City Building : Development News

As of yesterday, Burlington’s got a greatly expanded LCBO to serve its lakefront.

The Maple Mews Plaza location, closed for several months, re-opened yesterday with 30 per cent more space.

According to LCBO spokeswoman Sally Ritchie, the Board’s calculated that the store will serve a population of about 87,000 Burlingtonians, a population that’s expected to increase by about 8 per cent over the next decade.

"In the specific case of the Burlington store in the Maple Mews Plaza," says Ritchie on the subject of the expansion, "our planners were very satisfied with the current location, where the store has been since January 4, 1994. The plaza has other retailers which complement our store, such as Longo’s grocery store."

The store had been closed since Feb. 4.

The re-opened store has 7,400 square feet of selling space, with 1,940 regular varieties of drink, in addition to 215 Vintages and 345 VQA wines. There’s also a refrigerated beer room, an increasingly popular feature of new and renovated LCBO stores.

This being lakeshore Burlington, there will also be two full-time product consultants, who are there to advise customers on things like cellaring and bar-stocking.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Sally Ritchie

The 35 acres on the city’s waterfront is getting ever closer to becoming the Canary District.

Developer Dundee Kilmer just topped off what they’re calling blocks 3 and 15, and what we’ll eventually be calling the Fred Victor and Wigwamen rental housing buildings. The Fred Victor, which like Wigwamen will be aimed at providing housing to those for whom market rates are a stretch, should be finished by 2014, though it will be used for the Pan AM/Parapan Games in 2015 before opening up to tenants.

According to Michelle Cain, a project manager with Dundee Kilmer, the next thing to be completed will be the laying of TTC tracks on Cherry Street between Eastern Avenue and just south of Mill Street, connecting the neighbourhood to the Distillery District, an early step in what one hopes will be the eventual integration of both into the city as a whole.

After that, the reconstruction Cherry and Old Eastern Avenue is scheduled to be the first part of the new district to be entirely completed, sometime later this summer or early fall.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Michelle Cain

Next door to the convention centre, the Intercontinental Hotel is likely destined to remain primarily a business hotel, but before they launched their latest renovation, the management noticed something about the business people staying there.

They were increasingly women.

According to Alienor Guilhem and Tatiana Sheveleva of Chapi Chapo Design, this is translating into "a strong residential feel with a welcoming atmosphere" including lavender glass desktops that "allow the light to dance off in warm, dusty tones."

The room renovations, which began a month ago and are slated to be completed in time for the film festival, also include multipurpose, Quebec-designed chaises longues, backed in lavender velour, and seven-foot tall dressing mirrors.

The renovation also includes the Azure restaurant, which involved re-doing the floors, upholstery and some wall coverings in the private dining room, while maintaining the namesake blue accents.

One hundred and sixty rooms are being renovated in the first phase, which will continue over time to include the rest of the nearly 500 rooms.

The Chapi Chapo team, who met while working at Yabu Pushelberg and which includes Boris Mathias, are also currently working on the Park Hyatt’s north tower.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Alienor Guilhem

The Yorkville is the latest condo to pop its head above ground in its namesake neighbourhood, reaching its third floor this week.

"It's a 31-storey building so we’re going to continue building through the winter," says Lifetime Developments VP Michael Pearl. "We’ll start closing the building in the next month or so."

Designed by RWA Wallman, the building is distinguished from all the other glass towers on pedestals by a couple of boxy bulges in the building's top third.

Demolition of the old Moriyama Teshima architecture office was completed at the beginning of 2012, and though that small garden enclave is itself a rehabilitated gas station, the digging was deep enough, according to Pearl four or five levels’ worth, that no soil reclamation was needed. "It was like beach sand down at the bottom," he says.

The interiors of the 233-unit building were designed by Tomas Pearce Interior Design.

Pearl figures the first of the sold-out suites will be ready for their owners or tenants by the middle or end of 2015.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source; Michael Pearl

A year and a half of work on the Gardiner Expressway began Monday.

Two eastbound lanes were shut down between Jarvis and the Don Roadway. They’ll remain closed until December.

There will be various road and ramp closures for the duration of the project, which the city expects to have finished by December, 2014.

Work began with the installation of a traffic light, and will continue with the relocation of light poles, and the repair of various aspects of the road, including drainage.

