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news

Toronto Life Square Is Broke and Life-less

By David Topping

20090501pugs_TorontoLife_1.jpg
Photo courtesy of the Pug Awards, where Toronto Life Square placed second-last in its category this year.


Toronto Life Square—the massively unattractive ogre on the north-east corner of Yonge and Dundas, which houses not only a Future Shop, Google’s local offices, and an AMC that uncomfortably doubles as Ryerson classrooms, but also a vast and ever-growing pool of all of our tears—is “broke,” according to the Globe and Mail. What’s more: Toronto Life, who scooped up the naming rights in 2007, “has been locked in a months-long legal dispute to remove its name from the project.” (Perhaps the magazine finally realized the irony of suggesting that the building that loomed over Dundas Square added anything to Toronto life.) The Globe notes that, under the building’s original owners, a subsidiary of PenEquity, it racked up some $280 million in debt, and has now been placed in receivership, meaning that it’ll soon change ownership but not, unfortunately, disappear altogether. That fate will, for now, remain confined to the dreams of those who want to believe Toronto could have done so much better.

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  • http://undefined rek

    Hilarious. That corner was behind construction hoarding for about a million years, and a year after completion it’s now clear to absolutely everyone that it was a terrible idea.

  • http://piorkowski.ca/ qviri

    I don’t know. The washrooms there are pretty nice.

  • http://undefined MJWilliams

    They could always pave paradise and put in a parking lot.

  • http://undefined Dave

    I think the building is just fine… but the should go to being called metropolis due to the fact that it is not a square and people get it mixed up with Dundas Square

  • http://undefined David Toronto

    If they got rid of that ugly signage and changed
    the colour of the facade to something brighter,
    then there would still be half a chance of it
    becoming more appealing.

  • http://undefined SpupEh

    The building is incredibly ugly and not very well designed. Escalators are way too narrow and there aren’t enough stairs – I’d hate to be caught in the AMC if there’s a fire! A glass and metal door (with no “crash bar”) at the bottom of an escalator? Really? Are they TRYING to kill people?
    I was leaving a screening and there was one elderly woman half an escalator in front of me – she had trouble getting the door open and people were bunching up behind her. There’s only a very small place to go at the bottom of the escalator and I’d hate to think what would happen if there WAS an emergency and someone got trampled in the crush.
    On top of it all, they still hadn’t fixed the HVAC so the place was stuffy and unpleasant. You can tell that the fry oil needs changing in the food court level judging by the rancid-grease smell on the AMC level above. Unbelievable. I avoid it like the plague.

  • Adam Sobolak

    “If they got rid of that ugly signage”
    ==========
    Unfortunately, the “ugly signage” is the, uh, architectural point of the place. Darned if you do, darned if you don’t.

  • http://undefined accozzaglia

    SCHADENFREUDE! F-bomb you, lady, that’s what stairs are for!

  • JMfromTO

    It’s such an eyesore. It looks like an addition to the Scarborough Town Centre from the late 1990′s.
    It also has all the stores that would be in an addition to the Scarborough Town Centre…. Maybe they should just move it East a little…

  • http://undefined Everybody’s Problem

    The things I don’t like about Toronto Life & Y-D Square:
    - It was conceived as “Toronto’s Time Square”. I hate the way this city is always trying to “keep up with the Jones’” instead of developing it’s own identity.
    - Furthermore, Time Square was an organic development, not the work of conceptual artists. Which is why Time Square works and Y-D Square doesn’t.
    - Concrete. Has a major public space ever been so brutal? There’s no shade, and no protection from the wind. Epic fail.
    - Dull & poorly chosen retail. Really? Do we need another Jack Astors or Milestones? There is, or was, already a Future Shop a block north on Yonge, and there’s a Best Buy a half block west on Dundas. Redundancy! The food court options are too expensive for the Ryerson students who most frequent it. ($9 for a Pita plate at Milo’s? Are you serious?)
    - Even the AMC (which already looked old on opening day) fails to be relevant. How many times have you gone there thinking you’d see the week’s big release only to find out it’s not playing at the theater? Recent examples: Star Trek? No. Harry Potter? Nope. Transformers? Sorry. I mean, sure, Transformers sucks, but you would expect it to play on at least ONE of the 24 screens on opening weekend. This is supposed to be the city’s premiere mainstream theater, afterall. And the theatre is the principle driver of the building’s business. They can’t afford not to carry the week’s big release.
    -I think the idea was to create a sense-of-scale, that the area was supposed to impress and be very urban. Unfortunately, I find the opposite to be true. The square feels claustrophobic: oppressive rather than expansive.
    Things I do like about the Square:
    - I have to admit, it does create a rare sense of place in a city that is desperately lacking “nodes”. It may be unpleasant, but at least it’s something.
    - I like the way the Eaton Centre has been “opened up” at the south-west corner. The glass atrium was a good first step in the right direction, and I’d like to see the entire eastern wall of the Eaton Center reconstructed to incorporate Yonge Street retail and interconnectivity.
    I suppose I could go on and on, but nobody really cares about my gripes, right?

