Development News

Work on the foundation for the first building of the new George Brown campus on the waterfront is nearing completion. The 330,000 square foot, 8-storey building with underground parking on the 0.83-hectare site is expected to cost a total of $175 million.

What's currently known as Building A, the larger of two buildings that will house the campus's four health sciences schools, is expected to be able to accommodate its first students in the fall of 2012. It was designed by Stantec and KPMB, and construction is being managed by EllisDon.

"There were many practical reasons for proceeding with the waterfront location," says Lorie Shekter-Wolfson, dean and assistant vice-president for the Waterfront Campus development, "namely the close proximity to our existing St. James campus -- but the fact that Waterfront Toronto was looking for a post-secondary institution to help revitalize the waterfront made our involvement a natural fit."

Once complete, the new campus will be able to accommodate about 4,000 students in its dental, nursing, health management, continuing education and "health and wellness" schools.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Lorie Shekter-Wolfson


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Booze-buying commuters will have to change their shopping habits as of Nov. 25, when the hugely popular Union Station LCBO moves to the underground portion of the Royal Bank Plaza, one of the first signs of the coming massive renovation at the station.

The new store will be bigger, offering about 2,700 square feet of shopping space, as opposed to the old one's 1,800.

"It's a good location, because it's very close to the subway," says LCBO spokesman Chris Layton. "Something like 195,000 people pass by each week."

The old store, which Layton says has been around and mostly unchanged since the 1970s, will close for good at the end of the business day on Nov 24.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Chris Layton

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The gentrification of the formerly industrial Dupont strip continues westward with the renovation of the old Angelo's Diner (aka Howland Diner, aka AAA Chinese) at 268 Howland on the corner of Dupont.

Leanne Martineau and her husband, Stephen Hancock, moved onto Howland three years ago and with her history in the food industry, had her eye on this space ever since. Her husband had grown up in the area and used to go to Angelo's, which had been in business on the corner from the 1940s up to the 1970s or early 80s. "It was always a space in the neighbourhood where all the kids would go for their French fries," Martineau says.

When AAA Chinese moved out this past spring, Martineau and Hancock, along with business partners Sarah Baxter and her husband Reid Pickering, who owns The Feathers pub in The Beach, contacted the landlord, Chris Chaggaris, Angelo's son, and made a deal.

The $250,000 renovation expenses, which include putting in a full-sized basement, re-doing the interior complete with custom-made furniture by Jason Davis Design/Build, as well as recladding the small structure in brick, were split between landlord and tenants.

Martineau and Baxter will manage the restaurant, to be called Fanny Chadwick's, after a historical Annex figure Martineau uncovered, and will be hiring four wait staff and five kitchen staff for the planned mid-January opening.

The flooring was installed and kitchen appliances were moved in this week.

The restaurant will be relatively upscale, with main dishes between $15 and $25. And the neighbourhood kids, in recent years mostly from Royal St. George's College down the street? "It's not going to be a particularly attractive space for them to hang out," Martineau says. "There's certainly enough of that on Bloor Street."

"The development on Dupont -- a lot of designer firms, little intricate shops, especially closer to Spadina -- has certainly taken hold," Martineau says, "and it's just a matter of time before it continues on."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Leanne Martineau


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Dufferin is finally straight. After months of work to align the jog in the road that occurred around Queen, the newly orthogonal street will have it's official unveiling tomorrow at 3pm at the north end of the underpass between Queen and Peel.

"It's been a project the city has wanted to do for decades, almost a century in fact," says Councillor Gord Perks, in whose ward Dufferin once jogged. He lists one of the major benefits of the change a quicker running time of the Dufferin bus, which will, he says, allow fewer buses to transport more people in less time, which translates into financial savings.

He also foresees new development in response to the friendlier streetscape, which includes an amphitheatre on former scrubland and a bike path that leads from Dufferin to the future site of a railway bike path.

"Already the 2 Gladstone project is going in, and there will be opportunities for development along Dufferin north of the bridge that had been abandoned, empty warehouses," he says, adding that one such proposal, for a public health centre, has already been approved.

