Toronto Clear Spirit | 131.36m | 40s | Cityscape | a—A

One of the more fascinating aspects of this thread is how often people have tried to link what is happening in this unique site to what has happened, or has not happened, in other quite different sites which have different histories, owners, purposes etc.
 
interchange42 said:
Yawn.

Fort York is publicly owned. That's different. See the politics subforum here.

BTW, there were fights about allowing tall buildings south of Fort York on the other side of the Gardiner too.
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I don't care how tall the buildings are...it doesn't really matter. You can't dispose of my comments that way since I've said a few times in this thread that arguing the proposed condos are inappropriately tall is a bit silly and baseless.

There were no fights about new buildings inside a historic site like Fort York, which is a completely different argument, one that's being mostly ignored while one side says "they're too close/tall!" and the other says "no they're not...and we're more right than you!"
 
Indeed, alklay. It matched syn's quip about there being no precedents for high rise buildings in the Distillery and his idee fixe concerning the glories of windowless Rack House 'M' ( which adma has now backed off of ).
 
Urban Shocker said:
Indeed, alklay. It matched syn's quip about there being no precedents for high rise buildings in the Distillery and his idee fixe concerning the glories of windowless Rack House 'M' ( which adma has now backed off of ).
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I'm curious just how far gone Rackhouse M is. I have a hard time believing it's beyond redemption considering some of the properties that have been restored.

As one of the largest buildings in a historic district, the city should require the developer does whatever is possible to salvage it. It's quite easy to dismiss the windowless building, but as alkay as pointed out one could make the same argument for the "rebirth" of every building in the District. Unforunately, it would no longer be a historic district anymore.

Razing a building and then putting some of the old bricks in it's replacement is not a reincarnation, no matter how one tries to spin it.
 
But nobody is making the same argument for the rebirth of every building in the district, least of all the developer and their architects, since it is an architecturally listed site. The Incredible Hulk is being redeemed by it's new use. Therein lies it's salvation. It bites the dust ... and rises again as something better. :)
 
scarberiankhatru said:
Glorious or not, it's not being kept, and that's all that matters.
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Why does it matter? Nothing of social, political or cultural significance occured in it. It is not architecturally unique, or rare. Not every old building needs to be preserved just because it is old. And it's not particularly old at that.
 
ELIZA said:
Why does it matter? Nothing of social, political or cultural significance occured in it. It is not architecturally unique, or rare. Not every old building needs to be preserved just because it is old. And it's not particularly old at that.
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It's a national historic site. We've gone through this before.
 
5 reasons why these buildings should be welcome here.

Taken today at 5:30pm. Where is everybody? Hmmm summers over and the tour buses have left our little pioneer village. The bar staff told me that many of the stores in the area are for sale and that most of the girls are on their last week of work until next summer if they come back. But no, save the M block! yes it was cool today and the first day of school and work, but when I left here after 6:30 the patios in Cabbage Town and Little Italy were packed as usual.

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Perhaps if I drank a few thousand of these they wouldn't need to build in the Distillery but lets be real, the only way this place has a future is if it has it's own population.
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Sorry, but the few hundred people who will live there won't keep the businesses afloat in the off-season, either...they'd have the same individual impact as someone living in one of the thousands of West Don Lands units across the street.
 
scarberiankhatru said:
It's a national historic site. We've gone through this before.
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And I think there, aside from the merits (or not) of the hulk, we come full circle back to the subtext of why, in the end, the *entire* Distillery District might have been ill-conceived and ill-starred from the start, at least from a particular fine-tuned heritage POV, i.e. it ain't in the execution, baby, it's in the seed.

That's why, contrary to the "nobody's claimed" claim a bit further down this thread, *I've* wondered out loud if, maybe, a museum+institutional uses solution might have been better, insofar as it's more befitting a "national historic site". So...re
Fort York is publicly owned. That's different. See the politics subforum here.
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maybe if G&W were placed to a greater extent in public hands, we'd see something more heritage-POV satisfactory and self-justifying to boot. (Unfortunately, the DD came about in an age when the overriding merits of private-hands solutions were fetishized beyond belief, and "public" was correspondingly stigmatized.)
 
The area has a nearby population, though not a big one. Will three condo towers suddenly make the area jump to life as a 24-hour happenin' place? Does Little Italy depend on condos to make it work? No, it attracts people from all over due to it being established as a nightlife centre, though the local population (plus nearby U of T), good transit connections and easy accessibility help.

There's two different, mutually inexclusive things going on. Is the Distillery marketed right? Is the tenant mix working? Will three intrusive condo buildings save the district? But are the new residental buildings done in a way to happily co-exist with the old, or is demolition and overbearing towers the only way to make it work?

I don't see it as an either-or thing here, though some seem to frame it that way.

The area will get its resident population once East Bayfront and West Don Lands start to fill with people as well, though that will take more time.
 
Thank you, Adma.

You've just proved an important point.

Thousands of new residents will INDEED make a difference.

(And their friends, and their famliies and their out-of-town visitors).

It's all about density.
 
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