Wednesday of last week was the first muggy day of Toronto's muggy summer. By early evening, however, the midday closeness had lifted, giving way to one of those delightfully warm nights all Torontonians welcome after the long months of winter. Everyone was out on the vivid stretch of Bloor Street West that runs through the Annex neighbourhood, on their way to the restaurants in the district, walking their pooches, or just taking the pleasant air.
As I strolled along Bloor that evening, then walked up Walmer Road into the heart of the Annex, I was reminded of all the reasons people love this part of town. Not as insular as Rosedale, nor as self-consciously pompous as Forest Hill, the Annex combines the vibrancy of a big city with the peacefulness of the sturdy, shady Victorian residential quarter it is.
There is little sense of enclave here. Rather, the atmosphere of the Annex is relaxed, if still quite proper, and graced by the modest and urbane beauty that Jane Jacobs thought is, or should be, the envy of the world.
But if the warmth made that Wednesday night perfect for walking the streets of the Annex, it also made the air inside the handsome arts-and-crafts gym of Walmer Road Baptist Church stifling, almost unbearable.
Residents who live on the Annex's tree-lined streets fear tall buildings are set to creep into their neighbourhood. (FRED LUM/THE GLOBE AND MAIL)
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Undaunted by the stuffiness, several dozen local residents, urban planners and private consultants jammed the gym, and persisted through a long presentation by the official-sounding but private planning and design firm Office for Urbanism.
Little wonder. The citizens cherish their neighbourhood, and the company was on hand to launch City Hall's latest "visioning" study, to be conducted by Office for Urbanism, of the portion of Bloor Street dearest to them, from University Avenue to Bathurst Street. (The study area will later be extended west to Christie Street.)
More than the air in the gym was hot: Tempers were short. As Jennifer Keesmaat, a partner in Office for Urbanism, made her pitch — a rapid-fire, staccato speech heavy with the curiously abstract lingo of the planning profession — people around me were grumbling that this study is a sell-job meant to soften them up for the march of tall buildings westward along Bloor from University Avenue, into their domain.
Most residents I spoke with were still smarting from their unsuccessful bid to stop One Bedford, a 32-storey, 262-unit residential tower at the corner of Bloor and Bedford Road, designed by Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg. In a settlement negotiated with One Bedford's planners, the Annex Residents Association obtained the funds and go-ahead for the current examination of Bloor West. Now, it appeared to some in the room, their good intentions — to ensure the wise development of the street — are to be turned against them.
I am inclined to believe that Office for Urbanism, and its bosses at the city's planning department, are coming to the Bloor West study with open minds and good will, though they and everyone else feel the keen pressure to come up with answers to the high-rise question. This project will surely go nowhere fast if the people doing it drop the slightest hint that they are stalking horses for the developers. I, for one, don't think they are.
But there can be no doubt that Annex residents have something real to worry about. The city's new official plan encourages the intensification of Bloor West, along with several other important thoroughfares that run through settled residential neighbourhoods. The quickest way to accomplish intensification is to open traditionally mid-rise city streets to tall-building development.
Across the city, developers are making money from the residential towers they are putting up on main streets, and paying stiff taxes and fees into the city coffers for the privilege of doing so. Why wouldn't they (and city bean-counters) have their eye on the busy, valuable strip of Bloor west of One Bedford?
One simple solution, at least as far as residents are concerned, would be for the city to exempt Bloor between, let's say, Spadina Avenue and Christie (or Ossington Avenue, or wherever) from all development that exceeds the building envelope of the existing streetscape, and declare the area a "heritage" preserve.
But if such a move seems attractive at first glance, it fails (at least for me) on close inspection. It would likely cause an artificial depression in real estate prices along the street, depriving business property owners of a reasonable return on their investment in Bloor Street, while leaving homeowners in the surrounding Annex unscathed. That's plain wrong.
I suspect that no simple resolution of the problem of intensification on Bloor will be found — none, at any rate, that accords with Toronto's traditional emphasis on civility and opportunity. But I will certainly be following this process with interest, as the study, and the contentious matters it raises, roll out over the next several months.
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