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GWL Realty Advisors' plans for College Park are easily the most ambitious development project in Toronto since The Well. The landmark at the southwest corner of Yonge and College streets is one of the city's grandest complexes, with numerous features that make it an irreplaceable commercial heritage asset, even if it has been bastardized to a degree over the years, and even if it was never realized as grandly as the Eaton family originally intended. A new plan by its current owners looks to correct both the ill-conceived changes over the years, while also looking to honour more of the original grand plan.
UrbanToronto has already taken an initial look at the College Park redevelopment plans, published on July 8, when renderings and a press release were issued. Now, documents tied to the application answer many questions about the plans. There is too much to cover in one article, and we won't even pretend to summarize it all in this one, but below are more of the details that jump out quickly.
College Park was conceived in the 1920s as the grandest building in Toronto, if not the British Empire. Designed by Ross & Macdonald (the same firm behind the Royal York Hotel to which Eaton's full plan bares a strong resemblance), it was built between 1928 and 1930, the Great Depression curtailing its further development. Despite the economic hardship of the time, what was built was clad in Tyndall limestone, its interior was replete with European marble. The seven-storey, 56,000m², Art Moderne Eaton's College Street department store within was considered a palace, and its seventh level, with an auditorium, the Round Room restaurant, and further gathering spaces, became the social centre of the city.
At the same time, Eaton's continued to operate their Queen Street store just a few blocks south, but began planning a massive complex on that site which eventually morphed into the (continually morphing) Eaton Centre that persists and thrives despite the demise of Eaton's itself. The opening of the Eaton Centre in 1977 spelled the end for the College Street store, and changes to what was rechristened College Park began immediately, with a 244-unit apartment building being added above the single-storey south wing in 1978, and the demolition of the single-storey west wing for the 30-storey Maclean-Hunter office tower in 1984.
The original buildings are currently mostly retail on the lower ground level, partially retail on the upper ground level, offices on the department store's former second through sixth floors, and The Carlu event space on the seventh floor. Now named for its French designer, it opened in 2003, with GWL Realty Advisors having restored the social gathering spaces to their Art Deco glamour following the company's purchase of the complex in 2000.
Now, with the complex's centenary fast approaching, owner GWL Realty Advisors and their team are looking to add significant housing and other new program to the site through three towers rising above an expanded podium. The team includes Urban Strategies, Hariri Pontarini Architects, ERA Architects, Adamson Associates Architects, Public Work, and several other firms. While the towers are designed as a complementary modern addition to the complex, the expanded podium would takes its architectural cues from the original plans and the existing section.
The expanded podium was one of the most commented upon facets of our first story, with some wondering why while looking similar, it could not be an exact mirror image of the existing section. The answer comes in the architectural plans, showing what is going into each part of the expanded complex.
Looking southwest to the complex, above, and northeast to it, below, colour coding is used to show the programming of each element of the lower floors. The uncoloured towers are residential, coming in at 164,263m² of Gross Floor Area (GFA), and representing 244 rental replacement units, plus 2,090 new units across all three towers combined. The 2,090 new units would be a mixture of rental and condo suites, of as yet unspecified numbers of each. The purple amenity spaces, below, also make up part of the residential GFA.
Red indicates retail space: retail increases from the current lower ground floor and partial upper ground floor, to all of the ground floor plus most of the second floor as well. A daycare (in light green) takes up the remainder of the south end of the second floor. The new retail GFA would be 21,380m², while the daycare would be 1,482m² in area.
Orange indicates 'flexible commercial' space, also referred to as office space in the documents, on levels 3, 4, and most of 5 and 6. These levels, like the retail below them, are 'double height.' The office GFA would be 24,861m².
Light Blue indicates hotel space, taking up floors 3 through 11 of the newly expanded podium to the south. These levels are basically half the height of the commercial levels, and made up of hotel suites and associated facilities, meaning that more windows are necessary in the south podium than the existing north one so that each room gets light. While changing the proportion of wall to window, the new section is meant as a faithful variation on the theme of the existing section. The hotel GFA would be 18.801m².
Pink finishes off the colour palette above, indicating The Carlu, which will be further restored and expanded. The expanded Carlu would have a GFA of 5,517m².
To achieve everything above, a 13-stage plan has been crafted to guide the redevelopment, depicted in images below, with Stage 5 spread out and growing as concurrent work takes place on other stages.
While the stages proceed, there is no indication yet of which tenants would need to close or temporarily or permanently relocate, or for what duration.
Stage 5, starting above, is the construction of the north tower. The tower will eventually be home to the 244 rental replacement units for 424 Yonge Street... but that does not mean that those units will be ready before the existing rentals are demolished: that section of College Park is set to be demolished in Stages 7 and 8 as Stage 5 continues to rise.
No timeline for the stages is provided at this point, and indeed, the project is not yet approved, nor has its Site Plan Approval application been made at this point: construction would take place over years, may not start for years, and an eventually approved plan may differ from what you are seeing now.
Heights of the buildings caught a lot of attention in our first article, especially for the tallest of the towers, which has a height of 333.3m, which would make it the second tallest building in Canada after the Pinnacle One Yonge's SkyTower, and another 'suptertall' for Toronto. The height of that 96-storey building has not changed, but we are now recording the height of the south tower in comparison to how high it rises over the lower ground level at the south end of the complex; we now regard the 65-storey tower as being 231.67m high, up from 228.1m. There are no changes in how we record the 75-storey north tower at 265.23m. In the meantime, the new documentation provides a graphic comparison of the heights of these towers (orange, below) to some of those close by, whether built (faintly coloured), under construction (light blue), rejected (purple), or proposed (sky blue).
Another new image in the documentation shows the complex in context of the block it sits on, bounded by Yonge, College, Bay, and Gerrard streets, also noting the storey counts of neighbouring towers, whether built or proposed, if not their height. Notably, the image includes a block concept plan that imagines a potential future redevelopment of the 777 Bay Street tower (originally known as the Maclean-Hunter Building), demolishing the office building and with three residential towers in its place. The image does not constitute a finalized plan to move forward with a redevelopment of that part of the block.
There will be much more to say about the College Park redevelopment proposal as it moves through the planning process. For more renderings of the proposal, you can check out our previous story.
UrbanToronto will continue to follow progress on this development, but in the meantime, you can learn more about it from our Database file with yet more renderings, linked below. If you'd like, you can join in on the conversation in the associated Project Forum thread or leave a comment in the space provided on this page.
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UrbanToronto has a research service, UTPro, that provides comprehensive data on development projects in the Greater Golden Horseshoe — from proposal through to completion. We also offer Instant Reports, downloadable snapshots based on location, and a daily subscription newsletter, New Development Insider, that tracks projects from initial application.
| Related Companies: | Adamson Associates Architects, ERA Architects, Grounded Engineering Inc., Hariri Pontarini Architects, RWDI Climate and Performance Engineering, Urban Strategies Inc. |
