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john bentley mays

The mighty hotel and condominium tower proposed for the southeast corner of Toronto's Yonge and Bloor streets crossing appears to be doomed. Amid a snowstorm of legal paperwork last week, Bazis International, the Kazakhstan-based developer of the high-rise, blaming hard times, seemed on the brink of surrendering the vacant lot. The potential buyer has so far not been named. It could be the consortium of local creditors that has been publicly battling Bazis the past few weeks.

What the new owner will do with the site has not been announced. But certain scenarios, most of them gloomy, come to mind.

It could be the location of a new tall building as numbingly mediocre as the existing office towers on the north side of the intersection. But if the local consortium gets the property, this may not come to pass: The financier leading the charge against Bazis is Gary Berman, who is also an organizer of the annual Pug Awards for worst and best new Toronto architecture. Mr. Berman certainly knows something about good tall-building design and what makes a good city - though how much artistic influence he has over his business partners, if any, is unknown at this point.



The Bloor-Yonge site, at the heart of Toronto's urban geography and historical sense of itself, could also become merely the setting for a condominium spire no better than what was proposed for it in the first place. Architect Roy Varacalli's design of 1 Bloor East, as the 80-storey luxury condo project is called, has gone through a few iterations, all of them routine, none inspiring. Toronto deserves better. We are living in a remarkably inventive, vivid moment in the history of international skyscraper design, and Toronto's most famous intersection would be an ideal location for a stellar expression of this lively artistic thinking.

The most dismal outcome of this affair would be a new parking lot. Over the past decade, Toronto real estate developers have done a good job of ridding the city of these eyesores, and the idea of actually adding one is, or should be, unthinkable.

But almost as bad as a parking lot would be the use suggested last week in the Toronto Star by urban affairs columnist Christopher Hume. His notion: a new square, sponsored by some civic-minded plutocrat or corporation to save our cash-starved city the bother. This public square would be, in Mr. Hume's view, an opportunity for city hall (which, he correctly notes, has played a puny role in Toronto's so-called cultural renaissance) "to redeem itself and revitalize Bloor and Yonge."

"If we can have a Four Seasons Performing Arts Centre," Mr. Hume asks, "why not a Royal Bank Square, a Hudson's Bay Plaza, Thomson Place, Weston Way or Pizza-Pizza Piazza?"

One reason is that the scheme wouldn't work.

Busy, controversial Yonge-Dundas Square succeeds not because the place lends vitality to the surrounding area, but because it effectively draws on the dense urban vigour that surges all around it. A Milky Way of electric signs, electronic billboards, a large theatre complex, a host of shops and restaurants, Eaton Centre, Ryerson University, dozens of residential towers in the neighbourhood: All these magnets attract energy, excitement and population to the district, hence into Yonge-Dundas Square. The Bloor-Yonge intersection, on the other hand, is a windy, lifeless wasteland, and that fact will not be changed by turning its southeast corner into a glorified vacant lot.

Another and more important reason is that the last thing downtown Toronto needs is another open-air public space.

We need density, far more people in the urban core, and the multiplication of places for these people to live, work and play. That means more safe, beautiful and liveable skyscrapers, fitted out with a mix of residential and retail uses, especially along the most important inner-city avenues.

Whatever quibbles I have with the design of the 80-storey behemoth Bazis International intended to put up, the building would have brought a much-needed wallop of human density to the corner of Bloor and Yonge. One version of the plan featured, in addition to the condo units and hotel up above, a multiscreen movie theatre and ample retail at street level. These items, too, would have been welcome as added attractions to the structure (hence the intersection) and as added resistance to the increasingly unsustainable outbound pull of suburbia.

The world financial crisis was bound to hurt Toronto. The probable collapse of the 1 Bloor East project is not the first local real-estate casualty of the international turmoil and it may not be the last. But this event will serve some higher purpose if it provokes new, substantial public discussion about the city we want and are willing to fight for.

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