bengaijin
Active Member
Which means "We know exactly who did it, or at least ordered it, but they covered their tracks well enough that we can't make it stick."
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Which means "We know exactly who did it, or at least ordered it, but they covered their tracks well enough that we can't make it stick."
Northern Magus
Active Member
On the topic of the Empress site, I'd love to see a requirement to rebuild the hotel's facade as the podium for whatever goes up there.
In exchange for lots of density.
In exchange for lots of density.
Red October
Senior Member
Make the arsonist owners pay to rebuild it brick by brick. Or at least the facade.
Ladies Mile
Active Member
I had an interesting discussion with a graphic designer friend who argued that the merits of Yonge Street lie not in the architecture but in the signage that many feel spoils the architecture. In summation, he found more visual engagement and also more historical detail in the facade-sized signage than he did the buildings they covered or replaced.
It seems with the passing of the Sam's sign and the encroachment of a certain number of chains a large chunk of this aspect has been and continues to be lost. But does it make sense to reevaluate the street in terms of it anti-architecture--the street as a spool of text?
It does occur to me that the original "signed" quality of Times Square has been largely replaced and that Yonge-style signage--once common in many cities--has either been demolished or gentrified out of existence. The only place that I can remember feeling had a distinct visual similarity as regards the signs and the frontage in downtown Newark--which is not a place I would otherwise compare with Toronto.
A viable aesthetic argument or the fetishizing of commercialism?
It seems with the passing of the Sam's sign and the encroachment of a certain number of chains a large chunk of this aspect has been and continues to be lost. But does it make sense to reevaluate the street in terms of it anti-architecture--the street as a spool of text?
It does occur to me that the original "signed" quality of Times Square has been largely replaced and that Yonge-style signage--once common in many cities--has either been demolished or gentrified out of existence. The only place that I can remember feeling had a distinct visual similarity as regards the signs and the frontage in downtown Newark--which is not a place I would otherwise compare with Toronto.
A viable aesthetic argument or the fetishizing of commercialism?
Urban Shocker
Doyenne
Congratulations to your friend for knowing enough of what's beneath the signage to make such a judgement.
The buildings - as buildings, not as fascias for large advertising billboards - were there first, of course, and I'm delighted that their collective heft as streetscape is now gradually being reinstated, here and there, ahead of their transitory value as vehicles for commercial hucksterism. What's emerging is a nice surprise, even though the frontages are often quite humble and of the generic, red brick Victorian ilk. I think that as reclamations happen elsewhere - Spadina south of College, maybe, and Queen east and west - a once-hidden city will emerge anew. The competitive nature of the signage, where we see each commercial venture in isolation, has tended to overshadow their collective value.
Tewder
Senior Member
... and yet what would Picadilly or Place Pigalle or Times Square be without glitzy lights and bold signage? There is a heritage significance to this landscape too, the image of the big city that has come to define the pre-digital, twentieth-century notion of 'downtown'. To my mind this probably supersedes any heritage value in the underlaying buildings, no matter how much I love projects like 5condos. In the end the beauty of 'downtown' is/was its vibrancy, theatricality and ability to embrace everything from the sublime to the profane within one crass neon stew. I wish a little more of this was being preserved for Yonge Street between Queen and Bloor... and not to say that there shouldn't be exceptions where appropriate, only that the area's original character is slowly but surely slipping away through spreading gentrification and the encroachment of Ryerson etc.
Ladies Mile
Active Member
My natural inclination is for buildings over signs, but given his argument, the possibly unique status of Yonge as a collection of design-in-advertising and the (to speak honestly) rather meager interest afforded by most of the original buildings, I think it might be a valid point.
The real question is whether you can preserve something never meant to be static in an architectural sense. If Sam's is gone, how do we keep the sign? Obviously in the site-specific sense we didn't: and maybe we can't.
Tewder
Senior Member
I believe that the Sam sign should be preserved on Yonge Street as an art installation/heritage monument... and maybe others could be added as reproductions? There are many places along Yonge between Queen and Bloor where this could be done... as an example something could be done with the blank facade facing Dundas Square on the proposed highrise at 21 Victoria. Otherwise, it is largely an issue of being careful to preserve the commercial/media function of the Yonge/Dundas area in all of its crass glory. Toronto Life Square and the Torch help to keep this tradition going at least, and this for me is what helps redeem the lack of 'Architecture' in these ridiculous buildings.
