The extensive renovation of the Jamieson Building at the intersection of Queen and Yonge Streets, by Zeidler Architecture and ERA Architects, retained and restored the building's historic rounded corner.Adrien Williams/Adrien Williams
Men’s clothing retailer Philip E. Jamieson (1850-1909) did not have a good 1895. Three years earlier, he’d celebrated completion of an extensive renovation at the north-west corner of Queen Street West and Yonge Street. The Globe reported that “the whole lower walls” had been torn out and replaced with “immense plate glass windows” to showcase his wares. “There are no better display windows in Canada,” the paper breathlessly reported.
However, in March, 1895, disaster struck when a massive fire destroyed the almost-new, seven-storey Simpson’s store across the street. With the strong winds blowing the flames about, other buildings, such as Jamieson’s, were partially consumed as well.
This didn’t stop the determined, Edinburgh-born merchant, who’d arrived in Toronto in 1873 and immediately opened his store with a partner (and assumed full control by 1876). Four months after the fire, he’d written to the city for permission to “round off the corner” of his new building, which would be designed by architects Samuel G. Curry and Francis S. Baker. This, he reasoned, would not only ease pedestrian congestion, it would provide more space for lookie-loos to peer at his goods. Once approved and built, he turned the architectural feature into a promotional tool: every advertisement sported the slogan “The Rounded Corner.”
He was a master of promotion: According to his obituary, in addition to being the first to install electricity in a retail store, he was first to purchase a full-page advertisement in a newspaper, and Globe founder George Brown, who begrudgingly ran the ad, told him he would “hurl himself into bankruptcy” by doing so.
In January, 1909, Jamieson retired and allowed Buffalo’s Seymour Knox to expand his five-and-dime, located one door north, into the space. By February, Jamieson was dead. In 1913, Knox merged with his first cousins, Frank and Charles Woolworth, and 2 Queen St. W. would stay an F.W. Woolworth’s until 1976 (it was in a 1970 rebrand that Woolworth’s blasted through Jamieson’s gorgeous brick and terracotta, and filled in some of the windows, in order to install a white, porcelain-finished aluminum screen made by Alumincor of Scarborough).
Interestingly, when properties were being assembled to build the Eaton Centre in the early 1970s, Jamieson’s building was untouchable. This was due to a stipulation in the 1912 will of land owner Naomi Bilton (also owner of 188 Yonge St., where her parents had operated a store) who had a beef with the Eaton family; the two properties had been given to the University of Toronto (McMaster) on the condition that no Eaton could ever own them.
After a late-70s interior renovation, the building became home to Apparel Clearance Centre in 1980 and, finally, in 1985, the building was sold to Guaranty Realty Investments, who leased space to the Royal Bank of Canada. Guaranty employed architect Lloyd Alter, who restored the main portion of the rounded façade while cladding the sides in a cascading grey aluminum skin. That skin would stay in place until 2018, when new owner Cadillac Fairview began a massive restoration with Zeidler Architecture and heritage superheroes ERA Architects.
“This building has had more costume changes than Cher,” quipped ERA’s Philip Evans during a tour of the building this past December. “Or Taylor Swift,” he corrected with a laugh.
And all of those changes, said ERA’s Annabel Vaughan, made the building worse for wear: “So when Lloyd [Alter] comes in 1985 the building is in really bad shape. … He does the best practice heritage restoration at the time. … If he hadn’t, we wouldn’t have had this building to work on.” The building, she continued, had also been “fighting itself from Day 1” since the terracotta, manufactured locally at Don Valley Brickworks, was inferior and just “melting off the building.”
As Clifford Restoration’s Donovan Pauly removed each piece, he found multiple cracks all “pinned together with molten sulphur, which is the epoxy of 1880,” continued Ms. Vaughan. “And they were very crude, you could see people’s thumbprints on them.” The theory is that DVBW had jumped on the terracotta revival bandwagon, but, without previous experience, had put the pieces through the wrong kiln. When they came out broken, they were hastily glued back together and shipped to the site.
Enough terracotta was salvaged, thankfully, to be laser-scanned and reproduced by Boston Valley Terra Cotta in Orchard Park, N.Y. And, after scouring multiple manufacturers, an exact match to the brick was found, including brick for the less-yellow, more warehouse-y addition to the north. And that’s the thing: Everything, absolutely everything above the signage band reading “P Jamieson Clothier Outfitter” is a recreation (and parts of that band had to be recreated as well). Only the backup wall and some of the window glass was salvageable. Which deflates the popular theory that we can’t build like we used to; We can, but it costs more.
“We like to say construction contracts are about fifty-fifty: 50 per cent material, 50 per cent labour,” explained Cadillac Fairview’s David Stewart. “This is absolutely flipped, this is 75 per cent labour, 25 per cent material because it is bespoke. In between those top arches, someone took their brick hammer and chipped out a triangular piece of brick, and I guarantee you they didn’t get it right the first time.”
And with those top arches – and the rest of the building – now lit by a 21st-century lighting package, that mason’s work will shine for all of Toronto to enjoy once again. And, on the other side, new tenants will enjoy the same views of the former Simpson’s building through those arched top windows. Still empty on all floors, a tour of the restored and renovated interiors reveals elegant, versatile spaces that could be anything, really, since a direct connection to the Eaton Centre can be accommodated. And while it’s likely a retailer will once again occupy the ground floor and a swanky restaurant will take over the new glass ‘hat’ (which continues the “rounded corner” theme) and accompanying roof deck, ongoing transit construction at street level has suppressed enthusiasm.
“Metrolinx will be done some day,” finishes Mr. Stewart, “and the right tenants are going to see that this is a marquee corner. … We’d love to fill the building, but we also want to fill it with the right tenants.”
On the day I toured, I could’ve sworn I saw, out of the corner of my eye, an interested party: a Scotsman sporting a thick mustache and dressed in natty, well-made Edwardian clothes … but when I turned to face him, he was gone.