![\"Bloor](\"http:\/\/farm6.static.flickr.com\/5303\/5664389869_9308748268_z.jpg\")
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Synonymous with both subways and shopping but most recently with streetscaping construction woes, Bloor Street has joined St. Clair as an example of the troubles tied to Toronto\u2019s aspirations of greater beauty and efficiency. As cheeky new pylon ads proclaim that spring will bring \u201c134 new condos\u201d (ie: trees) to birds in the area, Bloor is finally nearing the end of its dramatic saga and settling into its much-hyped greener identity. However, while attractive couture, condos and now trees claim the street corner by corner, the man who had the most impact on Bloor Street\u2019s identity \u2013 Joseph Bloor himself \u2013\u00a0is still awaiting proper acknowledgement.<\/p>\n
Charles Pelham Mulvany and Graeme Mercer Adam give a good overview of Joseph Bloor\u2019s back story in their book History of Toronto and the County of York<\/em><\/a>. Born in 1789 near Staffordshire, England, Joseph Bloor moved to Canada with his wife Sarah Lees in 1819. Bloor began life in the Town of York as innkeeper of the Farmer\u2019s Arms on King Street, where he worked from 1824 through 1831. He used his profits from the inn to purchase four tracts of land \u2013 land that what would later become Bloor Street \u2013 and founded the Village of Yorkville with William Jarvis. As Mike Filey noted in a 2009 column<\/a>, Yorkville was essentially Toronto’s first suburb: Bloor moved his family of six north and began selling small lots to others seeking “clean suburban air outside the city.”\u00a0Bloor also opened a brewery and began competition with Yorkville\u2019s other resident beer maker, Severn Brewery.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Built in the Rosedale Valley, Bloor’s brewery dammed the nearby creek to generate its water power. In their profile on the brewery,\u00a0Lost Rivers<\/em><\/a> wrote that the damming created a popular pond that offered both a swimming and skating venue. Today, the reshaped topography of the area can make any of these past uses hard to place. Toronto history guru and 2009 Heritage Toronto Special Achievement Award recipient Stephen Otto<\/a> told me during a discussion on Bloor Street that \u201canybody looking for the location of Bloor\u2019s brewery today can practically stand on Sherbourne bridge and drop a penny.\u201d Bloor’s brewery was sold to John Rose in 1843. Renamed the Castle Frank Brewery, it operated until 1864 and was demolished in 1875. Severn Brewery came to outlast its rival, operating until 1886 and earning a place on the Yorkville Crest, represented as a beer barrel with the letter \u2018S.\u2019 Bloor instead lives on in the identity of one of Toronto’s most prominent streets.<\/p>\n Ranked the 20th most expensive shopping street in last year’s list by New York real estate company Cushman & Wakefield, \u201cBloor Street\u201d has evolved to acquire the same sort of stylish reputation as the brand name flagships found along it. With Libeskind\u2019s landmark ROM Crystal as an elaborate centrepiece and thousand-dollar scarves ripe for impulse purchase, Bloor from Yonge to St. George has become something of a high-class home base. The Cushman & Wakefield report found retail rent on Bloor Street in 2010 cost an average $313 per square foot \u2013 up from $300 in 2009. This is dwarfed by the $1,664 per square foot cost of setting up shop on Fifth Avenue, but it’s also significantly more than the next Canadian runner-up: Vancouver’s Robson street, which costs $220 per square foot.<\/p>\n Toronto travel guides allege that Bloor\u2019s strip of retail stores has been dubbed the “Mink Mile,” but I’ve yet to hear anyone use this term aloud (journalists, for their part, also do a good job of making this seem like far more common a nickname than it actually is).\u00a0The name seems to borrow as much from Chicago\u2019s \u201cMagnificent Mile<\/a>\u201d as Bloor\u2019s new physical identity does \u2013 Chicago\u2019s famous retail strip was oft-cited as inspiration in early development proposals.\u00a0Indeed, although its boundaries stretch far beyond Chanel and Prada, \u201cBloor Street\u201d as a name tends itself to be most strongly associated with this posh Bloor-Yorkville strip; neighbourhoods farther east and west have nicknames that play off of their North\/South intersections (\u201cBlansdowne\u201d) or their own identities (\u201cKoreatown\u201d).<\/p>\n Regardless of its connotation today, there\u2019s great debate over whether \u201cBloor Street\u201d as a name is even accurate to its namesake \u2013 much debate has occurred over whether \u201cBloor\u201d should actually be \u201cBloore.\u201d Prominent Toronto historian Mike Filey, for one, contends that \u201cBloor\u201d is a misnomer<\/a>. Joseph Bloor, for his part, did a great job of encouraging such confusion: he signed his name on an early Upper Canada Land Petition without an \u201ce,\u201d but many of his later signatures include it. Presumably, the \u201ce\u201d came as he developed beyond just a brewer \u2013 possibly because he believed it paired better with his wealthy new status, which makes it ironic that Toronto\u2019s most expensive street lives on today sans \u201ce\u201d. Bloor\u2019s death did little to settle debates: his obituary refers to him without an \u201ce,\u201d while his gravestone includes one. For his part, Rob Ford seems to have launched his own quiet ruling on the matter, deciding that the appropriate name is actually neither Bloor nor Bloore, but\u00a0Bloot<\/a>.