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Barber: Get Rid of Redpath

Alchemist - you make a good point. Shipping and rail transport is coming back big time and having a some kind of port could come in handy someday.
 
Remember: John Barber isn't necessarily using an "architectural eyesore" alibi against Redpath. Just that its continued existence makes no unsubsidized economic sense

And really; why single out the shed? The whole complex is an architecturally cohesive ensemble (why else is it listed?) with, perhaps, some intriguing adaptive-reuse potential throughout. Heck, I'd argue that the whale mural is an unneccesarily kitschy add-on. And lest we forget...

No sweet ending for landmark sign
Peter Kuitenbrouwer, National Post
Published: Monday, April 24, 2006
The other day John Martins-Manteiga and I drove out to Mississauga, sort of west of the airport, to look for the Redpath Sugar sign.

We arrived at Attar Metals, a chaotic, dystopic scrapyard just west of the airport, where you can barely hear yourself amid the shriek of giant metal jaws of cranes crunching up truck cabs as though they were cardboard boxes. Other giant cranes pick up piles of girders, paint cans and metal shelving and move them around the muddy yard. Trucks roar in, dumping more junk. Jets course overhead.

Two weeks ago, a crew of workers ripped the huge, red Redpath Sugar sign off the side of the building where it had hung for 45 years. The crane operator told Mr. Martins-Manteiga, director of Toronto's Dominion Modern museum, that he brought the sign to this Mad Max graveyard of the industrial age to die.

The guys in hard hats who run the scrapyard waved us through to look around. We just sort of stood vaguely, gaping at the mess. Clearly, we were too late.

Mr. Martins-Manteiga wanted the "R" -- at $1.30 a tonne for steel, the scrapyard would have probably sold it for $5 -- for his museum.

We went away feeling sad.

"I felt it was important to at least save the sign," Mr. Martins-Manteiga said. "The sign was designed for the building."

I started missing the sign the other day after I rode past the refinery on my bike, on the way back from the Beaches, and saw it was gone. The corporate parent, Tate & Lyle PLC of the United Kingdom, has stuck its own name, each letter as big as a Buick, on the side of the city's famous refinery.

"In order to make it easier for our customers around the world to work with us, we put everything under the Tate & Lyle banner," explained Silvio Allamandi, president of thriving Tate & Lyle Canada. He said he did not consult anyone about the change. "We are very proud of our Redpath brand, and so our Redpath brand is very much alive on a sign on the west side of the building."

Personally, though, I can't see his point. Sure, Tate & Lyle has owned Redpath for many years, and they can do whatever they want. But the sign, the building, the factory, are part of our collective history. They left it alone for decades, so why trash it now?

John Redpath, whose name now lies in a heap of twisted scrap, was the Scotsman who settled in Quebec and turned Redpath into a vibrant refinery. When the St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959, Redpath was the first industry to move to Toronto, taking advantage of the waterway to bring its raw sugar ships right to the edge of its biggest market, Southern Ontario.

I love pointing out the refinery to my kids and telling them how sugar comes from the Caribbean on big ships and gets refined right near our house. Somehow, with the Redpath Sugar sign gone, it becomes just one more faceless industrial building.

"To replace that bold, red-blooded sign with that vapid, aenemic Tate & Lyle, is to emasculate it," Mr. Martins-Manteiga said. "It's gone."

Fairmont, the new owners of the Royal York Hotel, planned to take down the Royal York sign, but compromised after a public outcry and wrote "Fairmont Royal York." Similarly, we could have "Redpath Sugar" with "Tate & Lyle" underneath, especially given that the company plans to continue marketing sugar under the Redpath brand.

Our modern history, as Mr. Martins-Manteiga reminds us, is worth saving.

© National Post 2006
Click to expand...

The way it used to be *sniff*
234749-79630.jpg
 
I don't really mind Redpath that much. If anything, the Queen's Quay Loblaws is a far more atrocious land use.

That said, it would be prudent for the TWRC and the City to initate some sort of planning/visioning process for the site, so as to ironclad the desired built form when the day comes for redevelopment.

AoD
 
where will the kids learn about sugar? from coke dealers?

keep it.
 
Energy will never be so expensive that we have to worry about having a port in downtown Toronto, or whether our refined sugar is made downtown or in Stoney Creek. Keep in mind that the sugar comes from thousands of kilometers away in the first place...
 
Only if you import cane. Canadian grown beet, refined in Alberta for the western market, doesn't have to travel far. There used to be a large beet sugar refinery in Wiarton about a century ago.
 
Another point: the stench of unrefined sugar is bad. Not slaughter-house gagging vile, more like a body odor coming out of every pore persistent smell.
 
I always think it smells like mothers milk, sort of sicky sweet. But it's not bad when it wafts up on the same day they are roasting coffee at the market.
 
I would miss the ships in the Harbour. Maybe at some point large passenger vessels could take its place.
 
Probably a safe bet that they won't be from Rochester. I've heard that Great Lakes cruises may be making a comeback. It was quite popular once- before the Noronic disaster.
 
I'd love to take a cruise that takes in Thunder Bay and Chicago.
 
You can occasionally detect that sickly-sweer smell near the Lantic Sugar location in New Toronto. Not the most pleasant smell.
 
just to back up a bit.. it it me, or is this nostalgia totally insane?

I love pointing out the refinery to my kids and telling them how sugar comes from the Caribbean on big ships and gets refined right near our house. Somehow, with the Redpath Sugar sign gone, it becomes just one more faceless industrial building.

"To replace that bold, red-blooded sign with that vapid, aenemic Tate & Lyle, is to emasculate it," Mr. Martins-Manteiga said. "It's gone."
Click to expand...

I mean, if Adma thinks your modern-preservation sensibilities are too fine, then probably you've gone a bit too far. (No offence.)
 
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