If Woody Allen set movies in Toronto they would be shot at Yonge and Eglinton. It’s vertical, the sidewalks are full of people wearing lululemon — Toronto’s equivalent of Allen’s tennis racquet conversation prop — and it’s upwardly mobile. It both functions and is known as the city’s uptown even though North York denizens might disagree, since megacity amalgamation rendered Yonge and Eglinton Toronto’s midtown.
It’s the kind of place where the cool kids don’t hang out but the “Young and Eligible” folks do. This civic dynamic of uptown-downtown is universal, and there has always been an awkward relationship between the two. In his 1994 novel about Toronto’s cultural scene, Russell Smith wrote of a late-night arrival in the neighbourhood: “Ted got off the subway at Eglinton. John had told him to just walk north until he saw the cars. He had never been to this part of town before; it was where John had grown up. John never talked about it. Go-Go had sneeringly said it was white, just white and nothing else. In the dark, Yonge Street seemed deserted and sterile. There seemed to be a disproportionate number of specialty food shops with baguettes and jam jars and italic lettering in the windows, all closed. In between them were dry cleaners, a dark Second Cup, an imitation British pub at the base of a mirrored office building.”
The shops and bars in and around Yonge and Eglinton tend not to be destinations for people from other neighbourhoods (restaurants are an exception) and the neighbourhood has always suffered from a sense of being off the trendy beaten path, a foggy “place up there.” In an article in Toronto World from 1907 on the area, then the frontier of Toronto’s manifest destiny surge into rural Ontario, it’s clear the neighbourhood has always been off everyone else’s civic radar: “A good deal is being heard of this most beautiful of Toronto’s suburbs, North Toronto, but few people indeed know where it is situated and when the question is asked ‘Where is North Toronto?’ the answer generally is . . . altogether wrong.” The article goes on to describe the area in topographic terms that current residents might not object to: “This high altitude secures the town’s inhabitants pure air, as the atmosphere is not contaminated with coal smoke and other foul-smelling, disease-producing and death-dealing odours; and consequently makes it a very desirable spot to live in.”
Yonge and Eglinton still is a desirable place to live in and, when the subway opened in 1954, a new pressure was added: developers. Eglinton was the end — or beginning — of Toronto’s nascent subway system and it transformed what was a sleepy streetcar suburb into a hub. When you stand on one of the west corners of the intersection you can still see the transformation happening: in places, Yonge looks like it could still be the Diefenbaker era with low-rise — some even one storey — retail buildings lining the street while opposite are skyscrapers. From a distance, Yonge and Eglinton is an impressively silhouetted skyline knuckle on Toronto’s Yonge Street spine.
The black glass towers of Canada Square — previously called “Foundation House” — were the first to lead Yonge and Eglinton into the postwar modern age. As it did in the early 1960s when built, Canada Square embodies an unapologetic big-cityness with movie theatres and corporate head offices all attached to underground trains. TVO even broadcasts from the basement — guests on Steve Paikin’s The Agenda can feel the subway rumbling a few feet below — and there was nothing more modern than TV in the postwar era. Toronto’s 1964 “Plan for Eglinton” summed up the spirit of the time: “To the Torontonian boarding a subway train to the City in the morning, or motoring up Yonge Street in the evening rush hour, the Eglinton District presents the picture of dynamic growth and change. Impressive glass office towers, bustling stores, high-rise apartments and the busy intersection of Yonge Street and Eglinton Avenue all contribute to this new image.”
As it was then, this intersection is still a contentious place as it continues to grow tall and dense. The giant memorials to the recent growth spurt are the Minto twin towers — nobody seems to call them by their James Bondish official names, Quantum North and Quantum South, perhaps because even the as-advertised lifestyles of occupants can’t live up to that much fiction. The anti-tower crowd point to them as the neighbourhood killer. In an article in the National Post back in February, Councillor Michael Walker called them “monsters” and said “you have to feel for the residents of Yonge-Eglinton” — a strange sentiment because he represents a lot of folks that seem quite happy living tall and, perhaps more importantly, the area already went vertical over 40 years ago.
During the growth of the 1960s, many residents were all for it. An archival collection of letters to City of Toronto planners, in response to the 1964 plan that called for the blocks surrounding the main intersection to be high-density apartments, were largely positive, lending an admittedly weird feeling to reading them, conditioned as we are by decades of consultation where the predominant word is “no.” True, some of the homeowners were likely for the plan because they could sell their property at top price. Today there are only four or five blocks of apartments that transition easily to solid single family homes, typical of many Toronto neighbourhoods.
Wandering the surrounding blocks today is to travel through a kind of modern wonderland. Low-rise and (very) high-rise buildings with names like “Lord Elgin,” “Imperial Manor,” “The Rosemount,” “Place de Soleil” and “Americana” capture both the optimistic modern thinking of the day while still being connected to our colonial past. Two magnificent 1970s concrete buildings found behind the rather ugly and austere RioCan buildings on the northwest side of Yonge and Eglinton — the RioCan Centre is in the midst of renovation plans — are called “Berkshire House” and “Canterbury House,” that, like the Foundation House before them, have much in common with brutalist buildings in Britain that have traditional “house” names.
Lingering by the fountains in the Anne Johnston Courtyard between the two Minto towers — named after the local city councillor who gave her political life up to defending Toronto’s right to skyscrapers — you can easily forget there are many storeys above. Done right, tall buildings aren’t wastelands at the bottom, and aren’t an eyesore on the horizon, but what is wasted is the opportunity to put tall buildings where they belong: in the middle of a major hub. That the Minto towers are shorter than they should be is one of Toronto’s latest failures to recognize that it is a vertical city. The latest failure in this long, drawn-out “fight” that was over when Trudeaumania began are the abandoned TTC yards adjacent to Canada Square, where a proposed development was what tweaked the perpetual kink in Councillor Walker’s neck back in February. Tall buildings are coming. Why not let them be as tall as they can be, and let Yonge and Eglinton be the metropolitan centre it’s been turning itself into for decades.