<\/p>\n In any case, Toronto (or Yorkville, then) adopted Bloor\u2019s family name without an \u201ce.\u201d An October 11, 1854 Globe and Mail<\/em> advertisement marks likely the earliest mention of Bloor Street in print. Prior to this, Toronto’s Second Concession Road had gone by a number of other, short-lived names. Mike Filey covers the full sequence in his book Toronto: The Way We Were<\/em><\/a>. Originally, the street took after the nearby St. Paul’s church opened in 1841 and went by St. Paul’s Road. Shortly after, the 1839 appointment of Lord Sydenham as the new governor of the Province of Canada led the road to be renamed Sydenham Road. The road next had a brief stint as Toll Gate Road, named after the temporary toll gate once stationed just North of Bloor and Yonge. Ultimately, Joseph Bloor’s role in developing various properties in the area led to today’s lasting Bloor Street moniker. Bloor’s property landholdings are outlined on the map above. For further history, Yorkville in Pictures<\/em><\/a> gives a good visual sense of Yorkville in these early days.<\/p>\n Today, it\u2019s hard to find mention of the man behind Bloor Street without turning to a book. As with any street, Bloor has taken on a life of its own, and the\u00a0life that first led to the street has become but one story behind a place with many stories to tell.\u00a0Nonetheless, efforts are underway to better recognize Joseph Bloor’s role in beginning these stories.\u00a0On Bloor’s death in 1862, a memorial tablet was placed in the Bloor Street Methodist Church that stood then at Bloor and Park Road, where The Bay is located today. The tablet was moved across the street to Westminster Presbyterian Church when the Methodists merged with that body in 1925; they were later joined by the congregation of\u00a0 Old St. Andrew’s United Church and\u00a0 took the latter’s name. When St. Andrew’s [formerly Westminster] Church was demolished in the 1980s and the site redeveloped for an office building and new church, it was not possible to display the stone there, so it and several other memorials were put in outdoor storage in a fenced enclosure at the foot of the Grace Hospital smokestack. Once the Toronto Historical Board heard of this, it took them into its care and put them in proper storage.<\/p>\n Since then, several attempts have been made to have Bloor’s memorial re-erected in a protective case in front of the\u00a0 property at 121 Bloor, the site of the house shown above where Bloor was living when he died. Many parties have been involved in making this happen\u00a0\u2013 St. Andrew’s Church, the managers of the office building, City and Heritage Toronto staff, architects working pro bono, conservators, potential sources to fund the estimated cost of $15,000\u00a0\u2013 but to date their collective efforts have not been crowned with success. Hopefully soon, the tablet and its accompanying interpretive plaques will make their debut as a gift to the street and enrich public understanding of this worthy man.<\/p>\n After its naming, Bloor Street\u2019s next biggest historical milestone was the installment of the Bloor Street subway line in the 1960s. Now a fixture of Toronto, Transit Toronto<\/em>‘s coverage of the line’s development<\/a> explains that it was heavily criticized when it was first proposed. To many Torontonians, Bloor was an odd choice over Queen Street, which certainly began as a more prominent east-west street. In fact, the City’s first subway proposal in 1945 had called for a 13 station streetcar subway line along Queen. Nonetheless, by the time the City returned to\u00a0reevaluate an east-west line, a number of factors shifted attention to Bloor. The street’s own streetcar line was up to 9000 passengers per direction per hour, and Bloor was also overloaded with automobile traffic. As cars fuelled the growth of lower-density suburbs, the population sprawled farther east and west. To the east, Queen Street offered only a limited route, as it gets cut off by the angled shoreline. With settlement skewing farther North anyways, the Danforth was becoming a more popular commuting path. Interestingly, a “flying U” compromise was floated for a while and would have created a subway line that dipped from Bloor at its edges to Dundas and then down to Queen.<\/p>\n Filey notes in Toronto: The Way we Were<\/em><\/a> that backlash to the Bloor line was only really quelled because it was \u201cwell understood that the city\u2019s next underground line would be built along Queen Street.\u201d A half a century later, with a \u201cDowntown Relief Line\u201d now a mythical term, things have obviously played out according to a different plan. Today, Bloor-Yonge is easily the busiest subway station in the city, seeing 405,530 passengers pass through it daily. It’s clear that the Bloor line has also heavily shaped Toronto development.<\/p>\n Construction of the subway line saw the appropriation of 800 properties \u2013 70% of them residential. Coupled with the subway line, new allowances for higher densities along Bloor dramatically and quickly changed its character. The architecture of the area gives good insight into the timeline of development: 1970 brought Modernist tower 101 Bloor Street West, while the Brutalist concrete construction of the 70’s introduced landmark tenants the Manulife Centre and The Bay in 1974 and Holt Renfrew in 1978, followed by the surge of soaring glass condos in the past decade. TOBuilt<\/em> offers an excellent catalogue of past and present Bloor Street buildings<\/a>, including such blasts from the past as Holt Renfrew’s original building<\/a> at 144 Bloor Street West, demolished in 1955.