There will also be a major piece of public art, a mosaic, by Toronto artist Luis Jacob inside the underpass, a $300,000 installation whose cost is equivalent to 1 per cent of the project's total $30-million expense.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Gord Perks

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Roncesvalles still isn't finished. But it's getting there. Work on this second phase of road-munching began in July, and is expected to be finished by April or May.

The current $9.2-million phase of work, being carried out by Sanscon Construction, includes TTC track construction, transit platform construction, road reconstruction and resurfacing, sidewalk repair and streetscaping, including continuous soil trenches to give planted trees more root freedom.

The earlier work, carried out between July, 2009 and May of this year included water main and sewer replacement over the same 2km stretch of beleaguered road roughly between Queen and Dundas.

"More or less, all of the infrastructure was of an age that it needed significant repair or replacement," says John Kelly of the city's technical services division. "The surface works were the first to be identified as required, and we always try to co-ordinate any underground utility work with road reconstruction to maximize the life span of the road by minimizing the need to cut into it in the future."

So, stiff upper lips till May, then, to all those business owners behind the cheeky, door-mounted Construction Sucks posters.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: John Kelly

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Toronto-based Quadrangle Architects have won a design award for urbanization work they've done in Markham.

The firm got the Urban Intensification Award for the four-building Rouge Bijou development, downtown Markham's first condo project.

The project gets its name in part from its proximity to the Rouge River at the western edge of Markham's city centre.

"The ambition is to establish a context for the next buildings and support the vision of Downtown Markham as a compact, sustainable, walkable and transit-oriented community," said Quadrangle principal Sheldon Levitt in a press release.

Rouge Bijou, whose buildings range in height from seven to 10 storeys and which house a total of 450 living spaces, is part of a larger, nine-building collection of buildings that also includes Verdale, Nexus North and Nexus South.

Rouge Bijou is also built to LEED Silver standards, and includes in-suite energy recovery ventilators, super-lobby green roofs and will collect rain for grey water use.

The award was presented on November 8.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Sheldon Levitt

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The Toronto City Summit Alliance writes, in a recent press release, of Telus' new $250-million, 30-storey LEED Gold headquarters at 25 York Street, that "While the building is built to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) gold certification, the building's environmental performance depends in part on tenants' and their employees' use of the space."

There's been a lot of talk to building standards, especially LEED, in the last several years as the development industry and Toronto at large become more aware of the potential for technological advances to claw back our impact on the environment.

But as this press release pointed out last week, the greenest-built building can still be wasteful if the people who use it are.

Which is why the TCSA-sponsored series of landlord-tenant talks in some of the largest buildings in the city are so potentially useful. This one, hosted last Thursday by Telus and the tower's builder, Menkes, gathered the building's other tenants to discuss the built-in green features, and share strategies for making the most of them.

Strategies discussed included car pooling to work to use the allocated car pooling spots and biking to work to use the in house showers and bike storage facilities

This was the fourth such meeting in the awkwardly named Greening Greater Toronto's 'Greening Our Workplaces' Tenant-Landlord Collaboration Series.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Rebecca Geller

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The St. James Cathedral's Parish House is getting its second semicentennial renovation care of Peter Clewes, Dalton construction and $16 million.

"The space was getting pretty tired," says St James' director of operations and finance Rob Saffrey, "which is probably being nicer than one might otherwise be."

They demolished the one-storey 1959 addition and are replacing it with a three-storey space, primarily to be able to offer parishioners and community members more space to meet and celebrate.

"One of the major programs we run is an outreach for people in the neighbourhood. We do a foot care clinic, cutting of hair, we serve a meal one day a week, so the space was not really adequate for that at all."

Other groups that have been using the space, and could benefit from more of it, include a mother-and-baby group, and a Muslim men's prayer group.

Saffrey says $5 million is coming from St James' coffers, and $11 million from donations and capital funds.

In addition to the space, St James and Clewes are also revealing some of the original 1909 architectural details that were covered up in the 1959 renovation, including some interior stone archways.

The renovation and addition, set to be finished by October, 2011, will also include a new slate roof, the cleaning and exposure of much original interior brick, and the installation of various audio-visual conveniences.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Rob Saffrey

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Loren Ackerman thinks Toronto needs more high-end homes to rent.

