Toronto Photography Meetup Group

OK. I was wondering because we have offices in the same building.

has anything on the corner of yonge and gould lasted? the hot-dog joint, the restaurants, the shoe stores, now this sushi place is likely gone. that place is cursed it seems.

Salad King crushes them all.

Pun intended.

although salad king does fair well in comparison, i literally meant THE corner store.

that corner never has any luck, and is out of business in no time.

The storefront on the corner runs back to the area below the collapsed section

lol....RPI=Ryerson Polytechnical Institute

That's old skool. When I went there it was RPU now its just RU.

Tell me about it. I've probably got 30 work shirts that I can't wear, because of the branding changes.

20 points to whoever forsaw this morning's fire.

I bet you the owner set fire to it so he could build a fresh business premises complex

Either that, or squatters moved in over the Christmas break and had a fire going to stay warm. I never saw what I would have called security around the place.

I'm writing this from home, as Ryerson has been closed for the day. It would have been nice if they had informed me of the fact though, before they disabled all of the pass card readers

Watched it from home this morning. It was massive.

Suspicious? Why? Just because it happened 1 week before the City was going to decide upon a reconstruction timeline that would have saved the building the owners didn't want? What's suspicious about that?

And as for a rebuild.. My guess is that Ryerson will expropriate it.

It was still going strong when I got to work, around 6:00am this morning. I could see right down into it from the south windows of the Library building. Unfortunately no pictures.

Even as late as around 7:30am, there were large visible flames that they were knocking down.



Well it would certainly make for a good 'campus gateway', what with the student building going up across the street, on the old Sam's site. I doubt it'll happen though.

Fire usually is the 1st option after permit denial. I doubt it was squatters as fire started on the upper levels that is exposed to the elements. Lower level of the building would have been more suitable for them.
Either way, the building owners will be held accountable for either setting the fire or not securing the construction site.

There are police video cameras in this area. Lets see if they do any good. If they turn out to be useless to solve the crime, perhaps it is time for them to be removed. I never liked the idea of the police monitoring the public. And after the anti democratic actions of the police during the G20 they don't deserve our trust.

DG

Making the place a heritage building, retroactively, was a bloody stupid move on The City's part. You allow or deny; you don't obfuscate.

Unlikely that any squatter would want to be on the ground floor, given the large plate glass windows along the front of the building. Far too easy for a fire to be spotted. Remember; the frontage was taken up by restaurants, which were quite open. Upstairs, on the other hand, there were still enclosed rooms away from windows.

They haven't held them liable for Gould St. being closed for 9 months nor have they hit them for Yonge St. being down to two lanes each way, both causing chaos in the area, so why would they do anything now?



There's a police camera directly across Yonge from the building. It would be quite easy to avoid being seen by it, as the hoardings are 8 or 10 feet tall. Now our campus security cameras, on the other hand.....

That isn't what happened. It has been a listed heritage building since the introduction of the Heritage Act in 1974. It was designated in August, 2010. None of this is "retroactive".

And the difference between "listed" and "designated" is......?

This building really should never have been considered a "heritage" building. Its construction is nothing special and its biggest claim to fame, is to have had the upper floor 'hotel rooms' rented out by the hour. There are buildings that were far more deserving of the designation, that have already been bulldozed to the ground.

Well since the walls came a thumbing down....it was mostly gone anyways. Clear it out and open Yonge again.

The difference is in the level of legal protection. "Listed" basically signals that the City is putting the building owners on notice that it considers it to be of historic value, and that any effort to significantly alter it will trigger further heritage reviews. Designation is stronger protection, in the form of a heritage by-law, a component of which is a heritage assessment. It is the strongest level of protection currently available to a municipality.

With respect, I disagree with your assessment (forgive me if you happen to be a heritage architecture expert unbeknownst to me).

No, no expert. Simply someone who has seen a goodly number of more deserving buildings either gutted, or turned into nothing more than a door's archway.

I agree that other buildings that are also deserving of their designation have been lost. But that doesn't mean that this one was undeserving of the designation.

For those who are interested, here is the heritage designating by-law for 335 Yonge:
http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/bylaws/2010/law1176.pdf

Nor does the fact that it was a hodge-podge cludgework of architectural mess make it worthy of saving. It wasn't endemic of any style. Just being the oldest hole on the block doesn't make it worthy of the designation either. That, plus historical significance might but, as I said previously, having rooms that were rented by the hour doesn't make something historically significant.

what if some famous figure was involved in a one time rent there?

If he was, and if he was smart, we'd never know more than "John Smith rented room 4b, from 11:00pm to midnight"

I stumbled across this on another site.

http://urbantoronto.ca/showthread.php?6 ... o-Then-Now

There seem to have been much more awesome buildings than this one that have been destroyed in Toronto in the name of "progress".

Thanks for that. I went through a fair bit of that thread, as many of the pictures reminded me of the times when I lived at Don Mills and Eglinton, in the late '60s as a kid.

And there are some fine shots that illustrate exactly what I was talking about, where things like the entrance of the old Toronto Normal School has become a mere facade. How many people, though, wonder why O'Keefe Lane is named as it is? Wonder where the namesake has gone? Hmmmm....

FYI, they are slowing down the subways between College & Dundas to prevent the wall from collapsing any further.