corner.
I'm still failing to understand why there is a public outcry on this one. Keep the good looking history (cottages), and get rid of history's blight (mill).
Okay, count me in with those who don't necessarily find the mill that heartstoppingly unique or exceptional or even something absitively, posolutely worth preserving--generically speaking, there's plenty like it all around (not that that's bad or anything). But unless your urban aesthetic sensibility's suspended in 1955 or 1965 or something, "hideous", "eyesore", "history's blight" is a little on the hyperbolic side, isn't it? And as far as its "not fitting the character" goes...uh, beyond the industrial/commercial-next-door-to-residential part, how is that really the case--especially since the building seems to have settled in and adapted itself to Regis College quite comfily, at no harm to its surroundings? Honestly, if your "good looking history vs blight" urban/heritage approach ruled, a good deal of non-residential Toronto (the Kings, Liberty Village, etc) would *never* have seen adaptive reuse, Kensington wouldn't be worth cherishing, and Jane Jacobs would have been laughed out of this town as a lunatic. If such stuff was truly such a hideous eyesore and blight,
why is it not uncommon to see it being cherished and adaptively reused all across the province?
If you wanna argue against the mill, don't use such obtuse arguments that are amateurishly ignorant as to the *broader* scope of what "heritage sensitivity" means in 2008. It only undermines your case.
Then again, as I think of it, and this may sound NIMBY-haywire to the pro-development crowd, but...consider the
whole St Nicholas/St Mary/Yonge/Irwin block as it currently stands, and how it forms a remarkably polyglot-yet-cohesive, intensive, interesting unit of ever-adapted urban form that hasn't seen much in the way of non-cosmetic physical change in well over a half century (i.e. since the north Regis and Scientology buildings). Hey, concerned neighbourhood interests, let's take a more ambitious step here--
why not commission an heritage-conservation-district-style urban/historical study of the entire block? Given the block in question, my gut judgment is: it fits...