At the moment, with the conversion of the Benvenuto into condos, there's Minto Yorkville, 50 Prince Arthur, the Colonnade and very little else. So with some funds from the sale of a family commodities trading company, Ackerman, along with his father, Hy, and his sister, Ivy (who's with the operation part-time), has been buying up big homes and small multiplexes and converting them into places people with $3,000-$10,000 a month might like to live. Each conversion, Ackerman says, falls into the $1-million range.

At least to begin with, Ackerman figures his tenants will be mostly transients. "People who've got terms in Toronto," as he puts it. People who are here on contracts, or who have sold one house and have yet to find another. When asked about the possibility of people living in his places, branded Rue de Lux, more permanently, paying rents that aren't unusual in other cities, he says, "No one's approached us about that, but of course it's something we'd entertain."

So far, Rue de Lux has one house, divided into two properties, completed at the corner of Admiral and Bernard, within a couple of houses of both Margaret Atwood and Galen Weston Jr's new pad. It's that kind of address that he's putting his mark on in Rosedale and Forest Hill as well, with the help of William Ryan Design.

In addition to the Annex property, part of which is called Bernard House, the other bit Admiral Suites, Ackerman is working on The Garden House at 73 Forest Hill Road, Chestnut Park Suites at Chestnut Park and Roxborough, and Thornwood Suites at 9 Thornwood, which is the next scheduled for completion, sometime in May or June.

The unfurnished rentals themselves range from 1,000 square feet to 4,500 square feet.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Loren Ackerman

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Robarts Library, the fourth biggest academic library in North America with 4.8 million volumes, is being de-booked.

In the middle of a two-year renovation, the massive brutalist library is undergoing a six-floor renovation, replacing stacks with study spaces to maintain the building's utility for students.

Once a sort of physical manifestation of the Internet, Robarts is now feeling the effects of the actual Internet. "Everybody's accessing information online now," says Nadeem Shabbar, the Univeristy of Toronto's chief real estate officer.

So the librarians made a list of the least-accessed books, and they're being moved to a storage facility in Downsview. Students will still have access to them, but only by special order, deliverable in 24 hours.

Four of the six floors have been completed.

The renovation has been budgeted at $24 million, and is due to be completed in early 2011, after which another, larger project will commence to add another pod-structure to the back end of the building, over the loading dock to create even more study space. The new structure will be called Robarts Pavillion.


Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Nadeem Shabbar

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Toronto got its third scramble last week, this one at the intersection of Bay and Bloor.

The scramble -- an intersection that includes an all-way pedestrian green in between the usual red-green traffic cycle -- was approved at the same time as its predecessors, at Yonge and Dundas and Yonge and Bloor, by city council in 2007.

The cost of transforming the intersection was $22,425, which Fiona Chapman, who is in charge of pedestrian projects for the city's transportation department, says included "on-site programming of the traffic controller, connection of the APS (Audible Pedestrian Signals) units, fabrication of all signs, installation of the 'No Right on Red' signs, installation of the pedestrian scramble phase signage, advance warning signs and the removal of existing prohibition signs, and installation of 12 diagonal zebra stripes."

"We had a set of criteria that identified the four that council approved," says Chapman. The fourth she refers to was meant for Bay and Dundas, an idea that's since been scrapped after deciding it would create streetcar delays. "Primarily, it was the number of pedestrians, and the number of vehicles that are trying to turn" that create conflicts between cars and people on foot.

The fourth now being considered would be at the corner of St George and Harbord/Hoskin.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Fiona Chapman

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Commute Home, the Queen West design and furnishings shop behind the looks of Kultura, Nyood and others, has moved from its decade-old digs at 819 Queen West up to Dupont.

In the process, owners Sara Parisotto and Hamid Samad doubled their floor space, from 1,000 to 2,000 square feet, and given the new space at 367 Dupont, formerly a kitchen design store, and before that a Porsche repair shop, a $60,000 makeover.

"It has to do with the people you keep company with," says Samad of the reasons behind the move. "We're next door to Floorworks, and a lot of their clients would have similar tastes to our clients. We started out on Queen Street and our clients have grown. A lot of our clients now head design firms or architecture firms, and their budget has gone up a bit, so you want to be close to shops like South Hill Homes, and you're not far from the Designers Walk, Avenue and Davenport is very close."

Most of the extra space comes in the form of width, which has extra benefits for the showroom aspect of the business.