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Urban Shocker
Doyenne
Well, the garishness of Piccadilly is actually now more in the imagination than in reality, because many of the signs have been removed over the years and the architecture beneath them rediscovered. But once the bigger picture - the transitory nature of horror vacui and advertising culture as a model for our public spaces - is accepted, and I think that there's a progressive tide in the affairs of cities such as ours that's leading that way, we'll see more such reclamations.
Urban Shocker
Doyenne
Did your friend give any examples, other than Sam The Record Man ( as we used to call it )?
Does this person prefer the two storey corporate Aldo billboard that covers 332 Yonge to the building beneath it, or the two storey corporate Ardene billboard that covers 334 Yonge to the building beneath it, or the two storey corporate Sunrise Records / Pink Floyd billboard that covers 336 Yonge to the building beneath it, or the two storey American Apparel billboard that covers 338 Yonge to the building beneath it, for instance? Does he think the Foot Locker sign on the front of John Lyle's 340 Yonge ( the Thornton-Smith Building ) improves it?
And, getting away from the frontages that are now corporate billboards, what buildings with more modest examples of graphic / typographic design on them does your friend hold dear, compared to the unadorned buildings themselves? As a designer myself, I'm all for visually appealing and sympathetic combinations of structure and message.
adma
Superstar
One problem with this whole argument (esp. when it royally encompasses Yonge from Queen to Bloor) is that "Pop Yonge" has really only been historically concentrated around the Yonge/Dundas/Gould node; and that's now being addressed through Y-D Square's "Times Square" zoning. So, Kyle Rae answered all of this long before this thread was started.
The rest of Yonge--sure, it has and has had its signs; but not to the same overwhelming degree (and so what; so did other commercial strips like Bloor, Dundas, Queen, etc), and enough of its Victoriana remained urbanistically palpable so that it already made the THB Inventory in the 70s. (Indeed, the de facto first victory of the "sign removers" was none other than the now fire-demised Reynolds/Empress/Edison block.)
I think US's point re the block across from the Sam's sign is pertinent; because aside from Thornton-Smith (and maybe the ghost of the 50s Times Square building at Yonge & Edward--probably more than the ghost of whatever Victorian or Moderne was effaced by Pizza Pizza), everything there is pure disposable/dispensible retail anonymity of the last quarter century--externalized mall retail, nothing more, nothing less. The buildings being covered there are now, effectively, non-buildings; so, discussions of Victorian or Edwardian heritage are moot...
The rest of Yonge--sure, it has and has had its signs; but not to the same overwhelming degree (and so what; so did other commercial strips like Bloor, Dundas, Queen, etc), and enough of its Victoriana remained urbanistically palpable so that it already made the THB Inventory in the 70s. (Indeed, the de facto first victory of the "sign removers" was none other than the now fire-demised Reynolds/Empress/Edison block.)
I think US's point re the block across from the Sam's sign is pertinent; because aside from Thornton-Smith (and maybe the ghost of the 50s Times Square building at Yonge & Edward--probably more than the ghost of whatever Victorian or Moderne was effaced by Pizza Pizza), everything there is pure disposable/dispensible retail anonymity of the last quarter century--externalized mall retail, nothing more, nothing less. The buildings being covered there are now, effectively, non-buildings; so, discussions of Victorian or Edwardian heritage are moot...
Tewder
Senior Member
... yet the signage on the North/Shaftesbury side remains. Was this deliberate? After all, that view of advertising billboards is as iconic to Piccadilly as the statue of Eros. Perhaps it is all more in balance now, in preserving aspects of the different layers of heritage that make up an evolving space?
... and context is important too. In the traditional commercial node that is the Yonge/Dundas area it is in fact perhaps less 'progressive' to dismiss certain aspects of the cultural heritage as unworthy of preservation because lowbrow or distasteful, a dangerous assessment from a heritage point of view that may prove equally as transitory.
howl
Active Member
There is room for both with a large city. Most streets and avenues in Toronto should have modest signage and attractive buildings, but in the Dundas Square area and along adjacent sections of Yonge Street an exception can be made. Failing to create exceptions for distinctive local character areas is a poor way to do urban design. The key criterion for allowing this type of architecture/urban-design is if the area is entirely commercial and largely retail in nature, including the upper floors of all the buildings. This kind of architecture/urban-design is NOT appropriate for any location where there are people living above the street level.
