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

Urban Shocker said:
Do we know for a fact that the temporary space is smaller? Maybe it is bigger. The veggies and antiques won't shrink, whatever size they build the new North Market.
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The hall, itself, of the north market is 10,000 sf. The temporary space will be the parking lot south of the south market. No, we don't know for a fact that this parking lot is smaller. But it appears that it is. As you said, maybe it's bigger.

We may be jumping the gun assuming Red will be chosen, but if it is I am very confident that a good variety of veggies and antiques of varying sizes will be able to be on decent display.
 
UrbanVigor said:
The hall, itself, of the north market is 10,000 sf. The temporary space will be the parking lot south of the south market. No, we don't know for a fact that this parking lot is smaller. But it appears that it is. As you said, maybe it's bigger.

We may be jumping the gun assuming Red will be chosen, but if it is I am very confident that a good variety of veggies and antiques of varying sizes will be able to be on decent display.
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The temporary market WILL be a bit smaller than the present North Market but vendors will also be able to use the area outside South Market along Jarvis Street. Details are at: http://www.toronto.ca/stlawrence_market/design/pdf/esplanadereport.pdf
 
A few years ago the Sunday Antique Market used to set up inside the South Market if the North Market was booked by some other concern. A bit cramped, with some nasty food smells.
 
Here's an interesting editorial from the newest issue of The Bulletin newspaper regarding this project. The author obviously has a lot of anger about the way the project has evolved, but I don't have enough background on the issues to understand whether it is fully justified. I personally agree with his dislike of having the parking enter off already-gridlocked Jarvis, but I disagree that the design should be built with a faux-historic stone and brick exterior as per some 1990s (!!!) resolution. Also of note, the author pegs the Red design as the inevitable winner, as do many of the posters here.

City bureaucrats pull a fast one on us
http://thebulletin.ca/cbulletin/con...0188076702012307697&ctid=1000136&cnid=1002475

By Frank Touby

All the hoopla about a new St. Lawrence North Market design belies an ugly truth about city hall. It’s populated with deceivers and obstructers paid for by your tax money. Locals have been tricked by high-paid bureaucrats who have been scrambling to feather their nests and stake out their turfs while pretending to consult with residents about how to shape the new North Market.

Locals took it to heart, believing that butt-covering, empire-building city bureaucrats would actually do something first on behalf of the neighbourhood where the North Market is a fixture, then on behalf of the wider city it also serves.

Over the duration of the “pubic consultation” some 50 well-intentioned and thoughtful area residents and business operators met many times with city-hall operatives from 1998 to this year.

They would have better spent their time picking up the trash on the streets and other public places as once was done frequently by city workers in the pre-Miller days before a broom became the symbol of sweeping incompetence out of sight.

Certainly there’s a long-standing need to revamp the undistinguished ‘60s-era box across from the historic treasure that is St. Lawrence Market. The vibrant neighbourhood of businesses and homes that centre on the Market is dominated by city-hall department warlords who take up an unacceptable amount of public space in the under-serviced business and residential district.

What it has is too much city government: an entire retail strip is rendered useless on the south side of The Esplande west of Jarvis. It seats the butts of bureaucrats in the city licensing silo. The entire second floor of historic St. Lawrence Hall has been vandalized by two city departments that ripped out the old to replace it with modern new construction. Despite years of soothing talk by Councillor Pam McConnell that they’ll be gone, they’re still in place.

She also paid lip service to freeing the Market complex from the strangling bureaucracy of the city real estate and property silo. Sadly, like too many on this city council, she seemingly considers staff part of her constituency. And city hall types don’t like to give up any turf, especially a toy as much fun as St. Lawrence Market and St. Lawrence Hall.

The result is that managers on the ground haven’t enough autonomy to do their jobs effectively and can only hire staff from city hall, while competitors (such as Evergreen Brick Works with a Saturday farmers market) can outperform any city-hall operation.

Making the Market complex an independent city-owned agency (as are Sony Centre, various arenas and other city-owned facilities) would enable it to hire competent staff instead of whomever city hall or the union decide has to be positioned.

