By Jamie Bradburn

Source: the Financial Post 500, Summer 1988.

For today’s featured ad, we hand writing duties over to the longest-serving mayor of North York, Mel Lastman. In his introduction to the semi-advertorial book North York: Realizing the Dream (Burlington: Windsor Publications, 1988), the Bad Boy describes how his municipality’s miraculous new downtown is one of the factors behind his boast that “nowhere is the human spirit stronger than in North York.”

The focal point of our city is what I refer to as North York’s Miracle on Yonge Street—a $4 billion downtown that’s being constructed in our city centre, complete with a civic square and major performing arts centre. Millions of square feet of retail establishments, offices, and residences are sprouting up seemingly overnight.
But it took many years of planning in partnership with our citizens. Area ratepayer groups participated fully in the forging of our downtown plan and gave it their complete support. Outside of North York, it is rare to see so keen a level of cooperative planning between local government and its citizenry…It is nothing short of miraculous that we are creating a downtown after we built the city and that this barrage of construction activity is happening all at one time, spurring us on from one success to the next.
The City of North York is quickly becoming the main magnet for commerce in Metropolitan Toronto. Our shiny new miracle of a downtown has prompted major corporate head office relocations and a flood of new business activity, and has spawned an unprecedented demand for our office space.
When completed, our downtown will generate full-time jobs for 60,000 employees, homes for more than 30,000 new residents, and $100 million annually in business and realty taxes. We’re in great shape. We are becoming recession-proof.