The budget for all the work is $6.99 million.

All this work is being done while the city decides exactly what to do with the road, which many believe is a blight and one of the major factors in hobbling the process of connecting the city to the lake.

But while the lengthy environmental assessment (EA) is done to determine the Gardiner’s fate, the city couldn’t hold off on repairs any longer.

"The repairs of the deck are to keep the Gardiner safe and serviceable until the EA is complete," says Jim Schaffner, the city’s acting manager of structures. "The repairs should cover a seven-year span (2013-2020), during which time the EA should be complete."
 
Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Jim Schaffner

The people at the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority were leaving nothing to chance during the recent deluge. On July 9, in addition to everything else, they were paying special attention to a newly built mound that's part of the River City 2 condo development.

"We were monitoring it 24/7," says the TRCA's Sameer Dhalla of what's technically known as a berm, or a flood protection landform, put in place by the TRCA and Urban Capital, the developer behind the River City condo project.

It was built to protect the eastern downtown core, from the Don to Bay Street, from the sort of flooding that's known in meteorological circles as a 100-year storm.

And during the lashing the city got on July 9, the TRCA were at no point certain this wasn't one of them.

There were indications that it might not be. The storm limited itself to the downtown core, for instance, excluding much of the Don River watershed, which extends north to Richmond Hill, meaning there would probably be little of what's known as river flooding--the exult of too much rain dumped into the entirety of a river system--as opposed to urban flooding, which is what happens when a city's sewerage and guttering infrastructure can't handle the amount of rain that's falling, and backs up into the streets.

In the end, this ended up being one of the saving graces of what was otherwise quite a catastrophic storm. The very fact that the city's infrastructure couldn't handle the rain meant that not too much of it made it into the rivers, keeping the truly monumental sort of flooding that happened along the Humber during 1954's Hurricane Hazel at bay.

When the storm was over, the berm was barely touched, with no flooding at all in the flood protection landforms vicinity, south of King Street between River Street and the river.

Which, on one hand, is good news, and on the other, means we ain't seen nothing yet.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Sameer Dhalla

Work on the latest of a planned series of new nature trails in the city is set to begin Monday in the Bayview and Finch area.

Known by the city as the Finch Corridor Trail Project, the multi-use trail, which will be suitable for pedestrians, bicycles, and various mobility devices, is being built on privately owned Ontario Hydro land, part of a Hydro corridor. It will run roughly from Kenneth Avenue in the west to the Don River at Pineway Avenue, just north of and roughly parallel to Finch Avenue. It will be about 3 km long and about 3.5 metres wide.

Construction will run until the end of November this year, and recommence in the spring, with a projected completion date of July 31, 2014. There will be new road crossings constructed at Willowdale Avenue, Maxome Avenue, Ruddington Drive, and Luton Gate.

The city intends to limit construction hours from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. weekdays, and 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekends and holidays, as stipulated by city bylaws.

Ultimately, the city hopes to have a network of up to 30 km of such trails in the Finch area.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Richard Chang Kit

"When they voted in May to reconsider, the vote was 35-9 to look at the Danforth subway extension."

So says Joe Pennachetti, the city’s manager, expressing what in his view is the likelihood that council will vote to approve and fund the subway extension into Scarborough, overturning the previous commitment to making it part of the city’s new light rapid transit (LRT) system.

Council is considering the issue today, and may make a decision right away, or defer the issue for further consultation.

"We had literally 10 days to prepare the report that should have taken three or four months," Pennachetti says of the document council is discussing.

"What Planning is saying is that it's difficult to get final impacts for the whole system without doing more analysis. The one piece where there's some conern is that if we move on the Scarborough subway now, it will put an added burden on the downtown subway, and we've already got problems getting the downtown relief line done, so what we're saying is, we'd have to hurry that up, too."

So, one subway extension begets another.

And in addition to the billions that are being bandied about, there is one more extra expense involved in shifting transit gears.

"If council approves the subway, we’ll have to pay Metrolinx the sunk cost money," Pennachetti says, referring to the $85 million already spent on staff, research and property acquisition for the LRT.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Joe Penachetti

The Waterfront development continues with another huge undertaking, this time by Hines and Tridel, announced last week.

