urbandreamer
recession proof
After reading the Toronto Life article (and posting it in the Real Estate thread) about 74 Spadina Rd I was thinking about those apt's in the Annex, especially 169 St George where my "life" began (ie where my parents met in the '60s.) It's a long article probably written in the mid-90's but it's really interesting and relevant to the current bitching (in a few threads) about modernism vs faux-whatever-ism in today's condo scene.
I haven't read Taddle Creek magazine since leaving the Annex 8 years ago so maybe others here will remember reading this article (comes with cool photos of hipster living c. 1968):
http://www.taddlecreekmag.com/fabulous_place_1
Here's a bit of it to get you interested:
THIS FABULOUS PLACE
You wouldn’t think an aging apartment house as a good place to put down roots. Think again.
By Alfred Holden
Architect Wilfred Shulman promoted Sherwood Towers, 206 St. George
It was almost certainly Puccini, probably an aria from La Bohème, an opera about rent. Back and forth, two voices, a tenor and mezzo-soprano, jousted from open windows on the upper floors of separate apartment buildings in midtown Toronto—voices invisible in the dark and unable to see where, or who, the other was.
The spontaneous, semipublic opera, lasting about twenty minutes, added a surprising note to the St. George Street cityscape on a hot August night in 1996. Yet, it was no more surprising, really, than a little bit of urban theatre that startled neighbours and passersby here one winter evening a year or two earlier.
Sometime after the dinner hour, midway along this apartment building row that rose in the fifties and sixties, between Bloor Street West and Dupont Street, the bigger-than-life image of a plucked, dressed chicken escaping from a kitchen range was projected across a laneway between two apartment blocks, seven floors up.
The screen was the white, glazed brick south wall of 177 St. George Street, and the film was Thanksgiving, a National Film Board of Canada 16-mm short in which a raw, headless poulet, animated with the aid of stop-action filming, flees on its drumsticks to safety.
A warning on the film can read “NOT FOR CHILDREN,†recalled the fine arts student—soon to study at Yale—who ran the projector for a gathering of friends from her glass-walled corner apartment opposite the movie, at 169 St. George Street.
Not for children, indeed.
The exact same has been said about apartments themselves; one cliché among those accepted, repeated and generally believed in a North American culture infatuated, and in no small measure governed, by clichés—suburban homes, private cars, nuclear families, Republican politics. In this individualist universe, apartments, though creations of capital, have never quite fit.
“It is contended,†a contributor to Canadian Architect & Builder noted in the eighteen-nineties, summing up sentiments still heard today, “that there is no privacy in these great piles, no place for children, and that many other things are lacking to the man who considers his home is castle.â€
Not much would change. “THOSE NASTY APARTMENTS—AN OLD TORONTO PREJUDICE DIES HARD†flashed a headline over a story that appeared in the pages of the Toronto Star just past the middle of the twentieth century. “All over town, various politicians, planners and newspaper editorial writers are huddling their skirts about them and shrieking… .â€
“APARTMENTS THWART PASTORS†said a newspaper report in the same era, in which a building superintendent claimed to be able to observe the shift in a person’s personality when they moved from a house into an apartment. “They withdraw into themselves, they don’t smile as often and seem to lose interest in other people.†The inherent irresponsibility of tenants seemed proved, definitively, one June day in 1963, when someone returning from a weekend outing stocked a new Toronto apartment building’s reflecting pool with live brook trout, fishing the creatures out by casting from his fifth floor balcony.
And the part that especially interests me:
The apartment hunter would have crossed Lowther, and after a few steps more looked up through the elms and silver maples. Towering—by the standards of the day—stood nine storeys of, basically, glass in slim, stylish steel frames and casements; ribbons of transparency in turn framed by a slim, grid-like concrete structure, the whole floating lightly on stilts. Its address, 169 St. George, was spelled out sans serif over the entrance, which was itself a glass pavilion, leading into a lobby of plate-glass and glazed, speckled brick walls. On the ceiling in the lobby was a brass lamp, a sphere whose projecting spikes with little bulbs on the end made it look like a satellite or some subatomic particle.
“Everybody smoked!†said Alec Keefer in the late nineteen-nineties, perhaps aware that, in the lobby, holes next to the elevator once anchored a half moon, stainless-steel ashtray.
