Toronto’s cemeteries are great gifts to city-dwellers. Often densely forested, these places are oases of serenity in the otherwise hectic urban landscape, and they are perfect for the quiet strolling we all need to do from time to time just to clear our heads. I count myself fortunate to live close to a large west-side graveyard that has been golden, glorious and eminently walkable this fall.
Not all citizens, of course, share my enthusiasm. Home-hunters who find these final resting places disagreeable will probably not want to buy into the 96-unit Imagine condominium complex, which is going up right across the street from picturesque Pine Hills Cemetery in Scarborough.
The clubs, restaurants, boutique hotels and stores that are jumping in the Queen West corridor between downtown and High Park are also gifts to us. They are hot spots and vivid hangouts for young people in what was, within living memory, a decayed postindustrial wasteland. People who prefer to live near the beating heart of the metropolis, like those who dislike cemeteries, will almost certainly not want to move to Imagine’s site at the intersection of Kennedy Road and St. Clair Avenue East.
As Gertrude Stein once remarked of Oakland, at this crossroads “there is no there there.” A Tim Hortons, but no interesting restaurants. A place to rent a truck and an auto repair shop, a shabby strip mall, acres of small, elderly bungalows on narrow lots – but no night-life, no street life, not even a subway station. (There is a GO commuter train stop a stout walk away.) Even high-rise builders have avoided the area. Realtors politely describe such districts as “pregentrified.” This is really the middle of nowhere.
With the arrival of Imagine, however, the Scarborough junction may be taking its first step toward becoming somewhere. It is too early, of course, to tell if Toronto developer Ron Herczeg’s decision to plant a mid-rise residential project in this very low-density zone will open the way to further intensification of Imagine’s neighbourhood. But in terms of design, the four-storey structure crafted for Mr. Herczeg by John Chandler, principal in KFA Architects and Planners, promises to set a pretty good example for whatever might come next.
Like other Toronto suburbs, Scarborough is littered with bad building art of recent vintage: bleak concrete apartment slabs, and sentimental, pseudo-historical new homes and townhouses. Mr. Chandler, for his part, has worked here in a modestly modernist idiom that architecturally savvy inner-city folks will surely find too tame, but that, compared to what else is happening in Scarborough these days, may be a little bit radical. The roof is flat; on top will be a terrace with views of the towers of the core in the distance and, of course, the forest canopy over in the cemetery. The lines are simple, and the façades are unornamented.
“We wanted to bring a downtown feel to Scarborough,” Mr. Herczeg said. One downtownish move will be to clad Imagine’s first three storeys with densely black brick. It won’t be expensive, imported brick of the sort architect A. J. Diamond used, for example, on the façades of Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre. Rather, Imagine will employ a cheaper, sootily dark local variant to do the job black brick does well: lending a certain evening-wear formality to the exterior, giving a touch of urbane seriousness to the composition. (On this point, the renderings made available to me are misleading. They make the outside seem light and bland. As I found when I visited the partly-built block last week, it’s not.)
The small but emphatic pedestrian entry pavilion is where it should be: not in the middle of Imagine’s long side, but right at the corner of St. Clair and Kennedy Road. Like no other feature at the heavily trafficked intersection, this entrance will mark the crossroads as somewhere, or at least nowhere aspiring to be somewhere. This being old suburbia, where cars rule, it will probably be a long time before the pedestrian entrance is noticed or even used much – but giving it a little architectural prominence anticipates a future in which Imagine’s residents will have nearby destinations they want to walk to.
In the present, Imagine has prices that might tempt even a deep-dyed urbanite to think about nesting out in suburbia. Mr. Herczeg told me that a 500-square-foot apartment is for sale at about $200,000, while a 950-square-foot suite – the largest size available – retails for $375,000. There will be spaces underground for 110 cars, which are more cars than units.
Imagine may not have location going for it. It may not be exciting artistically. But, Mr. Herczeg said, “every area starts somewhere.”