Yikes. That just suckerpunched reality and makes sense.
I foresee a lot more lane filtering next summer..
Gardner construction could take as long as TWENTY YEARS.
- Thread starter Mongrel
- Start date
Yikes. That just suckerpunched reality and makes sense.
I foresee a lot more lane filtering next summer..
Venom01
Well-known member
You buy a condo right next to a highway . No noise complaints allowed
This is my signature.....apparently
Another RC Harris fan! It's rare enough that anyone has even heard of the guy!
You know who else from Toronto was awesome like that?
Thomson Brothers contruction (along with the architects of Ross & Macdonald). Why? Because they built Maple Leaf Gardens and it's one of the strongest and best-designed buildings ever raised in the city. Seriously. The vaulting is some of the strongest, most stable vaulting in the world. It's an incredible building. And they did it in five months. And had the lowest bid of the ten companies that applied.
Did I mention they built it in FIVE MONTHS?
Using depression-era slave labourers isn't a fair comparison. Starving people will work without safety gear for pennies a day to try and avoid death just 1 day longer. Sometimes they fall off the girders because they don't have a rope harness or got dizzy due to lack of food. This is immoral, exploitative and cannot be sustained.
The CIBC's 34-storey Commerce Court North tower which started construction in 1929 and opened in 1931 was the tallest building in the British Empire for 30 years.
Don't get me wrong, I love all these visionary architects who dreamed of the future and wrote poems in stone but slave labour is slave labour.
IMHO, the Gardiner cannot be fixed. It needs to be brought down safely. The "private sector partnership" can be the condo developers paying to have it be a tunnel under their shoeboxes so that they can take over the land and put up even more condos!
So what do you want to change if they are already working under those rules? ... obviously it's not hurting them because it's the part of their costs.
skip
Well-known member
I remember bidding on parts of the demo work over 4 years ago. New mayor, new council, the EA which was in the last step of approval got canceled. All the contracts in place to start the demo were canceled (with the cancellation penalties paid by the city). It was frustrating professionally, but as someone living in Toronto I was/am livid over the waste of time and money over scrapping a plan that was approved and about to begin.
Are there also "fines doubled when roadwork present" signs as well?
It was the first thing I noticed; that the signs were black on white (regulatory).
The strength of the buildings or the fact that they were built with the future in mind has nothing to do with their being built with "slave labour" as you call it.
We're talking about design and planning, about being organized, having a map of where you want to go, and thinking about the future. Even "slaves" won't do a damn thing for you if you don't organize them well. And if the buildings were designed like crap then they'd be falling to peices in no time, the way the Champlain Bridge in Montreal is falling apart (the Gardner is falling apart of course, but this was actually its projected lifespan).
In any case, they weren't "slave workers" anyway. Construction work building the Gardens would have been good paying work for the time (the Depression was pretty tolerable as long as you were lucky enough to have a steady job - everything was cheap!) and the reason that Thomson Brothers had a low bid was because A: Thomson Brothers had an internal supply chain of subcontractors and B: they cut a deal with their labour union to offer shares in the precursor to MLSE as partial payment. Not only did those shares turn out to be worth quite a bit, they were an incentive for speedy completion (the sooner the arena was open for business, the sooner the shares would start earning returns). In fact this was a classic case of workers doing a better job because they had partial ownership and benefited directly from good work.
Plus that only applies to the Gardens. What about the Prince Edward Viaduct (aka the Bloor-Danforth Bridge)? The viaduct was built in 1911. If ever there was a symbol of what we used to be able to do and can't do at all it's that bridge.
There used to be a hell of a lot of things we could do.
Did you know that at various points in the twentieth century Canada had the world's third largest navy? Or the third largest airforce? Or the sixth-biggest army? Now imagine the Canada of today trying that. What a friggin' joke! That's exactly what I meant when I said "Good thing there isn't a war on."
Last edited:
Note to self: Remember to check out the book "In The Skin of a Lion". http://www.randomhouse.ca/books/124591/in-the-skin-of-a-lion-by-michael-ondaatje
Haven't read it myself, but it looks good. That said, Ondaatje's book contains some real anecdotes mixed in but is clearly fiction. I don't know that I'd take it as any sort of authoritative look at Harris. It's certainly possible Harris was racist by today's standards and if Harris did turn out to be a racist, that would hardly be unusual for an upper class white man in early 20th Century Canada. But I don't actually know - I've never seen anything factual describing his views on race, period.
Apart from Harris in particular. I wouldn't deny that immigrants haven't been taken advantage of - I mean that's still going on today, so it would be stupid to pretend it didn't happen in the past.
But good city planning and Canadian racism are separate enough issues that I think we can talk about the value of good planning and foresight without getting sidetracked by a racism discussion.
Apart from Harris in particular. I wouldn't deny that immigrants haven't been taken advantage of - I mean that's still going on today, so it would be stupid to pretend it didn't happen in the past.
But good city planning and Canadian racism are separate enough issues that I think we can talk about the value of good planning and foresight without getting sidetracked by a racism discussion.
Last edited:
No idea about racism, the labourers were all white anyway afaik. Classism perhaps. The book caught my interest because I agree with you that there was a time when Toronto did all the big things and then stopped. And stayed stopped for a very long time. When it hesitantly started up again, low vision fools would shout about how dare they build in a style that was not reminiscent of Soviet architecture. Bleak and drab. Good example is the library downtown with the griffins(?) in the door arch. They had to list the bronze as plain metal supports otherwise it would have been disallowed as not Soviet enough had they said "beauty and inspiration for the entrance". It makes me nauseous that all we build now is condos, the ghetto housing of the future.
One building that amuses me is Union station. I just love that the architects put their names on the corner of the building (southwest corner of Bay and Front street).
One building that amuses me is Union station. I just love that the architects put their names on the corner of the building (southwest corner of Bay and Front street).
"White" is meaningless. There was quite a bit of bigotry. You didn't want to be Ukrainian, Irish, Spanish, or Italian.
As for the rest all that I can say is, "Welcome to Megacity One."
Yeah, the definitions have changed somewhat over time. There was definitely a time not so long ago when "Irish" was a "race".
I think it's sort of funny (and also incredibly depressing) how we've sometimes managed to approach doing great things again only to completely screw them up. Like the way we built the Sheppard subway (and continue to retroactively try to justify it) instead of building it under Eglinton in the first place.
Or the way the original design for the Michael Lee-Chin crystal was actually very ambitious and interesting (the same shape, but entirely covered in refracting glass), only they belatedly realized they would be frying the historical exhibits inside and had to change it to the ugly-as-sin metal-plated monstrosity we were stuck with.
Last edited:
The Sheppard Subway just makes me laugh and shake my head.
For a couple of years I used to work up near Sheppard and Don Mills and actually took it all the time - and I still think it's a useless mistake!
For a couple of years I used to work up near Sheppard and Don Mills and actually took it all the time - and I still think it's a useless mistake!