  • http://undefined Loozrboy

    I tell everybody how much I hate this building whenever I get a chance. Still, I don’t think it’s likely to be improved by going belly-up and all the businesses clearing out, so let’s not root for that.
    @Everybody’s Problem: if it makes you feel any better, I saw Star Trek there opening week.

  • http://undefined bigdaddyhame

    Insert Nelson’s “HA-HA!” imagery here.
    I saw Star Trek there too with my Son – only because it wasn’t playing at the Paramount/Scotiabank whatever at the time. The AMC theatre is WEAK – whoever thought going up six escalators to get to a theatre is a good idea is an idiot. I agree about the fire escape situation, too. WTF.
    Yonge/Dundas Square is sort of ok, but most of what goes on there is crass tie-ins to television shows or other media personalities. Would it have killed them to put some greenspace in there? A few trees maybe?
    Gripe gripe gripe – we’re stuck with it now, it’s too early to think about replacing it with anything.
    How cool would it be, though, if one of the advertising panels could be devoted to community use? Just imagine the weird and funky stuff people could put on a 40×40 space.

  • http://undefined Astin

    I don’t mind the place.
    I live down the road and have found it very convenient. A good-sized Future Shop replacing the closet-sized one that used to be on Yonge. A movie theatre by the Eaton Centre for the first time in years, and this time not one with TV-sized screens. These are both businesses that require no small amount of real estate to operate.
    Yah, the large restaurants are crap. We need another Jack Astor’s like we need more horse shit on the road. At least Milestones offers a nice patio to have a drink on with your mediocre food.
    The food court has some original offerings at least. Although I miss the downtairs gelateria.
    But it’s there. It’s not going anywhere. And it’s still better than the walls of blue that were hiding a giant hole in the ground for what seemed an eternity.

  • http://undefined montauk

    it has the most counterintuitive positioning and arrangement of escalators I’ve ever seen. maybe that’s why the higher I go in that building the more soulless I feel. by the time you reach jack astors’ level you need a stiff drink, but fittingly, you can only have it surrounded by the drunk college-aged hollister boys I am pretty sure that restaurant imports in cattle trucks to perpetually populate its tables. they jubilantly sing-scream along with the desperately supplicative classic rock and disco tracks – like a neverending CD of wedding party music from 1998 – and the more ecstatic they get the more certain you are that you are not having fun and you have, in fact, escalatored yourself to the fringe layers of hell where even the hipsters can’t keep you company. you wonder how many times the perky stepford waitress has heard them cry “I can’t believe they’re playing this song!” and how many of her coworkers have cracked and curled up chain-smoking under the vacant indoor tables pounding their forehead against the stool legs to the beat of apache by the sugarhill gang. there’s no reprieve, it’s just you and the heat lamps and the good-natured college cattle and a seven dollar piece of admittedly decent but alarmingly soft pan-fried bread and even when you emerge in living thriving society there’s still the stink of corporate death on you. or maybe it’s just the garlic. that building is like the ex you never want to meet in the street, the baby you accidentally stepped on and made cry who may carry some residual memory of the event and want to kill you, the embarrassing memory of hitting yourself in the head with the volleyball trying to serve it during gym class. you experience that building once and want to avoid it evermore. and i’m not even the rabidly anti-corporate type. i just motherfucking hate that motherfucking building.
    matty, feel free to now address your perceptions of my neuroses.

  • http://undefined Ben

    And it’s not like this building is there for us locals. It’s for tourists to look up to, oohing and ahhing.
    “Honey, it reminds me a bit of a picture of New York. Take a picture of me while I do my Woody Allen impersonation, okay?”

  • http://www.bitpicture.com Marc Lostracco

    montauk: The escalators are intentionally like that, which is a configuration common to malls (like the Eaton Centre). If they force you to get off one escalator and have to walk a distance to the next one, you’re more likely to stop at the stores you encounter along the way.
    Last week, I was in Toronto Life Square and all the escalators were stopped, so there was a huge lineup for the elevators. When I got to the top level (where the AMC theatres were), I got off the elevator, but they had the egress from the elevator stanchioned off with an Employees Only sign, so you had to crouch under the stanchion belts to actually go anywhere or walk up those steep escalators.

  • http://undefined montauk

    I don’t mind walking from one escalator to the next, but they (unintentionally, I think) went into overkill mode and made the damn things too hard to find, hence the late addition of extra navigational signage and the sympathetic caretakers who appear accustomed to pointing despairing theatre-goers in the right direction. I prefer the IKEA tactic – a total fucking maze with clear and bountiful signage. Best of both worlds.

  • http://rantspectacle.blogspot.com/ mccool

    I had free passes to see Star Trek at the massive AMC and thought I was lost more than once. Six escalators to the top? Really?
    After the movie, I was so dizzy by the time I got to the bottom I felt like I was hyperventilating. Stepping out onto Yonge St. and taking a deep breath was far from relief. After scrambling past a thousand tourists all looking up and around (instead of where they’re walking) I wanted to scream and rip my hair out and just get the fuck out of there.
    God, just thinking about it now makes my chest tighten.
    Maybe the whole corner will disintegrate under bankruptcy and we’ll watch and laugh as popped collars and fake tans tumble out the windows of Jack Astor’s scream-singing jock rock into their bottles of Coors Light the whole way down.

