A proposed 6-storey, 42-unit apartment on a long and skinny corner lot in the Grange area of downtown Toronto. The project, which requires an official plan amendment, is geared at university students and residents or interns working in the University Avenue teaching hospitals.DUBBELDAM Architecture + Design
By his own admission, artist Charles Pachter has for years had a lucrative side hustle, buying, renovating and flipping older buildings in Toronto’s Queen West area and at the edge of Chinatown, including a six-plex at 80 Beverley St.
“I’ve lived in the neighbourhood for over 40 years and have renovated over 20 properties there,” he says over a zoom call from a friend’s place in Mexico. “My first house I bought was on Sullivan Street, way back in the in the 1970s. Everybody thought I was crazy. Then I moved up to Grange Avenue in 1996 when the average price of a house was 200 grand.”
That block of Grange, between Beverley Street and Spadina Avenue, is a classic downtown hodgepodge, and was even more so then. The narrow property Mr. Pachter acquired had a low-slung industrial building, with the remnants of a century-old funeral parlour at the back. He knocked down the industrial structure and renovated the back building, transforming it into his “Moose Factory,” a permanent studio for his iconic moose-and-queen themed pop art.
Then, in 2005, he built what he grandly dubbed the ”New Pachter Hall” on that lot. A modernist confection of extruded black boxes with dramatic windows, it fronts onto Grange Avenue and is sandwiched between two row houses. A few years ago, he erected a terraced three-storey live-work studio at the back of the 160-foot property, now dedicated to art from lot line to lot line.
Mr. Pachter acknowledges that he got more than a little chirping about some of his other renos. For this reason, he’s decided to temper his initial objections to a new proposal to shoehorn a six-storey, 42-unit apartment on a long and skinny corner lot three doors east, a property that currently contains a rundown bungalow and a lot of alleyway parking. “I’ll be 82 in a couple of weeks,” he muses. “I believe it’s inevitable that the neighbourhood will change.”
The project, which requires an official plan amendment, is the brainchild of Green Street Flats, a multiplex developer and property manager that made the news earlier this year with a proposal to build a compact 10-unit apartment on a lot on Barton Avenue, in Seaton Village. Both sites are deep and narrow, and abut laneways. With mainly bachelors and one-bedroom apartments, with a few two-bedrooms, Green Street’s Grange project is geared at university students and residents or interns working in the University Avenue teaching hospitals.
Founder Leonid Kotov says the location justifies building a small apartment building on the site: close to two subway stations, OCAD University and the Chinatown stretch of Dundas Avenue. And as with the Barton property in Seaton Village, 14 Grange is unusually deep, with one lot line abutting Grange Place, a gritty laneway that leads to Dundas Street. “With a pretty innovative design, we’re able to make some meaningful density work here,” he says, “as long as the City plays ball.”
Mr. Kotov has retained architect Heather Dubbeldam to figure out how to shoehorn a small apartment building on a deep skinny lot. She turned to a solution that is common in many European cities but quite rare here, due in part to long-standing fire code and ventilation regulations that encouraged builders to construct buildings where a long central corridor serves each floor, with apartments opening off either side.
“Instead of a traditional double-loaded corridor, we opted for a single-loaded exterior corridor configuration,” she says. “This strategy not only better suits the constrained site but also allows all units to extend the full width of the building, ensuring that each unit has at least two exterior walls with operable windows.”
In other words, the west side of this new building will feature exterior corridors, which will enable cross-ventilation – there will be doors and windows opening onto this exterior corridor as well as windows on the east side – and provide some balcony-like outdoor space. As she puts it, “The outdoor corridors on multiple levels function almost like porches, fostering a sense of community when residents begin to personalize the spaces outside their entrance doors, with potted plants or seating.”
While single-loaded corridors are quite common in many parts of the world, they’re exceedingly rare here. Well Grounded Real Estate, a boutique developer, recently received approval for a mid-rise rental project in Scarborough that is configured around a central courtyard, with exterior, or single-loaded, corridors serving each unit.
For all the design innovation, the regulatory reality is that Mr. Kotov’s site is on a residential street in a compact, though very urban, neighbourhood filled with Victorian semis. As with the Barton project, which was rejected twice by the City’s committee of adjustment before receiving the green light earlier this fall from Toronto’s local appeals board, Mr. Kotov recognizes the risks associated with being what he describes as “a first mover.”
While the city has passed a raft of measures to encourage multiplex projects inside residential neighbourhoods and small apartments on so-called major streets, Mr. Kotov’s application here is aiming to press the case for walk-up buildings on side streets as well.
“That’s just in our company’s DNA,” he says of this approach. “We’re forward thinking, and we want to do meaningful projects within neighbourhoods that do push the envelope – because I think the envelope needs to be pushed in a situation that we are in right now.”
Not everyone agrees. Some members of the Grange Community Association, says Mr. Pachter, aren’t thrilled about the prospect of seeing a six-storey apartment go up on a side street; one of GCA’s representatives said as much in a recent meeting with city officials.
That was his initial take, too. But after some reflection and more than a little negative social media blowback from students hoping to find housing near OCAD, he’s softened his view.
“I am saying now I welcome the new addition,” says Mr. Pachter. “I’m prepared to welcome a whole bunch of students looking out on my roof garden from two doors away. What can I say? It is what it is. I’ll figure out a nice way to build a privacy screen if I’m out there running around in the buff. We’ll come up with something creative.”
Special to The Globe and Mail