"We tried putting a couple of the items we had in the old shop," Samad says of their preparations for last weekend's soft opening. "They actually look better because there's more perspective; you can stand back and look at the items."


Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Hamid Samad

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Thanks to some federal stimulus funding, the Mississauga campus of the University of Toronto is getting a new $70-million building.

Built on a former parking lot on the west-end campus, the 150,000 square foot Instruction Centre will include new lecture rooms and larger spaces for such things as exam-writing and other mass gatherings. The building was designed by Shore, Tillbe Perkins and Will.

The design includes distinctive copper cladding for the building, which will appear to be constructed out of stacked blocks. According to the architects, the building is intended to "frame a new entry plaza at the north end of the campus" and create a "new hub of student life."

Work began on the project in March of 2009 and according to Nadeem Shabbar, the university's chief real estate officer, it's one of the few large recipients of the stimulus funding that is expected to be completed in time for the program's stated March 31, 2011 deadline.

This is the second large commission on the UTM campus for the architecture firm, which also designed the Hazel McCallion Academic Learning Centre and Library, a 98,000 square foot, four-storey building completed in 2006.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Nadeem Shabbar

Do you know of a new building going up, a business expanding or being renovated, a park in the works or even a cool new house being built in the neighbourhood? Please send your development news tips to [email protected].

If you go to the south end of the Eaton Centre, on levels 2 or 3, you'll already be able to catch a glimpse of what the new Eaton Centre will look like once it's completed in the spring of 2012.

If you haven't totally succumbed to the Gruen transfer by the time you make it up there, you'll notice the new swirled floors, the glass handrails with stainless steel finials, and the new tiling on the columns.

Anyone who's been to the 33-year-old mall since Canada Day will have noticed the scaffolding, the closure of the north food court and, as of last Thursday, the big new Victoria's Secret shop, the first of several new tenants the Eaton Centre has signed, including Richtree, which will take over the south food court and turn it into a single restaurant.

The galleria -- or the main open space in the mall presided over by Michael Snow's geese -- will be getting a comprehensive overhaul, "literally from top to bottom," according to the mall's general manager, Cadillac Fairview's Susan Allen. "Floors, washrooms, existing handrails, upgrading all elevators and escalators, and a new retail lobby entrance for the 250 Yonge office tower." She says that bit of the three-phase operation will be completed by October, 2011, a month after the new north food court -- which will no longer be called a food court and will include non-disposable plates, glasses and cutlery. The sole independent food court tenant, Sweet Rosie's, will not be returning after the re-design.

The new Richtree is slated to be finished by the spring of 2012.

The whole two-year project will cost $120 million. The lead architects are Q2, with Giannone Petricone and Gervais Harding working on the space formerly known as the north food court.

And in case you were concerned: "The geese are staying," Allen says. "We're not touching the geese."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Susan Allen
Renderings: Giannone Petricone Associates (common area) and GHA Design Studio (food court).


Do you know of a new building going up, a business expanding or being renovated, a park in the works or even a cool new house being built in the neighbourhood? Please send your development news tips to [email protected].

Work continues on -- and over -- the Gardiner Expressway as the two sections of the Lakeshore Bridge are demolished just as the Jameson Bridge was last month.

Work on the two sections of the bridge, the 109-metre east bridge and the 59-metre west bridge, has been closing several lanes of the Gardiner since Oct. 25, and work on this phase of the project will continue until Friday at 5am, when the westbound lanes from Spadina to the Humber River will re-open after periodic closures that began yesterday.

"As a general rule, we inspect all our bridges periodically," says Mike Laidlaw, acting manager of structures and expressways for the city's technical services department, "and depending on condition, we slot them into particular times to rehab them before they get to the point of falling down or are hazardous. These are all being done [at the same time] because of their proximity and there's an economy of scale." Laidlaw mentioned traffic control as one major scalable expense.

Laidlaw hopes to have the bridges reconstructed by the end of the year, but says the timeline is dependent on weather. The city plans to have the entire $15-million contract finished by late spring or early summer of next year.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Mike Laidlaw

Do you know of a new building going up, a business expanding or being renovated, a park in the works or even a cool new house being built in the neighbourhood? Please send your development news tips to [email protected].