Look, I am not saying 60-80s can be built anywhere downtown. I am only saying that to arbitrarily force a tapering off from Bay st is extremely stupid, and there is absolutely to reason why the towers at King/Bay have to be the tallest in the entire city.
Fair enough, although some of us will have different opinions about the need for a tapering off policy. Personally, I'm somewhere in the middle between "it's extremely stupid" and "it's good planning".
As to Chicago, not everything is along the lake. I don't know how you get this idea. Willis Tower is a mile away from Lake Michigan, and using the same distance from Yonge st, we would have 300m towers on Sacksville st East of Parliament, or Augusta ave west of Spadina. While John Hancock Tower is minutes from the Lake, Trump Chicago is about 1 mile from it too. The 307M Franklin Center is also a mile west of Lake Michigan.
I didn't mean everything is on the lake. While some towers are a mile from the lake, the skyline is much larger than one mile when you look at it from the lake, whereas in Toronto the skyline appears smaller from the lake compared to the east or west side. Whatever, this point is irrelevant. I was just mentioning a difference. Chicago is not a blueprint for where 300m towers belong in Toronto.
Regarding NYC, yes, skylines peak in low and midtown, but that covers a fairly large space, and there is no such rule that says one or two st have all the tallest towers and everything tapers off depending on how far they are from that street, is there? In fact, you don't see a pattern at all, as skycrapers are all over those two areas, not congregating on one of two streets.
Yes, I wonder why that's the case. Maybe it's because NYC is far bigger than Toronto. Maybe it's because they have a dense network of subway lines that can support so many skyscrapers all over the place. One other thing about NYC, is that its buildform is consistent. Once you move out of the forest of skyscrapers in low and midtown, you won't find many skyscrapers plunked randomly on top of low rise or midrise neighbourhoods like the West Village. In other words, if you believe Toronto should be more like NYC, an 80s tower next to Kensington market or any stable low rise area is not the way to go. I can't think of any city on this side of the planet where city planners allow such vastly opposite buildings heights to clash with each other.
Yes, there will be a lot of skyscrapers in the pipeline, but almost all of them are on the Bay/Yonge corridor, and this is what I think makes no sense - as if a certain distance away from Bay st there is automatically a need for height reduction. For example, I don't see why 80s towers can't be built at Jarvis/Wellesley, Church/Queen, or Bathurst and Dundas, or King and Parliament, if there is an appropriate proposal.
First of all, the only 80+ storey buildings that have ever been proposed lately are Mirvish + Ghery, and 1-7 Yonge (Toronto Star lands). These are not something you hear everyday, and no one has plans to propose anything of that magnitude outside the downtown core anytime soon. One of the reason why the tallest buildings are on the Bay/Yonge corridor is because that's where the infrastructure exists to support them. There's a subway on Yonge, university, and Bloor street, and naturally the density will generally decrease as you move outside the subway loop. While shoulder areas like Jarvis/Wellesley wont be getting 80s, maybe it will get 40s, 50s, or even 60s instead. Stop pretending that it's insignificant. As for further away areas like Bathurst/Dundas, if anything that should really be midrise, similar to other nearby developments. How 80s would make sense here is beyond me, when even Yonge street is still mostly low-rise. Maybe if the downtown outgrows it's current boundaries in 200 years, then the low/midrise at Bathurst/Dundas could be redeveloped again into taller buildings. But for now, you can take the entire population growth expected in the next couple of decades, and fit them neatly into avenues style development alone, without any more highrises (hypothetically of course). Toronto is a huge place. There's lots of land to grow.
who says a completely low rise nabe is necessarily such a great thing to start with?
What is it that you have against low rise neighbourhoods? Many of Toronto's most desirable areas are low rise, like the Annex, St. Lawrence, Cabbagetown, Beaches, Roncesvalles.