Bayside will ultimately be a 13-acre, $1.1-billion mixed-use project, including two office buildings and 125,000 square feet of retail.

But first, there's a condo.

Aqualina will be a 363-suite tower, designed by New York’s Arquitectonica, winner of an open architectural competition. "It takes more time and more administration," says Tridel's VP of marketing and sales, Jim Ritchie, of the unusual step of opening up a condo design to competition. "It's obviously quicker to go to the guys you know best, but I think the creative juices are enhanced when you go to a competition."

Tridel is devloping the residential aspects of the project.

Waterfront’s development standard is LEED neighbourhood Gold, which requires earning between 60 and 79 points on the UCGS LEED scale, but Ritchie says they're going for LEED neighbourhood Platinum for Aqualina, which requires a minimum of 80 points.

Sales were announced last week, and Ritchie figures construction will start in 12-15 months if sales go well, with first occupancy available towards the end of 2016.

Bayside is the second very large Waterfront neghburhood developmet, after the Canary District, being developed in the West Don Lands by Dundee Kilmer, which includes the athletes village for the Pan Am/Parapan Games on its 35-acre site.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Jim Ritchie

The LCBO is going through its biggest ever expansion, with 65 new or expanded stores now in the works across the province, including about a new one a month in the GTA.

The latest additions here have been in Forest Hill and Etobicoke.

In Forest Hill, an area the LCBO expects to grow by about six per cent in the next decade, the new shop opened June 24 at 420 Spadina Road. It has 2,900 square feet of display space, with about 1,100 products in the regular selection--including 29 craft beers--and about 200 in the Vintages section.

The Etobicoke shop opened last week on July 4 at 211 Lloyd Manor Road with 4,860 square feet of selling space, 1,450 regular products and 120 Vintages selections, as well as a beer cold room.

"Across Ontario so far, since 2012, a total of $56 million has been invested," says LCBO spokeswoman Sally Ritchie, who says that 139,000 square feet of selling space has been added so far.

She also says there are two new ways of getting our booze to us. The LCBO is introducing Express shops in grocery stores (yay!), and Ontario wine boutiques inside certain existing LCBOs. The latter, Ritchie says, is in response to wine producers, who told the LCBO they'd like to have more opportunity to put their wines in front of customers.

The LCBO expects the current expansion to be done by the end of 2014.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Sally Ritchie

The train from Union Station to Pearson airport reached a milestone last week.

On June 29, the last girder was put in place to link the existing airport train track with the spur that's being built to take the train from the existing Kitchener GO route to the airport.

"The service will operate along GO’s Kitchener (formerly Georgetown) corridor," says Union Pearson Express spokeswoman Anne Marie Aikins,"and branch off onto a newly constructed 3 km rail spur near Highway 427 that will connect to a new passenger station at Toronto Pearson Terminal 1."

The new connection, named the project of he year in May at the Global AirRail Awards in Frankfurt, is meant to be up in time for the Pan-Am/Parapan Games in the summer of 2015.

It will provide a 25- minute ride to Pearson from Union, leaving every 15 minutes and making two stops, and the Bloor-Dundas and Weston GO stations, on its way.

Construction has already started on the two new stations, at Union and Pearson respectively.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Anne Marie Aikins

Where there was once a big, ugly parking lot, in the space between Queens Quay Terminal and York Quay is now, finally, officially, a park.

Canada Square, a major addition to the central waterfront, opens officially on Canada Day.

"In the spirit of European plazas," says James Roche, Waterfront Toronto’s director in charge of park design and construction, "Canada Square offers a new place for people to gather and enjoy beautifully framed views of Lake Ontario and Toronto's skyline under a canopy of majestic redwood trees."

The park is on top of what is now an underground parking garage, constructed by Ellis Don after designs by Beyer Blinder Belle architects. The park’s landscaping design is by US firm Michael Van Valkenburgh and Associates.

Canada Square is part of the larger York Quay revitalization project, which also includes Ontario Square and Exhibition Common.

The budget for the whole project was $20 million.

Roche points out that this is only the second time Harbourfront Centre and Waterfront Toronto have worked together on such a project. "In 2006," he says, "public access to the water's edge was improved by widening the promenade south of Harbourfront Centre and the addition of a wooden boardwalk and two new finger piers."