“Women in seamed nylons, the sound of high heels on terrazzo, dresses of Wedgewood blue—light turquoise,†Keefer exclaimed. “The clothes were like curtain walls! Cool, smooth, sophisticated, easy.â€
One-sixty-nine was as glamourous and modern as tomorrow, and “Tomorrow was just this fabulous place that we were all dying to get to.â€
You’d go in a tiny elevator—push eight, why don’t you, to inspect one of those corner apartments, up high—“wanna see an ’02?†asks the realtor. And you do. The key, brassy and bright, slides in, opening the door. The smell is of fresh paint, over fresh plaster, barely dry. You step onto the parquet floor, all light and blond and slippery under fresh wax, and you are pulled in by light spilling into the hallway. You walk straight in and then daylight tugs you to the left and—
“Wow.â€
Afternoon sunlight floods a huge corner living room. Windowsills are barely above knee level.
“Look. There is not one exterior wall,†a resident would write years later. “Even at corners, the building’s support structure has been positioned outside on recessed balconies, so that the curtains of glass that enclose the living rooms can wrap right around the corners, unobstructed… . The windows stretch to the ceiling, clear across every room, and into every corner.â€
The balcony door—three pieces of glass held in the slimmest of steel frames—is ajar on its hinges, and shifted slightly by a breath of October air. A great rock mass from another era—Casa Loma—rises on the ridge to the north, somewhere above the source of Taddle Creek; to that Iroquois Shoreline above Davenport Road spreads a carpet of treetops, whose fall colours are blazing in the sun.
You’ll take it.
“We thought there was an opportunity here,†remembered Boake, who with Jim Crang produced the design and drawings for 169 St. George Street.
The young architects had lucked into something valuable to an architect in swashbuckling Peter Robinson: a client who really didn’t much care what they did.
“There didn’t seem to be a lot of interference, if you like,†Boake said on September 20, 1999, and pleased with 169.“With this building we were able to do what we wanted to do.â€
“One of the best small apartment buildings in Toronto,†Patricia McHugh would write in Toronto Architecture: A City Guide.
You, of course, wouldn’t have met Boake there that day when you rented your apartment in 1959, or for that matter for another forty years: after 169 was completed the architect wouldn’t return until 1999.
Little did I know that 169 St George was the "trendy" place to be in 1960's Toronto!
I haven't read Taddle Creek magazine since leaving the Annex 8 years ago so maybe others here will remember reading this article (comes with cool photos of hipster living c. 1968):
http://www.taddlecreekmag.com/fabulous_place_1
Here's a bit of it to get you interested:
THIS FABULOUS PLACE
You wouldn’t think an aging apartment house as a good place to put down roots. Think again.
By Alfred Holden
Architect Wilfred Shulman promoted Sherwood Towers, 206 St. George
It was almost certainly Puccini, probably an aria from La Bohème, an opera about rent. Back and forth, two voices, a tenor and mezzo-soprano, jousted from open windows on the upper floors of separate apartment buildings in midtown Toronto—voices invisible in the dark and unable to see where, or who, the other was.
The spontaneous, semipublic opera, lasting about twenty minutes, added a surprising note to the St. George Street cityscape on a hot August night in 1996. Yet, it was no more surprising, really, than a little bit of urban theatre that startled neighbours and passersby here one winter evening a year or two earlier.
Sometime after the dinner hour, midway along this apartment building row that rose in the fifties and sixties, between Bloor Street West and Dupont Street, the bigger-than-life image of a plucked, dressed chicken escaping from a kitchen range was projected across a laneway between two apartment blocks, seven floors up.
The screen was the white, glazed brick south wall of 177 St. George Street, and the film was Thanksgiving, a National Film Board of Canada 16-mm short in which a raw, headless poulet, animated with the aid of stop-action filming, flees on its drumsticks to safety.
A warning on the film can read “NOT FOR CHILDREN,†recalled the fine arts student—soon to study at Yale—who ran the projector for a gathering of friends from her glass-walled corner apartment opposite the movie, at 169 St. George Street.
Not for children, indeed.
The exact same has been said about apartments themselves; one cliché among those accepted, repeated and generally believed in a North American culture infatuated, and in no small measure governed, by clichés—suburban homes, private cars, nuclear families, Republican politics. In this individualist universe, apartments, though creations of capital, have never quite fit.
