Mel Lastman's legacy lives on in the latest furniture farce
John Barber The Globe and Mail Jun 12, 2007 A14
Let's skip the details and go straight to the top. City Hall's No. 1 reason why putting a Leon's Furniture store in the historic John Street Roundhouse, which was once supposed to be a major museum in what was once supposed to be a major park, is a good thing: It may be a discount-furniture outlet, but at least it's not a Bad Boy.
Such are the small mercies available to bedraggled bureaucrats in the age of the public-private partnership. They ride along, making excuses, reminding us helpfully that things could always be worse. This is the city, after all, that not so long ago draped the chain of office on a discount-furniture huckster.
Make no mistake: Mel Lastman's legacy liveth on in the latest Leon's. This week's news is the fruit of a tragi-farce that began its agonizing descent in the earliest days of the megacity, when such expressions as "request for proposals" were enough to send alternating chills of dread and greed surging through the corridors.
A decade of murky non-progress later, Leon's is the pedestrian but otherwise benign - and perfectly appropriate - result.
It may seem odd that the job of defending such a half-loaf would fall to Rita Davies, director of the city's culture department, but she does it with spirit.
The new Leon's will have tasteful signage and cater to the "upscale downtown condo market" now thriving amid the towers of the old railway lands, according to Ms. Davies.
"It's not going to be a cash-and-carry, it's a showcase store," she said. There will be no new parking lots. "Whatever one's concept of big box, this is not it."
The chain is undergoing a "rebranding" and soon will not be the same old Leon's, according to Ms. Davies. Not that there's anything wrong with that. "Not everybody can afford to shop at an UpCountry," she said, noting the "slightly snobby" response to the latest news about the railway museum in the Roundhouse.
The Leon's deal will ensure the Roundhouse is finally restored, its turntable made operable and three of its 30-odd repair bays are set aside for a museum - with the funding needed to operate it.
"We're going to get a beautifully restored building, we're going to get a rail heritage museum and maybe we're going to get a store that we'll all be happy to shop in," Ms. Davies said.
The snobs are not amused. One of them is newly elected Councillor Adam Vaughan, who enjoys the great benefit of not knowing how such a state of affairs in his downtown ward came to be, and thus remains uninfected by the defeatism such knowledge naturally encourages. Despite careful briefing on the deal, he is determined to blow it up.
But as Ms. Davies and others point out, that is likely impossible. Council voted last fall to approve a new lease on the Roundhouse, with a new developer, after the last big plan for something better went bust. In the process, it surrendered any say in the selection of sub-tenants. Retail is allowed. Leon's is retail.
At the same time, council extended the sweetheart deal enjoyed by co-tenant Steam Whistle Brewing, which won the right to occupy three more bays in the Roundhouse at $7.50 a square foot - and is now complaining loudly about Leon's.
But the brewery is just more of the same, its tenancy adopted as an expedient to cover for the failure of the original Lastman-era RFP.
Once Toronto dreamed of a great rail museum in a now-unique heritage structure. It got a brewery. It dared to dream again - and got a discount-furniture outlet.
"Except this won't be a discount-furniture store," said Ms. Davies, reminding us of the rebranding. "So it's a brewery and a furniture store - and a museum."
Good news at last: Things could be worse.