I'm not sure this is the place to mention it, but there has been talk for years about the need for a 'Museum of Toronto'. Old City Hall has been proposed as a potential location for this museum in light of the transfer of the Ontario Courts of Justice to their new home on Armoury St., but I wonder if there might not be a better location for this museum? The recently vacated Nordstrom department store at the north end of the Eaton Center comes to mind, and there are several reasons why I think this might be a better choice. For one thing, though Old City Hall is an exceptional specimen of late 19th-century Romanesque Revival architecture, its interior may not be best suited to the needs of a modern museum which requires large open gallery spaces that can also direct visitor flow and be easily reconfigured for changing exhibits. Old City Hall, with its fixed interior walls and architectural elements, may be more constraining than a newer, large, multi-floor building whose vast interior spaces are much more amenable to change and that can also amply accommodate a modern museum's needs for theatrical, curatorial and storage space, as well as room for a potential restaurant, cafe, and book/gift shop. The site is also large enough that it would be able to meet the museum's future growth well into this century. Though both locales are well-positioned in terms of public access and prominence, the Nordstrom site, with its direct access to the Eaton Centre's throngs of visitors as well as the Dundas subway station and its prime location overlooking the often frenetic Dundas Square, comes out ahead IMO. Yes, the site would certainly require modification, both inside and out, but I believe this would still be less costly(and less destructive) than converting Old City Hall, and I'm certain that if the city played its cards right, it could negotiate a favourable long-term leasing arrangement with CF. There is also precedent with similar conversions of commercial to institutional buildings, including Ottawa's much out-of-the-way 'National Museum of Science and Technology', which occupies a building that was once a food processing plant(bakery), as well as a recent proposal by the city of Berlin to establish a central public library in the soon-to-be-vacated 'Galeries Lafayette' department store on Friedrichstrasse, in that city's Mitte district. I know there have been proposals for a waterpark or some other transient type attraction for the Nordstrom site, but at a time when the city is experiencing such unprecedented growth and change, a 'Museum of Toronto' here would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something really big, in a space large and prominent enough to enable it to tell its ongoing story to the world.