The Colonnade building on Bloor between Bay and Avenue Road provides Gucci-encrusted “Mink Mile” shoppers a public square in the form of an elegant half-oval. When completed in 1963, it was also Toronto’s first combined residential, commercial and retail development. After disappearing during a recent renovation, the plaque on the unique zigzag staircase has returned proclaiming this one-and-a-half-turn spiral “is the only one ever built without a central support” and that “the Colonnade is a totally Canadian project,” certainly things to be proud of 45 years ago when provincial Toronto was emerging from the shadow of the Empire.

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