National Post
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ROM asks city to waive fee for Crystal overhang
$2,400 Annually
Lisa Varano
National Post
Friday, January 05, 2007
The Royal Ontario Museum has asked the city to waive its $2,400 annual rent on the piece of the sky above Bloor Street sliced by architect Daniel Libeskind's famed Crystal.
The ROM has paid the fee three times, beginning in 2004, for the Crystal's encroachment over the Bloor sidewalk. The centrepiece of the Renaissance ROM renewal project, the Crystal extends about four metres, 24 metres up, according to a city report.
The ROM decided to ask for the waiver in writing in September because informal requests had been unsuccessful, said chief operating officer Meg Beckel.
"We felt that a $2,400-a-year charge was unreasonable given all that the ROM is giving back to the city as a result of the Renaissance ROM project," Ms. Beckel said.
The Michael Lee-Chin Crystal will open in June. Mr. Libeskind, known for designing the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Freedom Tower for the former site of the World Trade Center in New York, was chosen to design a landmark building for the ROM in 2002.
He famously sketched the jutting lines of the Crystal on a napkin; the ROM now mischievously offers reproduction napkins with the design in its gift shop.
ROM has applied for the fee to be waived and the request is now before the city's legal team.
Angie Antoniou, manager of right-of-way management for the city, said a city bylaw requires fees for encroachment into public space. The ROM fee is "based on the market value assessment" of the public space the Crystal occupies, she said.
Other institutions have had to pay for encroachment, said Ms. Antoniou. The most recent example is a footbridge at Ryerson University. A footbridge connecting the Eaton Centre to the Bay Centre is also subject to an encroachment fee.
Ms. Antoniou said she does not know of any case in which a request for an encroachment fee to be waived was made.
She said the city's lawyers are examining the ROM's request, but could not say when the museum will get its answer.
"It shouldn't take long," she said. "It depends on the nature of the request and the nature of the response that they have to provide us."
David J. Lieberman, who teaches urban design at the University of Toronto's faculty of architecture and is a practising architect, said encroachment charges are very common.
He said fees of this kind could be lifted as a gesture to all public institutions, but the Crystal fee should not be waived as an exclusive favour to the ROM.
"It demonstrates a fairly low cost way in which the city can be very supportive of the public institutions, but I would say equally," he said. "It would be very generous and, I think, responsible of the city."
However, Professor Scott Thomas Sorli, an expert in art gallery architecture at the University of Toronto, said everyone, including ROM, should pay for encroachment.
"Any institution who wishes to build into that public space of the street is, in a sense, antiurban," he said. "The architecture could have been done within the footprint of the ROM itself, as opposed to cantilevering over the street."
Toronto adopted the Culture Plan for the Creative City in 2003 to promote economic development over 10 years. City councillors decided to invest in culture to create economic growth and make Toronto an international cultural capital.
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Has this writer done much research before writing this article? The Freedom Tower is now more SOM than Libeskind's original design, and I've never really heard anybody call The Bay Queen Street the "Bay Centre".
Sorry for going off topic!
