Toronto St Lawrence Market North | 25.3m | 5s | City of Toronto | Rogers Stirk Harbour

For those too afraid to venture into the scary dark park late at night, here’s some pictures of it for you.

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I used to live nearby years ago and while I wasn't afraid to pass through here, I remember that I always felt there was a certain "emptiness" to this immediate area at night. I think for Queer folks like myself, or women, or Black, Indigenous, or other minority groups, "emptiness" (or an absence of witnesses) in the city is not a good feeling especially if you have experienced casual racial, gendered, or homo/transphobic verbal abuse, cat-calling or even physical violence in situations just like like these, as so many of us have.
 
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Even just the skeleton of this building is infinitely better than that concrete shed that was there before. I'm no hater of brutalism but that thing was fugly.
 
spaced said:
Even just the skeleton of this building is infinitely better than that concrete shed that was there before. I'm no hater of brutalism but that thing was fugly.
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There is something more than just the fuglyness of that 70s building - the scale was all wrong.

AoD
 
Those 2 giant cement walls that a mural couldn't even make interesting was the worst part. When it existed I didn't even know if was a public space, I never set foot in it.
 
It was actually a brick-clad building, but it always felt like an afterthought. One positive thing about it was that you could still see St. Lawrence Hall's cupola from Front Street, which was likely deliberate in light of the 1970s renaissance of ideas like preserving view corridors in the city.

The new building preserves a view corridor through its atrium. It's nice that the idea of preserving the view wasn't forgotten over the decades.
 
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urbanexplorer said:
Interplay of old and new from this AM.

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Looking at these photos -- specifically, this view south along Jarvis -- it's nice to see how well the new market building matches and complements St Lawrence Hall in scale. The new structure relates quite nicely to the older. Their rooflines are well-matched, the cornice of St Lawrence Hall lining up nicely with the base of the uppermost floor of the new market building in a continuous line.
 
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