Locals looked forward to some public space that could house various local initiatives and services. Many creative ideas were proffered at these citizen-bureaucrat confabs. Much self-serving obstruction was proposed by the city-hall departmental silos, especially the inept city parks department that couldn’t open a wading pool during the start of a horrid heat wave last month but waxed poetic about how it couldn’t spare an inch of the poorly maintained, often trash-strewn Market Lane “park.” That’s the slab with a planter, benches and fountain between the North Market and Market Square condo.

Few of the local participants in the “consultation” process about the future of the North Market want to be quoted. Many views of those who would speak off the record are reflected above. They say that once the bureaucrats made it an $800,000 international design competition, they knew their input had been in vain. That’s a bureaucrat’s way of washing away local perspectives to appear bold, international and inclusive.

What the locals wanted was, first of all, to retain the historic external materials of the Market’s era: stone, brick. That was in a resolution proposed in the 1990s by Tim Burns and unanimously adopted by his fellow members of the St. Lawrence Neighbourhood Association. The idea was that the building would last through the centuries, as the one to the south will do. The modernistic glass and metal the chosen architects have proposed would go the way of the ’60-era modernistic crap it would replace.

As for uses, the community has lost bigtime. If it’s built according to any of these showpiece plans, there will be four storeys of a luxury courthouse, plus a massive front-of-the-second-floor room for police (who already have a station down the street).

Because of the parks department bureaucrats, the entrance to the underground parking wouldn’t be from King Street. It would be a monster traffic-jamming slope off busy Jarvis.

This is true if city hall has its way. If you disagree with the choices, which you can see online at www.toronto.ca/stlawrence_market/design/, be sure to let Pam McConnell know. She’s certain—perhaps deservedly because she does work hard—to be reelected, since she has name recognition and that means “unbeatable” the way this city is run.

The bureaucracy will annnounce a “winning” design June 7. That doesn’t mean it has to be built. There’s going to be a new mayor in October and maybe a new and better city-hall regime. As for the public vote on a selection: Figure that the likely already chosen winner will be the Red design.

2010-06-03 20:46:50
 
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Several of the designs ( most notably the "Yellow"and "Green" teams' proposals ) do, in fact, reference the building materials of the earlier Market’s era. So, given how involved this person says the "locals" are with their community, they'll presumably have voted in large numbers for either of those designs.
 
I do hope the rumours about the red design being chosen are true.

After reading over who the architects were I definitely see Richard Rogers at work here. Slight hints to his past projects such as Lloyd's and the Pompidou centre, some of my favourite buildings anywhere. It would be great to have a piece of that in Toronto.
 
CityPainter said:
Here's an interesting editorial from the newest issue of The Bulletin newspaper regarding this project. The author obviously has a lot of anger about the way the project has evolved, but I don't have enough background on the issues to understand whether it is fully justified. I personally agree with his dislike of having the parking enter off already-gridlocked Jarvis, but I disagree that the design should be built with a faux-historic stone and brick exterior as per some 1990s (!!!) resolution. Also of note, the author pegs the Red design as the inevitable winner, as do many of the posters here.
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Seems to be squarely in the radical-right "angry taxpayer" realm of urban thinking, sort of like a cross between the Toronto Sun and City Journal. Makes Stig Harvor look like a softy.

Sad thing is, this is how certain people would like to spin the opposition to 204 Beech, or "hysterical preservationists" in general...
 
adma said:
Seems to be squarely in the radical-right "angry taxpayer" realm of urban thinking, sort of like a cross between the Toronto Sun and City Journal. Makes Stig Harvor look like a softy. Sad thing is, this is how certain people would like to spin the opposition to 204 Beech, or "hysterical preservationists" in general...
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Having an Editorial in the Bulletin written against something is probably a "Badge of Honour" and a strong indication that the subject is a Good Thing. The 'editorials' in the Bulletin are almost invariably poorly researched, badly written and usually wrong-headed! You can read older ones at: http://www.thebulletin.ca/cbulletin/index.jsp The only useful and interesting columns in the 'newspaper' are Bruce Bell's history essays.
 
Which, I suppose, makes Bruce Bell a higher-minded Mike Filey, i.e. mass-appeal Toronto historiography coopted as an All In The Family "Those Were The Days" theme for the grumpy grumblies out there...
 
By "Adamson assoc. & Rogers Stirk Harbour and partners". (I'm not at the announcement, but the Mayor appears to have mastered speaking & tweeting at the same time.)
 
Adamson Associates Architects and Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners

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I love it.
 
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