I am aware of what constitute the law. I am also fairly confident that the decision makers aren't necessarily daily user of the station AND I am also fairly confident that most current users of the station will consider the current state of affairs less than desirable. Given the potential increase in traffic beyond what even the current round of revitalization is designed to handle, it is prudent to think beyond what Parks Canada consider appropriate or otherwise given their limited mandate. The rest of the battle can be fought in the political arena, if necessary.
Heritage protection doesn't work that way. You don't have the right to appeal the rulings of pesky historical preservation experts to the court of public opinion, on the basis that a poll of 10,000 people getting off a GO train every morning should outweigh 2 academics in tweed blazers hired by an Ottawa bureaucrat.
Guess what, listing buildings has consequences, and one of those is that discretion over changes gets taken out of the hands of the ownership and into the hands of third parties whose whole reason for being there is *not* to bend to the popular will of the moment but instead objectively try to ensure an appropriate level of historical integrity is preserved for future generations. Don't want to be bound like that? Don't list the building.
In terms of "fighting the battle in the political arena" -- well, we can either ask the federal government to de-list the building (from, incidentally, the highest level of protection you can put on any structure in the country) and then let the ownership go nuts with it, or we can live with the greatest #firstworldproblem of them all, #noCalatravatrainshed.
I have to question how much Parks Canada values the Bush trainshed, seeing that they approved the demolition of 1/4 of it.
My thoughts exactly. The station itself is gorgeous and should be retained at almost all costs, but the train shed? Meh.
Was the train shed specifically given a heritage designation, or was it just lumped into the "Union Station" heritage designation?
The train shed is identical from one section to the next. If Toronto was a walled city it would be like punching a new opening through it. You don't need the whole thing to understand it.
The national historic site
citation that I linked-to earlier includes the following on the "character-defining elements" list:
- the industrial character of the large, attached Bush train sheds, including: the arched trusses spanning columns between the tracks; the cascade of end façades; and the pattern of smoke ducts;
On all listed structures that are up for renos, there's always give and take with the history police... think of it as a bit like brokering a variance with City Planning. For the preservationists, the alternative of banning anyone from so much as touching a structure could mean the owner lets the whole thing rot away. 3/4 of a loaf is better than nothing.
I vaguely recall from a presentation I saw a few years ago that in the case of Union there was a negotiated deal struck with Parks Canada that I guess satisfied them as sticking to the spirit of the above citation: a chunk could come come out of the middle and most of the old wood top layer could be replaced with steel, but only on the condition that a section (I think it's the platforms closest the to the station building, but I could be wrong) would be restored back to exactly the way they were in the '30s.
