By Mitchell Fox, with Fredrick Thomas Reyes
Adam Bunch was working a “terrible” office job in the St. Lawrence Market neighbourhood of Toronto when he was sucked into the world of history and heritage. Spending his lunch exploring the historical buildings, details and plaques across the area, he came to appreciate what the city had to offer.
The Toronto- and Canada-focused historian and writer created the Toronto Dreams Project, an effort in which he left short fictional stories, detailing dreams of historical figures, around the city. He turned a fascination with the city’s historical and architectural environment into a full-time endeavour.
“Now it’s what I do all day, every day. All thanks to that weird little lunchtime idea that’s led me into real history stuff,” said Bunch.
For Bunch, history is “one of the most meaningful things in life, probably.” He said understanding the way Toronto has been built helps with making the city a better place today, as it is possible to understand how the good and bad things about the city came to be.
“Whether you have lived in a place your whole life or you’ve just arrived, I think understanding its stories and its past—how it ended up being the place that it is today—is a powerful way for people to feel like they belong in a place and in some ways, have ownership of a place,” he said.
Toronto’s architectural history offers a sample of where the city comes from and how culturally diverse and interesting it can be. However, historical buildings in the city are not safe from the unfaltering growth of such a metropolis—with more people and businesses comes a need for more homes and offices. When there is only so much land and space, sometimes the only way to go is up. That not only means building new taller buildings, but using the walls that are already standing to build something newer, taller and more modern.
Patricia Milne, the treasurer at the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario: Toronto and a member of the East York Community Preservation Panel, says some in her circles refer to the increasingly common condominium towers built on top of historic buildings as “jack-in-a-box buildings.”
The practice has seen increasing prominence in recent years. In the last couple of months, projects such as a 60-storey addition to the Stewart building at the university of Toronto and a 33-storey addition to a heritage building at Richmond St. W. and Bathurst St. have been announced.
“I think there’s a view, particularly amongst the development side, that heritage is antithetical to development”
Milne said the city faces a challenge of figuring out how to make the most of its heritage buildings, not only from the outside but their interiors.
“If you look at some great cities like New York, they haven’t lost their brownstone streets. They’ve managed to grow and develop while still maintaining a great character to the city,” she said. “I think that’s our challenge going forward, is not to lose that character that we have here, and not to lose the great livability of the city.”
In 2022, Doug Ford’s Conservative Ontario government released Bill 23, the More Homes Built Faster Act, which made changes to heritage and development regulations, including the Ontario Heritage Act. While making it more difficult to add new heritage buildings is one piece of the puzzle, another key element of the Bill was to place a two-year limit on buildings being progressed from the “listed but not designated” category to full designation, effectively eliminating the “listed” designation completely.
This year, the passing of Bill 200 by the Ontario government came with an extension of the deadline for listed properties to be designated from Jan. 1, 2025 to Jan. 1, 2027, unless changed again. Milne said this extension was lobbied for due to the high volume of properties on Toronto’s list.
“The really difficult thing about that is they’ve said they can’t be relisted for a pretty significant period of time,” she said. “One might wonder why, except that it gives the developers time to take building down. So there are a lot of questions around that.”
As of January 2024, there were 3,977 “listed” properties, as reported by the Toronto Star.
The City of Toronto’s Heritage Register website clarifies the difference between being listed on the register, which includes over 11,000 properties, and being a designated heritage property. Essentially, being listed makes sure further evaluation takes place if demolition is intended—Bill 23 could mean many buildings lose this privilege.
“Having properties listed is an important first step in ensuring we can preserve our heritage, but it does not prevent growth. Not everything listed will be formally designated as a heritage property. And for those that are, we know that conservation of full buildings or heritage attributes helps shape change, not prevent it,” the website reads.
According to Milne, the “listed” option was a tool that allowed the city to take it’s time with assessing and designating buildings.
“There didn’t seem to be any reason to proceed quickly, until this legislation came down and said, ‘We’re going to just take the buildings away. You can’t put them back.’ So there’s a massive scramble to prioritize existing projects,” she said.
Milne said there are some who think growth and development cannot go hand-in-hand with heritage preservation but areas such as the Distillery District attract a lot of people and are “really significant” in the city.
“I think there’s a view, particularly amongst the development side, that heritage is antithetical to development, whereas it can really inform and work beautifully with development to create great spaces,” she explained.
“I think Toronto, historically, hasn’t done enough to preserve its built heritage”
It is possible the city will see an influx of developments on historic buildings in the next few years, as listed buildings are booted off the register and cannot regain status. Bunch says that some people, including some government officials and developers, see heritage as “an impediment to growth,” though that is changing with some developers, who see the history of a place can bring out more value.
“We’re in a particularly tough moment for Toronto’s built heritage since the leaders at Queen’s Park don’t see it the same way a lot of people do and don’t have, clearly, the same respect for it that a lot of Torontonians do,” he said.
According to Bunch, the city has not historically had the best mindset, let alone by-laws, for taking the preservation of architectural history seriously. He said Toronto was built with a “colonial mentality” at first—valuing architecture and culture from London, England and eventually New York City, above its own—and has often put growth ahead of heritage.
