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An application for Site Plan Approval has been submitted to the City of Toronto for the redevelopment of 60 Birmingham Street, a large and mostly rectangular industrial site located in Etobicoke’s New Toronto neighbourhood, for industrial warehouse use.
Proposed by QuadReal Property Group, with Weston Consulting as planners and designed by Ware Malcomb Architecture, the project consists of three one-storey industrial warehouse buildings that will replace eight smaller industrial buildings that collectively served as the former Campbell Soup Factory, operative from 1931 to 2014 when the company announced the plant’s permanent closure.
The site is located in the southeast corner of the Provincially Significant Employment Zone (PSEZ) 13 and is bounded by Birmingham Street to the south, Dwight Avenue to the east, New Toronto Street to the north, and Third Street, the Toronto Police College, and Daily Bread Food Bank properties to the west.
The total area of the industrial lot spans some 76,085 m² and will accommodate approximately 35,096 m² of industrial ground floor area and 1858 m² of office space across all three buildings. Building 2 and Building 3 will be connected by a corridor on site’s eastern frontage along Dwight Avenue. Buildings 2 and 3 will occupy 11,210 m² and 11,092 m² of ground floor area respectively, with Building 1, a slightly larger structure, at 14,651 m².
While the site is neither a designated nor listed heritage property on the City of Toronto Heritage registry, a facade retention, rebuilding, and repair strategy is being proposed along the development’s Birmingham Street frontage to retain the original structure’s red brick facades that were built between 1930 and 1944.
The retention strategy also includes the removal of a mainly precast metal addition from the 1980s that covered a portion of the brick facade built in the 1940s.
The proposed modern facades are to include a mix of insulated metal panels in a palette of grey and white tones that have been selected to provide a muted facade that is sensitive to the surrounding residential neighbourhoods views of the site, and to defer to the the heritage sections.
The redevelopment will provide on-site parking for 285 cars, of which 28 will be reserved for office related uses. A total of 86 loading dock spaces are proposed as part of the redevelopment to support typical warehouse distribution operations. As such, both truck level and drive-in door spaces are spread across each structure, yet strategically located in central locations so as to minimize views and excessive noise from the abutting residential neighbourhood streets.
Additional information about this development can be found in our associated Forum thread, where you can join in on the conversation. You may also leave a comment in the space provided on this page.
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