  • http://undefined torontothegreat

    I ALWAYS forget how to get “down” after I’ve left the theatre. The configuration is f’d, I’d have to agree with that. I’ve commented to friends saying, it almost seems like the builder forgot to put escalators in, until it was almost done. It has that feeling to it.

  • http://undefined accozzaglia

    Well, uhm, Yonge-Dundas Square and Toronto Life Centre are private spaces on which citizens have no say in how they’re created, maintained, or negotiated.
    Most of us (myself, too) weren’t around to see the municipally created Yonge Street Mall, but by all indications, it worked, worked cheaply, and citizens (in the city sense) felt they held a stake in the place. When Mayor Crobmie asked the province for a couple of enforcement provisions at the municipal level to smooth out the kinks in the original mall implementation, the province spoke to the mayor of Canada’s largest city like he was a ten-year-old and said in no uncertain terms, “No.” He asked for greater licencing/regulation over leafletters on the Mall, and greater enforcement authority over public drunkenness.
    With that no, the Yonge Street Mall died, and the much costlier alternative, dismissed when the Mall came into use for those four years (1971-74), was expropriation: dismissed them as litigious, costly, and extremely time consuming. Twenty-five years later, that expropriation finally began to happen and Y-D L7 was born. And then Toronto Life.
    That’s why we have what we do now. Applaud/lament the loss in that sense of civic ownership over your own city. Now you know what and why.

  • http://undefined montauk

    Yeah, that’s exactly it. Navigation as an afterthought.

  • http://undefined Paul D

    I don’t understand some of the complaints about the theatre. The Paramount should have already accustomed you to giant escalators to see a movie. The AMC is now the best place in town to see a blockbuster – everything’s digital, the seats are comfortable, best screens, and the temperature is decent.

  • http://undefined montauk

    Hands up if anyone else feels like they’re gonna get vertigo on the Paramount’s giant escalator, despite having used it numerous times.

  • http://www.bitpicture.com Marc Lostracco

    If I’m on that escalator, I have to look down, because if I look up at the ceiling while I’m on it, I get dizzy and feel like I’m gonna barf.

  • http://undefined torontothegreat

    I won’t go there as I have a fear of heights. I only go to AMC now because of that escalator at paramount :P

  • http://undefined montauk

    Ah. So you see, Paul D., expecting people to adjust to a design flaw doesn’t make it less of a design flaw.

  • http://undefined rek

    The escalator at the Paramount doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the narrow one at North York Centre (I think?) that crosses a 3 storey drop.
    The carpet at Silver City Y@E, the combination of deep purple and florescent highlights with all the neon lighting made me want to hurl.

  • http://undefined caliban

    Movie theatre owners have always required a large area for an auditorium but want to simultaneously minimize the expensive street frontage. Fifty years ago this was done with a small streetfront facade which passed over an alley to a large auditorium which was technically on a different street (think the Uptown or the Imperial). Nowadays this design has been turned ninety degrees and theatre owners tend to put the auditorium above grade level (the Paramount or the AMC) — the previous attempts at putting them underground being less successful (think of the Eaton Centre or Market Square).

  • http://undefined uskyscraper

    To correct one of the posters above, Times Square in New York is not an organic development, at least not the Times Square you see today. Every building there is required to have gaudy, massive, oversized signage and billboards according to mandated design guidelines (drawn up with the help of Toronto consultants, ironically) that were developed about fifteen years ago. It seems odd in Toronto because it is only a couple buildings that have this appearance, but you can’t blame them for trying what worked elsewhere:
    http://img1.planeteye.com/users/1/48/116/5347252728049.jpg
    The architecture UNDER the signs, though, is terrible. Bad choice of cladding, bad colors, poor streetside interface. A faux-historical theatre entrance would have helped bring scale and focus to the entry.
    As for the escalators, this is no different than the AMC or Loews’s theatres in Times Square – six escalators is the price you pay for urban real estate.
    The square itself is ok, but not nearly as green as it should have been. Remove the concrete canopy, add some glass seating (as per Times Square) and throw in some more trees (as per Union Square in SF) and you might have a more attractive space in treeless downtown Toronto.

  • http://undefined sprung

    It can be dangerous too especially if you’re stupid. See below
    “A 27-year-old man is in critical condition this morning after he fell more than 30 feet from the second floor of a downtown movie theatre last night.
    It happened just before midnight at the AMC Theatre near the Yonge-Dundas Square.
    According to witnesses, the man was coming down the escalator when he decided to sit on the moving handrail, in order to ride it down., but unfortunately he lost his balance and fell 30 feet, landing on his head.
    He was taken to hospital, where he remains in grave condition with head injuries, said Sgt. John Spanton. ”
    http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/682148

  • http://undefined rek

    He’s dead.