“I think Toronto, historically, hasn’t done enough to preserve its built heritage. We’ve been pretty loose with heritage laws. We’ve lost a lot of our most precious old buildings, which means a lot of what we have left is also more precious,” he said.
For some, the fire at St. Anne’s Church—which brought value as a home to a collection of Group of Seven murals in addition to historical architecture—in June 2024 was a warning call for heritage preservation.
According to AngloAmerican.com, cultural heritage, which includes structures with historical values, “is considered a unique and non-renewable resource that possesses cultural, scientific, spiritual, traditional or religious value, and is frequently legally protected.” Buildings such as St. Anne’s or any of the listed heritage buildings from the city’s register provide value that can not be replaced, in this sense.
As such, Toronto is “grappling” with how to preserve history, facilitate growth and showcase multiculturalism all at once, according to Bunch. He and Milne both point to the city’s struggle with facadism, where the outside facade of a building is maintained and prioritized, but the inside and surroundings, as well as the purpose of the building, are lost when a new building is connected or built on top of it. For Milne, the result of such “taxidermy buildings” can be that there is “no character left in the building.”
“I think it looks very strange when it’s just the facades that are left. That’s not, to me, architectural preservation,” she said.
In September 2023, TVO released Charlotte’s Castle, a documentary about Spadina Gardens, an apartment building complex in The Annex. The two connected buildings, built in 1904 and one of the oldest apartments in Toronto, are having 10 storeys added to them while tenants are still inside. Charlotte Mickie, one of the building’s tenants since 1993, has advocated strongly for the building’s preservation.
~Check out Fredrick Reyes’ exploration of Toronto’s heritage buildings, including a timeline of Spadina Gardens’ construction and renovation~
Milne recently went on a tour of Spadina Gardens and Mickie’s apartment. She said the developers found obvious value in the area and haven’t done a terrible job using and preserving the old building, but there are “quite valid questions” about the project and how historical features such as courtyards will be affected.
“I was really shocked at how eroded that neighborhood is becoming and will become. It’s a great risk of losing one of our most unique areas,” she added about The Annex.
Nevertheless, Milne points out that there are examples across the city of thoughtful techniques for preserving buildings. She gives the example of Maison Selby, an old house-turned restaurant in the Bloor and Sherbourne area that was moved from its original location up to Sherbourne St, while the new The Selby tower was placed behind. The interior of the mansion was preserved, along with the exterior.
“I think the Selby is an excellent example, where the building was moved to create a feasible site for the tower behind,” said Milne. “It was heritage and new architecture working together.”
Innovative practices such as those used for Maison Selby have also been used elsewhere. In the city’s Northwest, developments around the new Mount Dennis station included moving the historic Kodak 9 building about 200 feet. The building was moved slowly on a concrete skid-way and kept structurally intact, and will be used as part of the new station.
While Kodak 9 illustrates a degree of ingenuity available for better heritage preservation, it is not feasible for every building, especially when there are so many listed buildings on the Heritage Register that will likely lose their safety in the next 25 months.
“Walking through Toronto…you can see some of that old heritage. You can also see how it’s been neglected, by how much of it is missing”
Bunch says the key to the city’s approach from here is likely a mix of newer and older buildings, as well as a mix of approaches to heritage preservation, as there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
“Some places we can afford to lose a little building entirely. Other places, it’s really important, I think, to preserve the full structure, as opposed to just doing facadism,” he said.
“I think we’re in an interesting moment that Toronto’s maybe reassessing its relationship to its own history, and that includes reassessing its relationship to its architecture,” he added.
For Bunch, the “mishmash” of architecture in Toronto is something to behold. Having neoclassical and renaissance buildings next to skyscrapers may make one stick out but it also allows the city to present itself and its history.
To kick off the course he teaches at George Brown College, Bunch introduces his students to two photos: one of the area around St. James Church in the 1800s when it was built and one from the 1980s, with much of the Victorian architecture gone and replaced by parking, which has since been filled in by condominiums and other buildings.
Nevertheless, he speaks of that area, the St. Lawrence area and the entirety of the city as a great example of the growth in multiculturalism the city has seen over the past two centuries. He says one of the most valuable things he has learned since those fateful lunchtime walks and “falling down this rabbit hole into Toronto history” is that by learning the history of the city, each walk through it becomes different. Learning more from the history around you allows you to notice it and experience the city a new way.
“Walking through Toronto…you can see some of that old heritage. You can also see how it’s been neglected, by how much of it is missing,” he said.
This story goes hand-in-hand with Fredrick Reyes’ work on an exploration of Toronto’s heritage buildings: https://blogs.journalism.torontomu.ca/jrn305-fall-2024/2024/11/28/exploring-torontos-heritage-a-look-at-the-citys-historic-landmarks/
Original post can be found at: https://blogs.journalism.torontomu.ca/jrn305-fall-2024/2024/11/28/preserving-the-past-torontos-battles-with-heritage-building-laws/
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