Following the ups and downs of developer Harry Stinson's career has long been a favourite spectator sport among observers of Toronto's real-estate market.
Mr. Stinson scored big in the 1990s with his pioneering, successful loft conversion of the Ce De Candy factory on Queen Street West. He scored again in the following decade when he put up the tall, graceful condominium-hotel complex known as One King West. We thought we'd lost him a couple of years ago, however, after his ambitious plans to raise an enormous residential tower in the heart of downtown Toronto collapsed, and he fell into a bruising court battle with his partner in the One King West venture, theatrical impresario David Mirvish.
But Mr. Stinson is back – in Hamilton, where he now lives – with a conversion scheme as exciting as anything he's undertaken since the Candy Factory Lofts.
An empty classroom at the site of the soon to be Stinson School Lofts in Hamilton.
The project is called Stinson School Lofts. As it happens, the Stinson recalled by the project is the unrelated Victorian merchant and developer Ebenezer, not Harry. In the 19th century, Ebenezer Stinson laid out a streetcar suburb below the escarpment that looms over downtown Hamilton and allowed a street there to be named after himself. The thoroughfare, in turn, gave its name in 1895 to Stinson Street School, the gruff, handsome Richardsonian Romanesque building (and two additions) that Harry Stinson bought last summer for $1.05-million and now proposes to transform into 68 condominium suites.
The coincidence of the name, Mr. Stinson told me, is one thing that drew him irresistibly to the school. But the structure's august, grand-manner architecture was another factor – “there was something cosmic about it” – that prompted him to place the winning bid on the 1.5-acre property.
The three-building cluster of Stinson School is composed of the principal 1895 edifice, designed by Hamilton architect A.W. Peene; a companion piece erected in 1913; and, between these two, a modernist link done in 1959. Everything that gives the school its imperial Victorian character and strength will be retained in the renovation by Hoordad Ghandehari, principal in the Toronto firm of Icon Architects Ltd.: the stately, slightly frowning brick and stone façades with their rainbow arches, the tall windows and high ceilings, the peaked slate roof. The drama of the main entrance – stone steps leading up through a massive archway to great wooden doors and a spacious lobby – will also be kept intact.
A view of the Stinson School Lofts site showing the close proximity to the Niagara Escarpment.
Cinder-block partitions, flimsy dropped ceilings and other embellishments accumulated by the school over more than a century of educational use – it was abandoned by students and teachers only last March – will be swept away, and its brick load-bearing bones sandblasted back to their original appearance. Ranging in size from 700 to 2,600 square feet, the condos are to be inserted into the school's classrooms and cloakrooms, washrooms, gym, basement, attic and other spaces. All the internal systems in the building will be modernized, though certain frills common in Toronto condominium developments will be absent in the finished product: There will be no concierge, for example, and no swimming pool or workout facility.
By prevailing Hamilton standards – where ample old houses on quiet streets can still be had for a fraction of what Torontonians pay for equivalent properties – prices are high: about $170,000 for the smallest suites, up to $400,000 and beyond for the largest units. But such prices still compare favourably to Toronto. Mr. Stinson thinks his buyers will be mainly greying residents of suburban Burlington and Oakville who are ready to downsize from their large family homes and who want the convenience of condominium living but are not prepared to pay the steeper Toronto prices to get it.
The attic at Stinson School, which will be converted into penthouses with 24-foot ceilings. The space was used as a rifle range during the First World War.
If a hitch develops in Mr. Stinson's plans, it will probably be the neighbourhood. The area around Stinson School is one of those old urban places that are politely called “transitional.” It may be comparable to Toronto's Cabbagetown district in the 1970s: a zone of fine-looking structures that long ago declined into so many rooming houses, group homes and cheap digs for a disadvantaged population, but that has already caught the eye of people willing to put sweat and money into improvement. The Stinson School neighbourhood is coming along, Mr. Stinson said, but whether it's changing fast enough for prospective condo buyers from suburbia remains to be seen.
That said, Mr. Stinson's investment of money and energy in the school building is a vivid vote of confidence in a postindustrial city that needs all the support it can muster and an admirable attempt to save a piece of Hamilton's architectural heritage.
Special to The Globe and Mail
