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Two decades later, in 1929, another soon-to-be abortive construction project\u00a0took shape on the eve of the Great Depression.<\/p>\n
At 26-storeys, the Victory Building at 80 Richmond Street\u00a0West\u00a0was supposed to be the tallest all-concrete structure in the British Empire.\u00a0The exterior, adorned with a multitude of\u00a0artistic flourishes, was specifically designed by architects Baldwin and Greene with input from Toronto high-rise specialist Henry Falk to emphasize height and stature.<\/p>\n
New York sculptor A. J. Goodelman was brought to the city to carve and install\u00a0an elaborate Indiana limestone sidewalk canopy, while on the roof, a massive concrete ziggurat\u00a0was anticipated\u00a0to crown the building.<\/p>\n
“A tall office building is a sort of mountain, a civilized city mountain,” architect Falk told the Toronto Daily Star<\/em> in September, 1929. “What impresses us in\u00a0a mountain, whether in nature or the city, is its mass and contour, not the details on its surface.”<\/p>\n The Victory Building sprang from\u00a0the ground at a tremendous pace. In just five months, the builders\u00a0had completed the shell of the 15th floor and were continuing skyward. However, market forces in Toronto and the rest of the world were beginning to cloud the building’s outlook.<\/p>\n The October, 1929 stock market crash halted work on the project at the 21st floor and rumours began to circulate about its structural and economic viability. “Nothing short of an earthquake, so severe as to destroy the whole city, could shake the foundations of the Victory Building,” Falk reassured.<\/p>\n The work stoppage, he said, was merely due to the rapid pace of construction. The\u00a0funds for the final stage of the project were unavailable\u00a0because of the record-setting pace of the build, he said. “A very bright future can be predicted for the Victory Building,” he added.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, as the Depression began to bite in early 1930, all work halted\u00a0and the tower became\u00a0a conspicuous shell. Despite numerous plans to fund\u00a0the final eight floors and roof, the Victory Building stayed\u00a0a stump for seven years, devoid of much of its promised architectural glory.<\/p>\n A\u00a0new buyer finally bought the dormant structure\u00a0in 1936, adding a few utilitarian additional floors and squaring off the roof. Tenants moved in on April 1, 1937, but the Victory Building never did quite fulfil its architects’ grand ambitions.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Perhaps Toronto’s most famous unfinished structure loomed like a spectre over the Don Valley for more than 20 years.<\/p>\n The Hampton Park Apartments, better known as the Bayview Ghost, started life in 1959 as a controversial 800-unit residential complex.\u00a0When finished, the development would have looked\u00a0over the Don Valley from a perch northeast of Rosedale, above Bayview Avenue, and included a swimming pool and putting green.<\/p>\n There was trouble almost from\u00a0the moment East York approved Hampton Park. The local council claimed it had acted in error and residents of the tony Governor’s Bridge neighbourhood fretted over the introduction of apartments, notes author Mark Osbaldeston in Unbuilt Toronto<\/em>.<\/p>\n Despite the local acrimony, Hampton Park pushed ahead with construction, putting up the shell of the first 105-suite building in 1960. In a last-ditch effort to keep the project advancing, East York rezoned the land for single-family housing, a move that triggered more than two-decades of legal purgatory.<\/p>\n By\u00a0the late 1970s, the property\u00a0surrounding the crisp white shell of the Ghost still remained\u00a0undeveloped. The bare land\u00a0and elevated location in clear sight of the\u00a0Don Valley Parkway fuelled\u00a0the building’s legend.<\/p>\n Finally, in 1979, a new proposal for the site pitched by new developers inadvertently broke the stalemate. Instead of rezoning the land to permit construction of two 12-storey apartment blocks as asked, East York instead issued\u00a0a demolition permit for the Ghost and acquired\u00a0provincial legislation upholding its single-family housing\u00a0bylaw.<\/p>\n In October, 1981,\u00a0a wrecking ball painted like a jack-o’-lantern crashed through the walls of the Bayview Ghost, ending the saga once and for all.<\/p>\n “This shouldn’t have been demolished,” said Morris Freedman, a partner with Hampton Park Developments\u00a0Ltd. “People should have been living here 22 years ago. But it’s a democracy. People get what they want.”<\/p>\n Today,\u00a0the Bayview Ghost site is covered by\u00a0two streets of single-family dwellings.