<\/p>\n Today, one of the buildings getting the most attention on the street is the upcoming One Bloor East condo tower. Praised as one of Canada’s \u201cmost attractive corners\u201d, Mike Filey notes that (the Northwestern corner of) Bloor and Yonge was actually once occupied by a cemetery. Coming full circle from these origins, the first proposal for a hybrid condo\/ hotel on the site envisioned an 81-storey tower with \u201cCadillac-inspired\u201d roof fins<\/a>, to be built by Bazis International. The site was famous for drawing out eager buyers to \u201cline up for weeks\u201d<\/a> back in 2007. Facing financing troubles, the Bazis eventually sold the site to Great Golf Homes, who unveiled their own 70-storey tower<\/a> last year, designed by Harir Pontarini. While an attractive design, this outcome was still a disappointment to many urban who had been optimistic about the opportunity to turn the site into a great public space. As Christopher Hume put it in his own ode to a public square on the site<\/a>, \u201ca condo tower can go almost anywhere, but a square only makes sense in specific spots, none more so than Yonge and Bloor.\u201d Instead, the corner will now end up contributing more to Toronto\u2019s skyline than to its street life.<\/p>\n Of course, Bloor\u2019s street life has undergone significant improvements in the past two years. For one thing, the busy pedestrian intersections of Bloor & Yonge and Bloor & Bay also account for two of Toronto\u2019s three new scramble intersections, allowing shoppers to get from destinations like TD Bank to the Gap in less than half the time it used to take. After a long wait, shoppers this summer will also have trees to admire along their walk.<\/p>\n Once scheduled to finish in 2009, Bloor Street’s “Greener Bloor” project became a three-year affair that ballooned $4 million over budget to a total cost of $24 million. Last April, The Star<\/em> ran five different parties\u2019 perspectives on \u201cHow it all went wrong on Bloor<\/a>,\u201d citing mostly the poor sync between Toronto Hydro and the City\u2019s contractors.\u00a0The Bloor-Yorkville BIA originally proposed the project in 1998 and the new Bloor St. Business Improvement Area committed to paying back the $20-million paid upfront by the city through premiums to their annual taxes over the next 18 years, with the City itself ultimately covering $5 million.\u00a0The plan, done jointly by Brown + Storey Architects with Architects Alliance, traded 53 parking spaces for wider granite sidewalks, lined in trees and planters, watered through an underground drip irrigation system. This labeled Toronto Star<\/em> photo<\/a> offers a good overview of all of the new touches along the street. Most recently, bike racks have also returned to Bloor.<\/p>\n Spacing<\/em> published an analysis<\/a> of the original Bloor Street project in its pedestrian issue back in 2005. In a 2006 response<\/a>, Dylan Reid wrote that he was caught between endorsing the city’s investment in pedestrian space and dismissing the fact that this investment was, essentially, “pandering to the wealthy.” In something of a role reversal, these wealthy shoppers found themselves putting up with very rough conditions indeed as work went on \u2013\u00a0entering a store required walking a plank of sorts, over vast voids and through dust clouds. For their part, the marketing firms behind the street’s frustrated retailers had fun finding the silver lining in construction: Holt Renfrew ran signs telling shoppers that their makeup counter was ready to retouch anyone anyone braving the dust.<\/p>\n Photos\u00a0posted on UrbanToronto<\/em><\/a> last summer do a great job of balancing the conflicting sights seen last summer: ugly, under-construction catwalks, and the beautiful new sidewalks finished at the far east end.\u00a0In any case, it’s nice to know that this year we can look forward to a street made up entirely of the latter. $1.3 million of commissioned art work is also scheduled to be unveiled at the official opening later this spring.<\/p>\n Clearly, the last few years have brought Bloor Street its fair share of problems. Now, as construction on the street\u2019s central strip concludes and the street settles into its new identity, it is left with another identity to address. \u201cGreener Bloor\u201d may have fashioned Bloor Street a fresh new look, but fashion fades. If \u201cBloor Street\u201d has come to signify style, then the man who gave the street its name \u2013 Joseph Bloor \u2013\u00a0should be honoured with the same eternality as style itself. While identifying Bloor Street as one of its \u201cVillains\u201d of the year<\/a> last year, Torontoist<\/em> wrote that the Bloor Street could very well end up a “Hero” this year “once the resentment has subsided.” If Bloor Street really wants to earn some respect, another positive step forward will be made when the street pays due respect to its own heroic figure: street founder Joseph Bloor.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/farm6.static.flickr.com\/5022\/5664391375_722264c097_z.jpg\" "\\"Shoppers")
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