Hipster Duck
Senior Member
I see your point, Ladies Mile, but I don't necessarily agree.
The halcyon days of the Yonge street strip, from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s, was always about a certain urban character rather than aesthetic. The aesthetic was a response to that character, and almost nothing exists of the original. Retaining the historic facades is, to me, a bit dishonest, since they never played any role in the Yonge street we knew and loved (they were covered up in neon ads), and, with few exceptions (like that Moorish building beside Zanzibar) are not particularly noteworthy.
Yonge street's character is long gone largely because it was of a time and place that is long gone. The Yonge street of Going down the Road was sort of that ne plus ultra of North American cosmopolitanism of the late 1960s which involved a comingling of the intellectual and the carnal pursuits: late night book and record stores adjacent to porno theatres; the porno theatres, however, showing films that might end up to be cult classics, while the book stores dabbling in their share of smut. When I think about it, Playboy magazine captured the essence of this culture very well, with its topless photos sandwiched between interviews with notable authors. It was all very exciting back in those days, but it doesn't hold up in today's world where sex, sexuality and intellectualism are conceived very differently.
Other than the Bohemian village around Gerrard street which was demolished to make way for hospital loading docks and parking lots, it's hard to think of a neighbourhood which has had the life sucked out of it quite as much as the Yonge street strip. Adma's right: it's low end mall retail in mediocre buildings; whatever commercialism is left over is of the crassest, most unimaginative kind (backlit posters for American apparel that are basically newspaper ads blown up 500X and printed on vinyl). I think Yonge between Dundas and Gerrard is the second cheesiest street in Ontario after Clifton Hill, and at least in the latter's case it admits to being a tourist trap in a tourist trap city, without ever having had the distinction of being the main commercial street for a major city.
The halcyon days of the Yonge street strip, from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s, was always about a certain urban character rather than aesthetic. The aesthetic was a response to that character, and almost nothing exists of the original. Retaining the historic facades is, to me, a bit dishonest, since they never played any role in the Yonge street we knew and loved (they were covered up in neon ads), and, with few exceptions (like that Moorish building beside Zanzibar) are not particularly noteworthy.
Yonge street's character is long gone largely because it was of a time and place that is long gone. The Yonge street of Going down the Road was sort of that ne plus ultra of North American cosmopolitanism of the late 1960s which involved a comingling of the intellectual and the carnal pursuits: late night book and record stores adjacent to porno theatres; the porno theatres, however, showing films that might end up to be cult classics, while the book stores dabbling in their share of smut. When I think about it, Playboy magazine captured the essence of this culture very well, with its topless photos sandwiched between interviews with notable authors. It was all very exciting back in those days, but it doesn't hold up in today's world where sex, sexuality and intellectualism are conceived very differently.
Other than the Bohemian village around Gerrard street which was demolished to make way for hospital loading docks and parking lots, it's hard to think of a neighbourhood which has had the life sucked out of it quite as much as the Yonge street strip. Adma's right: it's low end mall retail in mediocre buildings; whatever commercialism is left over is of the crassest, most unimaginative kind (backlit posters for American apparel that are basically newspaper ads blown up 500X and printed on vinyl). I think Yonge between Dundas and Gerrard is the second cheesiest street in Ontario after Clifton Hill, and at least in the latter's case it admits to being a tourist trap in a tourist trap city, without ever having had the distinction of being the main commercial street for a major city.
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Tewder
Senior Member
I don't think we should ring the death knell quite yet. Yes, we can get our porn and music on line now but this doesn't have to mean the end of a dynamic Yonge Street, as witnessed by the fact that legions of people are still very much drawn to the area as they still are to Times Square and other such places. In fact the biggest threat to Yonge/Dundas vibrancy is not an honest Clifton Hill-type garishness at all but the muddled efforts to 'gentrify' that dilute the character of what the area is which is my issue with the encroachment of Ryerson. Go big or go home, in other words!