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Queen W & Portland fire

Fascinating collection of photos in that report. I don't see why the principles outlined can't be applied to new streets to create vibrant new urban areas. Why should "heritage districts" be the only vibrant pedestrian-friendly areas of town? Why are we resigned to towers on podiums that offer little at the street level?
 
Oh man. It was a conservation DISTRICT.

Yea – there was no way anyone could have touched those buildings legally. EVER.

Fires don’t just start in old ass buildings that have lived through crazy bare wiring and pre-safety 1950s.

I’d need to check out where the parking lot is in relation to the buildings that will need to be brought down because they’re unstable, but I’m leaning strongly to the side of mystery fire that will turn out to be a blessing for a developer a few years from now.

No one would go in and develop right away. Watch it happen in a few years when it can be plausibly denied.

</tinfoil hat>


AlvinofDiaspar said:
Here is the Queen Street West Heritage Plan:

http://www.toronto.ca/heritage-preservation/pdf/queen_hcd_plan_full_18aug06.pdf
(~10MB)

AoD
Click to expand...

Is it the Bathurst end that went up? Or the Portland end? If you lose a significant amount of what gives an area character, it would be far easier legally to challenge a designation


Hopefully this shakes the city up into doing a better job of everything and take real pride in the city, not just studies.
 
Suspicious indeed.
Click to expand...

I don't know about that. I'm actually surprised by how few of these ticking time bomb retail/tenement blocks actually go off.
 
True. While I love looking at old retail spaces on Queen West everyone I lived in had something scarily wrong with wiring, crazy live wires everywhere, structural problems caused by tennants/shop owners knocking out walls, dangerous molds giving me migraines daily, blah blah blah. I've lived above three Queen West retail shops and the one I liked was sold for a few million bucks.

Hilarious reading BlogTO just now with some loon saying Home Depot is to blame! More likely some grungy tenant in a basement unit lit his couch on fire while smoking.....
 
I work in the big office tower at 555 Richmond Street behind the fire scene (which some of you probably think is so ugly that it deserves to be burned down). Going south on Bathurst in the morning I almost did think that it was my workplace that was on fire. Thankfully it wasn't (although all the corridors and elevator shafts smelled of smoke).

Here are my some of my photos of the fire... (the rest are found here on Flickr)

8:00 am

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Around 12 noon

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Thanks, Wylie.

Many of those photos with the ice buildup are strangely beautiful and post-apocalyptic.

How far west would you say the damage spread?
 
I didn't really get a close look at the west end of the fire, so I really can't say. When I was on the Bathurst side in the morning I was peering above people's heads and the fire trucks. At noon there was still way too much smoke to determine exactly how much damage was done.
 
Thanks for the pictures Wylie.

A report on CBC news at about 6.45 tonight said that some flames were still burning. Some of the building facades have already been pulled down. The rest are probably structurally unsafe and I wouldn't expect any of them to be salvaged.

urbandreamer said:
While I love looking at old retail spaces on Queen West everyone I lived in had something scarily wrong with wiring, crazy live wires everywhere, structural problems caused by tennants/shop owners knocking out walls, dangerous molds giving me migraines daily, blah blah blah.
Click to expand...

This is true. I like heritage buildings as much as anyone, and am sorry to lose any of them. But they are usually lacking in features which would be expected today, including especially firewalls between units. The places that burned today probably had interconnected attics, no firewalls, 100-year-old wooden frames and flooring which would be very dry and flammable, and maybe poor wiring. I've seen similar situations.
 
Well, don't blame Home Depot. Why would they start something that many stores down, unless they knew for sure it would spread throughout the block?

Anyway, I can't help thinking of the perfect person to both live and work on that block...
cbgseat.gif

Worst. Conflagration. Ever.
 
Didnt anyone catch this on the Toronto Star website this morning?

Chemical, biological and nuclear response teams are also preparing for a possible explosion, said Toronto Emergency Services spokesperson Lyla Miller. An emergency shelter has been set up at 155 Crawford St.

Things that make you go hmmm .....
 
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