“It is contended,†a contributor to Canadian Architect & Builder noted in the eighteen-nineties, summing up sentiments still heard today, “that there is no privacy in these great piles, no place for children, and that many other things are lacking to the man who considers his home is castle.â€
Not much would change. “THOSE NASTY APARTMENTS—AN OLD TORONTO PREJUDICE DIES HARD†flashed a headline over a story that appeared in the pages of the Toronto Star just past the middle of the twentieth century. “All over town, various politicians, planners and newspaper editorial writers are huddling their skirts about them and shrieking… .â€
“APARTMENTS THWART PASTORS†said a newspaper report in the same era, in which a building superintendent claimed to be able to observe the shift in a person’s personality when they moved from a house into an apartment. “They withdraw into themselves, they don’t smile as often and seem to lose interest in other people.†The inherent irresponsibility of tenants seemed proved, definitively, one June day in 1963, when someone returning from a weekend outing stocked a new Toronto apartment building’s reflecting pool with live brook trout, fishing the creatures out by casting from his fifth floor balcony.
And the part that especially interests me:
The apartment hunter would have crossed Lowther, and after a few steps more looked up through the elms and silver maples. Towering—by the standards of the day—stood nine storeys of, basically, glass in slim, stylish steel frames and casements; ribbons of transparency in turn framed by a slim, grid-like concrete structure, the whole floating lightly on stilts. Its address, 169 St. George, was spelled out sans serif over the entrance, which was itself a glass pavilion, leading into a lobby of plate-glass and glazed, speckled brick walls. On the ceiling in the lobby was a brass lamp, a sphere whose projecting spikes with little bulbs on the end made it look like a satellite or some subatomic particle.
“Everybody smoked!†said Alec Keefer in the late nineteen-nineties, perhaps aware that, in the lobby, holes next to the elevator once anchored a half moon, stainless-steel ashtray.
“Women in seamed nylons, the sound of high heels on terrazzo, dresses of Wedgewood blue—light turquoise,†Keefer exclaimed. “The clothes were like curtain walls! Cool, smooth, sophisticated, easy.â€
One-sixty-nine was as glamourous and modern as tomorrow, and “Tomorrow was just this fabulous place that we were all dying to get to.â€
You’d go in a tiny elevator—push eight, why don’t you, to inspect one of those corner apartments, up high—“wanna see an ’02?†asks the realtor. And you do. The key, brassy and bright, slides in, opening the door. The smell is of fresh paint, over fresh plaster, barely dry. You step onto the parquet floor, all light and blond and slippery under fresh wax, and you are pulled in by light spilling into the hallway. You walk straight in and then daylight tugs you to the left and—
“Wow.â€
Afternoon sunlight floods a huge corner living room. Windowsills are barely above knee level.
“Look. There is not one exterior wall,†a resident would write years later. “Even at corners, the building’s support structure has been positioned outside on recessed balconies, so that the curtains of glass that enclose the living rooms can wrap right around the corners, unobstructed… . The windows stretch to the ceiling, clear across every room, and into every corner.â€
The balcony door—three pieces of glass held in the slimmest of steel frames—is ajar on its hinges, and shifted slightly by a breath of October air. A great rock mass from another era—Casa Loma—rises on the ridge to the north, somewhere above the source of Taddle Creek; to that Iroquois Shoreline above Davenport Road spreads a carpet of treetops, whose fall colours are blazing in the sun.
You’ll take it.
“We thought there was an opportunity here,†remembered Boake, who with Jim Crang produced the design and drawings for 169 St. George Street.
The young architects had lucked into something valuable to an architect in swashbuckling Peter Robinson: a client who really didn’t much care what they did.
“There didn’t seem to be a lot of interference, if you like,†Boake said on September 20, 1999, and pleased with 169.“With this building we were able to do what we wanted to do.â€
“One of the best small apartment buildings in Toronto,†Patricia McHugh would write in Toronto Architecture: A City Guide.
You, of course, wouldn’t have met Boake there that day when you rented your apartment in 1959, or for that matter for another forty years: after 169 was completed the architect wouldn’t return until 1999.
Little did I know that 169 St George was the "trendy" place to be in 1960's Toronto!