The opening ceremony will begin at 1 p.m. on July 1.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: James Roche

It's been on the books since 2006, but today the final plan for what’s known as the Bridgewater site on Burlington’s waterfront has been revealed.

The 1.68-acre site will house a 340,000 square foot mixed-use development consisting of a 152-room four-star hotel (rumoured in 2012 to be a Delta), 170 condos, and ground-level retail. The condos are expected to be priced between $500,000 and $3 million.

The development is a significant addition to an increasngly urbanized Burlington.

The plan in 2012 was to have the hotel open in time for the Pan-Am/Parapan Games, but according to the developer, the current hope is to have it open by 2017.

The new design, by Page and Steele/IBI Group, is not significantly different from the one made public in 2012. At the time, Burlington ward councilor Marianne Meed Ward was not enthusiastic about the design, writing that, "Though my preference is not to see high rises on the waterfront, this project has already been approved." Critics at Urban Toronto described it as "hideous" and "awful."

Investment Group Mayrose-Tycon is announcing Windsor-based Mady Development Corporation as the developer. CEO Charles Mady evinced much enthusiasm but little knowledge of the site, where the well-known and much-maligned Riviera Motel stood for many years. "We believe that there was a service station years ago," he said, adding that the land had recently been remediated and been given “a clean bill of health."

Mayrose-Tycon’s Matt Jaecklein glossed over the seven-year construction delay, saying in a press release,"The timing behind our decision to move ahead with this project is rooted in a strong belief in the City of Burlington’s long-term waterfront redevelopment plans."

Burlington mayor Rick Goldring voices his approval for the project, stressing its contribution to the city's density, and its maintenance and expansion of waterfront access.

"I am pleased with the improvements planned for the lakeshore," he said, "to maintain a welcome and accessible waterfront. The Bridgewater project is an example of ways that we can continue to grow through intensification, while preserving public access and visibility of our waterfront on Lake Ontario."

Construction services are being provided by LCL Builds.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Charles Mady

First, it was the Entertainment District, then Bathurst and St. Clair, and now the Lash Group are betting that Markham and Ellesmere in Scarborough will be the next big condo spot.

"It's an up-and-coming neighbourhood that's underdeveloped, and hasn't been developed in many years," says Lash president Larry Blankenstein of the suburban area that currently hosts mostly 70s-style slab buildings.

It's a big development for the area, with plans for more than a thousand units over four acres. At least as importantly, Blankenstein's planning 13,000 square feet of ground-level retail. Currently, the closest major retail space is a drive away at Scarborough Town Centre.

The first 287 units are on sale now, and if things go to plan, Blankenstein hopes to break ground in the fall of 2014, with completion scheduled for late 2016 or early 2017.

The buildings were designed by Turner Fleischer, with interiors by Tanner Hill Associates.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Larry Blankenstein

You may not have noticed, but traffic in the downtown core is getting more efficient.

That's a result of the wholesale re-synching of traffic signals on major arteries, including Bloor.

Though it may seem a minor thing, timing traffic signals correctly, taking into account changing populaiton density and whether big new stores have opened, can have a huge effect on how long it takes you to get somewhere, and how much gas you use to get there.

Acording to a recent study from the city's Traffic Management Centre, the recent realignment along Bloor resulted in a 24 per cent reduction in the number of stops an average car makes, a 16 per cent increase in average speed, and a 13 per cent reduction in the amount of gas used and greenhouse gases emitted.

Though international studies have determined re-timing should be done every three to five years, Toronto got a little behind, according to Rajnath Bissessar, the city's Manager of Urban Traffic Control Systems, "due to the lack of staff resources."

One of the adjustments that has been made along Bloor, Adelaide, Richmond and Kennedy, and that will be made in the coming months along Victoria Park, Kingston, Weston, Keele, Parkside and Lawrence is the creation of what Bissessar calls "green-bands"--those long stretches of road where you seem to hit every green light, co-ordinated not only to make you feel like things are finally going your way, but to reduce stop-and-go traffic, which is bad for fuel consumption.

The city has plans to re-time 270 signals by the end of the year, after adjusting 110 of them in 2012. The plan as a whole was adopted by council on June 11.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Rajnath Bissessar