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By CHRISTOPHER HUME
On the landscape of Toronto, what you see is rarely what you get. Buildings, roads and parks form the visible city, but beneath that is a tangled web of ownership, legislation and zoning bylaws that controls everything that happens above.
For the old Riverdale Hospital, now called Bridgepoint Health, the differences are crucial.
The 1963 structure, a landmark in the Don Valley at Gerrard St. since 1963, is best known as the "half-round" building. Though unique and much loved, the eight-storey semi-circular monument faces demolition. As a health-care facility, it has been declared obsolete. More important, however, Bridgepoint and its planners insist it must go to make way for a new up-to-date $200-million hospital.
Of course, this is a city where heritage preservation is stuck in the past, so it's open season on buildings of the 1950s and '60s.
The casualties are numerous — everything from the Union Carbide Building on Eglinton Ave. (demolished to make way for an especially unpleasant condo) to the Bata Shoe headquarters on Wynford Dr. (about to be demolished to make way for an Ismaili cultural complex).
As a crowd of more than 100 heard at a public meeting held last night at St. John's Presbyterian Church on Broadview Ave., the half-round's days are numbered. Its fate will be decided by city council next Tuesday.
The session, called by Councillor Paula Fletcher and attended by a phalanx of city planners, was polite but testy. Not only have the locals grown fond of the building, some weren't crazy about what would replace it. In addition to a new 10-storey hospital, the redevelopment plan calls for three eight-storey residential buildings.
To many people that means condos, a bad word these days in Toronto.
According to critics, however, the needs of the hospital can be accommodated and the half-round retained. The key, they say, lies in the master plan.
But heritage architect Michael McClelland, who has worked on the project five years, disagrees.
"The hospital can't use the building," he says. "The site just can't accommodate it."
Completed in 1963, the half-round is one of those rare structures whose every gesture and detail speaks of the age that produced it. Exuberant and wildly optimistic, this is an architectural relic from a time, the last in our history, when the future loomed brighter than the past.
Ironically, the gloomy but magnificent 1868 Don Jail, which sits directly south of the half-round, will be restored at a cost of $25 million. It will become Bridgepoint's administrative centre and the 1970s addition torn down, along with a dreary apartment box on Broadview Ave.
Certainly, the Don Jail should be saved, but so should the semi-circular building. It is unlike anything else in Toronto, a genuine landmark and part of our history. Although architecture has regained its celebratory capacity since the heady days of the `60s, it has never recovered this same briefly felt sense of innocence and faith in what lies ahead.
Sadly, the intricacies of public and private land ownership, health regulations, heritage easements, view corridors, traffic requirements and bureaucratic procedures are as much a problem as lack of space. Either the half-round goes, or the hospital closes.
Arguing against health care doesn't go down terribly well, especially when the facility in question deals with "complex illnesses and disabilities."
Still, as one health-care provider told the group, patients in the half-round responded well to the views and the natural light.
The entrance has multi-coloured mushroom columns, shelters and delights in equal measure.
The half-round is, however, "modern"; in the collective mind that doesn't signify heritage. Given what happened to modernism and how quickly it was degraded that's not hard to understand.
That's why exceptional examples such as this must be saved.
Riverdale ripe for condo conversion: Globe and Mail, June 17th, 2005.
Critique of the meeting: Globe and Mail, July 9th, 2005.
Argument for demolition of Riverdale: bad plumbing?: National Post, Nov 11th, 2005.
Demolition of significant modern buildings picks up momentum: Globe and Mail, Nov. 26th, 2005.
History vs Healthcare? Or not...?: Eye, Dec. 8th, 2005.
Debate swirls around hospital's fate at Council meeting.: National Post, Jan. 18th, 2006
Riverdale Hospital for wrecking?: Star, Jan. 25th, 2006
Demolition plan roundly criticized: National Post, Feb. 2nd, 2006.
Development arguments wanting for logic: Now, Feb. 9, 2006.
Demolition is environmentally unconscienable: National Post, Feb. 17th, 2006.
Locals want to know: Why give land away?: National Post, March 11th, 2006.
Citizens catch Bridgepoint hi-jinx: Now, March 16th, 2006.
Progressives on Council fumble the Bridgepoint
scheme: Now, March 23rd,
2006.
Save Riverdale
Toronto Architectural Conservancy
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