news
Night Falls
The University of Toronto has purchased the McLaughlin Planetarium from the Royal Ontario Museum for $22 million, with plans for “academic use.” The Planetarium, which we profiled in detail last March, was, since its closure, transformed into temporary offices for ROM employees and a temporary warehouse—one of the most amazing ones imaginable—for ROM artifacts. But the more time that passed after its closure, the less it seemed possible for the museum to be able to develop the land that it was on: the ROM was met with widespread opposition to a proposed condo project in 2005, and though they were still planning a tentative new development last year, we wrote then that “as impractical as it is now, the Planetarium still stands on hallowed ground, and it is hard to imagine that another fight over its future is not on the horizon.” U of T and the ROM, regularly at odds over the Planetarium’s fate, have seemed able to agree on that point: U of T President David Naylor described the purchase in a press release as a “win-win-win for the U of T, the ROM, and the public,” and the Globe summarized the situation nicely: “The museum gets $22-million to help pay off the $84-million left owing to the provincial government after its $270-million expansion, the university gets badly needed room to grow and the public gets relief from a persistent threat to despoil a treasured landscape.”