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Tall Saint
Destruction of the line of gorgeous 19th-century houses on the corner of Charles and St. Thomas is now fully underway, their demolition the final step to make way for the construction of The St. Thomas, a twenty-three storey condo tower. It will be the third tower at the intersection, just north of 77 Charles Street West, a sixteen-storey condo (that will necessitate demolishing Lycée Français de Toronto, a french school); and just west of the almost-finished twenty-nine storey One St. Thomas.
In March, just before a fence went up around the site, Christopher Hume labelled the houses’ destruction—and their replacement with a condo—”an urban tragedy.” “What’s unfolding here,” he wrote, “is the disturbing spectacle of a city tearing itself apart, destroying itself, killing the very things that give it its character and constitute its identity.” At least one person at the building site agrees: a small sticker plastered on one of the walls that encloses the demolition site (and encourages passers-by to book an appointment to buy a condo) concisely begs “DON’T DO IT.”
It’s hard to not be ambivalent. Two of the three new condo buildings are cash cows for the University of Toronto (specifically Victoria University, whose corner of campus the buildings are built on, and where I am a student), allowing the institution to pump more money into projects of its own, and the only building that’s anything near finished now, One St. Thomas, is (as Hume pointed out in the same article slamming The St. Thomas’s pending construction) beautiful and hard not to love: elegant, unique, and distinguished (with great views to boot), it treats the street below it with reverence, even if its most expensive unit sells for eight figures. When all of the buildings are completed, though, the tall trio, taken together, will all but dwarf the nearby student residences and overwhelm the narrow street they are built on—to say nothing of the noisy and disruptive construction that will continue well into the next decade, and what must be destroyed to make space for them.
All that’s left at the future site of The St. Thomas now are piles of old but intact orange bricks, splinters of wood, and the shell of the remaining house, and all of that will be gone soon, too. For now, the final tenants—a family of raccoons in the basement and pigeons on the roof—are standing their ground, the last residents to be displaced before a new flock moves in.
More photos after the fold.
The article originally said that all three new condo buildings at the intersection of St. Thomas Street and Charles Street West are or will be “cash cows” for the University of Toronto and “specifically Victoria University, whose corner of the campus the buildings are built on.” The university owns only the land on the north side of the intersection, which currently hosts One St. Thomas and will host The St. Thomas soon; the land on the south side of Charles Street West—77 Charles Street West—is owned by the religious group Opus Dei. When the condo is eventually built part of it will be filled by Opus Dei followers, and will serve as a “college and cultural centre” for them.
