Torontonians care a lot about the intersection of Bathurst Street and Bloor Street West.
Some citizens in the Annex and beyond are already cheering the massive residential scheme, unveiled last week, that Vancouver developer Ian Gillespie intends to drop on the 4.4-acre site of Honest Ed’s, the famously gaudy, cheerfully tacky discount emporium on the southwest corner. Others (including this writer) have doubts about what’s been announced, but are willing to postpone making a final call until more information about the glassy mixed-use project becomes available.
At the time of this writing, however, one thing seems clear. If Mr. Gillespie has his way with the planners at city hall, the officially blessed main-street intensification rolling across other neighbourhoods in Toronto will happen at a crossroads considered by many observers to be off-limits for such development. Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever tried to erect a tall building on this or any other spot at or near the intersection. But if what’s wanted is a precedent, you can indeed find a fairly big structure there – not tall, but long, like a high-rise flipped on to its side – right across Bathurst from Honest Ed’s.
It’s Lindvest Properties Ltd.’s recently completed B Streets Condominiums, designed by a team led by David Pontarini, principal in the Toronto firm of Hariri Pontarini and an architect best known for his elegantly soaring residential towers. Some density of the sort beloved by developers has already come to this sensitive corner, it appears, without anyone getting into a tizzy or even taking much notice.
B Streets certainly makes little fuss about itself. While crafting this product, Mr. Pontarini left outside the studio door most (but, as I’ll show, not all) of the drama and flair he usually brings to his skyscraper designs.
But if the 195-unit, nine-storey project declines to serve up much in the way of thrills, it succeeds in being what its architect intended: “a poster child for the city’s mid-rise guidelines,” in his words. He wanted to create a respectful, well-behaved, neighbourly building, and he’s done so.
The lower portion of the 240-foot-long façade, for instance, is fashioned from brick and glass, the workaday, vernacular materials of commercial architecture in its vicinity, and throughout downtown. The hue of the brick is not the Victorians’ favourite red or buff, however, but densely black, which lends B Streets’ lower face retiring formality and offers a quiet contrast to the hectic visual burlesque of Honest Ed’s signage.
At the level of the sidewalk itself, Mr. Pontarini has sought to make his large building friendly by reproducing a condition that anyone who has ever strolled along Bloor west of Spadina will find familiar. It’s the rhythmic sequence of one small-to-medium-sized, well-articulated, glass-fronted shop after another, as opposed to those wide, unaccented expanses of glazing that make the bases of some other big mid-rises seem characterless, like fish tanks. Once commercial tenants have established themselves in the stores of B Streets, the pedestrian experience of the bulky structure at grade should be comfortable, in no way oppressive or alien.
While we’re on the subject of what happens at grade, I’d like to suggest that, in certain particulars, Mr. Pontarini’s work may be too polite. Was it really necessary, for instance, to make the main, Bathurst Street entrance of B Streets so modest and understated that it’s obscure? The lobby, accessed from the sidewalk through a plain wooden door, is small and somewhat grudging. It reads more like an afterthought or delivery intake than the carefully considered interface between public and private realms that every self-respecting residential lobby should be. (Ditto for the rear entrance.)
Turning from the little stuff to the architect’s larger gestures, one discovers some of the expressiveness and urbane visual poetry typical of his towers.
The black-brick bottom of the western façade, which looks out to Honest Ed’s, obeys simple, strict geometry, but it’s most noticeably demure right at the level of the street. Above the sidewalk, the façade resolves itself into bold, black-framed square boxes, each of them one storey thick and equal in size to every other of its kind. These boxes have been stacked up to various heights, some low, others tall—a move that lends visual pulse and drive to the building’s front. The black stacks go up to roughly the altitude reached by the uppermost flourishes of Honest Ed’s marquee.
At this point – at its jagged top edge – the grid-like system of black boxes engages the upper half of the façade, which is all clear glass and white precast concrete. This interesting composition of light-coloured oblongs, which jut and recede in irregular patterns, exhibits more variety and liveliness than the black lower portion.
High up, having reached a point beyond the summit of Honest Ed’s, that is, B Streets Condominiums is allowed to enjoy itself a little. Enough, anyway, to keep the whole building from being as humble as the entrance I don’t like – though hardly busy enough to prompt the old store across the way to stop jitterbugging for a minute and bark at it: Not in my back yard!