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In more recent times, the concrete stump of the original Bay-Adelaide Centre\u00a0provided stark warning that not all high-rise projects manage to make it off the ground.<\/p>\n In 1988, Toronto City Council gave the go-ahead to a controversial twin office tower project proposed by\u00a0Markborough Properties (the real estate arm of the Hudson’s Bay Company) and developer\u00a0Trizec Properties.<\/p>\n Essentially, council allowed\u00a0Markborough to merge density from three separate properties into just one at\u00a0the northwest corner of Yonge and Adelaide. In exchange, the developers agreed to provide space for a new affordable housing and a public park.<\/p>\n Toronto Star<\/em> writer David Lewis Stein called the Bay-Adelaide deal\u00a0“everything that is wrong with\u00a0…\u00a0city council.” A subsequent independent review, however, found the agreement to be satisfactory.<\/p>\n With the deal sealed, architecture critics praised the design of the skyscraper. The Star<\/em>‘s\u00a0Christopher Hume predicted the towers would become “instant landmarks.”<\/p>\n In 1989, builders excavated and built\u00a0the Bay-Adelaide Centre’s six-storey underground parking garage on the south side of Temperance St., just east of Bay St. The central elevator core that would have formed the spine of the building rose six storeys above ground\u2014and then the project fell apart.<\/p>\n The problem was\u00a0the Bay-Adelaide Centre was promising to deliver a considerable amount of new office space at a time when surrounding towers were already partially vacant. Just five years earlier, the Toronto office vacancy rate was 13 percent, and in the meantime Scotia Plaza and BCE Place had arrived in the downtown core.<\/p>\n Unable to secure an anchor tenant for the Bay-Adelaide Centre, Markborough Properties\u00a0put the project on hold in 1991. In 1993, it nixed the whole thing. “When word came … the Bay-Adelaide Centre had been killed, it came as a surprise to many that it had still been alive,” wrote the Star<\/em>‘s Christopher Hume.<\/p>\n An attempt in 1998\u00a0to\u00a0revive the project and\u00a0build off the stump also\u00a0failed because of a lack of tenants.<\/p>\n The partially-complete elevator core was finally razed in 2006 when\u00a0Mayor David Miller and Brookfield Properties’ Ric Clark took\u00a0ceremonial first swings at the concrete monolith.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n With the First World War a decade in the past, the T. Eaton Co. was once again ready\u00a0to further its ambition\u00a0of building a flagship Eaton store at Yonge and Carlton, minus the man who\u00a0masterminded the project.<\/p>\n John Eaton died of pneumonia in 1922 aged just 45 and the company was helmed by his cousin,\u00a0Robert Young Eaton.<\/p>\n In November, 1928 his\u00a0T. Eaton Co. revealed\u00a0its plans for a retail emporium astonishing in scale and proportion. Instead of building the five-storey, Beaux-Arts store it had announced just a few months earlier, Eaton unveiled\u00a0a colossal structure that would consume two city blocks\u00a0between Yonge, Bay, Gerrard, and College streets\u2014not Carlton, as the company had originally imagined.<\/p>\n Inside would be more than 2 million square feet of retail space spread over nine floors. All of Eaton’s administrative offices would be relocated to the building and there would be space for a theatre, dining hall, and a grand arcade connecting\u00a0Bay and\u00a0Yonge streets.<\/p>\n A 670-foot tower, more than twice the height of the clock tower of Old City Hall, would crown the whole thing. It was to be Toronto’s Rockerfeller Center\u2014the biggest retail development in Canada to date.<\/p>\n Construction began as planned in 1928, but the Great Depression quickly scuppered progress, and only the first phase of the building at the southwest corner of Yonge and College materialized. Though only a fraction of the building was built, the deep foundation pilings for the central tower lingered in the ground until the 1980s.<\/p>\n Today,\u00a0the widened sections of Yonge and College\/Carlton in the area\u00a0hint the great store that\u00a0was lost in the financial crisis.<\/p>\n Interestingly, land on Carlton Street the T. Eaton Co. sold when it switched its sights to\u00a0College Street gave rise to another abortive high-rise\u00a0project in the form of the Toronto\u00a0Hydro Tower. As it was originally planned, the structure that presently stands just east of Yonge was meant to support an 20-storey skyscraper.<\/p>\n It would take until 1977 for Eaton’s to get its modern Toronto flagship in the Eaton Centre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"toronto](\"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2016\/04\/20160408-UnfinishedTowers-Bayview.jpg\")
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