Margie Zeidler is that rarest of rare birds: a Toronto real estate developer who is also a vigorous community activist.
Over the last couple of years, Ms. Zeidler has been especially active in the latter of these roles. She has led a grassroots campaign to save a fine old Queen Street warehouse that provided studio space for many artists and to thwart a scheme to put up some egregiously out-sized condominium towers on the south side of Queen, near its intersection with Gladstone Avenue. As things turned out, she and her compatriots were routed this summer, when city planners caved in to the demands of developers and allowed them to proceed with building heights exceeding those permissible under the city's official plan. But when I spoke with her last week, in the café of the Gladstone Hotel (which she and her sister Christina bought and beautifully renovated), Ms. Zeidler was convinced it had been a battle worth waging.
"We just wanted decent urban design," she told me. "I was very let down by the planning department. We were not suggesting for a moment that they shouldn't develop what they were permitted to develop on those lands, maybe even more. But you can't build haphazardly in a city. That's my issue. City planners are fuelling speculation by allowing crazy things to happen." (The studio building Ms. Zeidler and her group fought to save will be torn down to make way for condo towers.) Ms. Zeidler's passion for keeping the city livable, and for sparing its elderly buildings, goes back to her earliest days as an architecture student at the University of Toronto in the 1970s.
"The required reading in my first year included Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities. It blew me away, especially the chapter on old buildings — warehouses, factories, buildings that no longer served the purpose they once served. I'm not talking about museum-piece buildings, though they are beautiful and wonderful ingredients of any good city. I'm talking about old buildings whose owners are no longer worried about paying the mortgages, so they can provide cheap rents for people with low earning power — the writer, the inventor, the artist. These buildings are neat parts of the city. I remember reading that old ideas — banking, accounting and so on — can afford new buildings, but new ideas must use old buildings. Right away, I thought that could be a wonderful use for the old industrial buildings I love."
Margie Zeidler on the roof-top terrace at 401 Richmond Street West. Ms. Zeidler, a developer herself, is concerned that a massive influx of large condo towers is changing the face of Queen West for the worse. (GLENN LOWSON/THE GLOBE AND MAIL)
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For some years after finishing architecture school, Ms. Zeidler worked for her father, the well-known Toronto architect Eberhard Zeidler, then later moved on into social development work with the non-profit African Medical Research Foundation.
"I became interested in communities, and how powerful communities can be if they want to work together. In Africa, they don't have decent health care systems, so they have to fend for themselves. The foundation was about trying to bring groups together with a very small financial input, educate people and get them to work together to build water wells and take on healthy behaviours. I had not thought that much about community before."
Back in Toronto in the 1990s, Ms. Zeidler discovered a way to combine her interests in community and old buildings. Her chance came in the form of an old industrial building at 401 Richmond Street West, at Spadina Avenue.
"I'd always found it a really beautiful building, and always admired it, so I bought it for $10 a square foot. The city had zoned the building industrial, but that area of downtown wasn't any longer suitable for heavy industrial use. This zoning meant there were a limited number of tenants you could take in, but artists were one of those groups. I was aware that there were a lot of artists out there looking for space, and I knew what their price point was."
So it was that 401 Richmond became what it is today: a handsome commercial development with about 130 tenants ranging from artists and architects to designers and 11 art galleries. When it came to taking on new tenants, "we never made strict rules, but people needed to understand it's a building that was inspired by the arts. If people said they didn't want a slop sink at the end of the hall because it would offend their clients, we told them to look somewhere else."
After 401 Richmond came Ms. Zeidler's next commercial venture in antique real estate: the Robertson Building at 215 Spadina Ave., between Queen Street West and Dundas Street West. Here, the developer was able to give bones to a dream she had nurtured since her days in African relief work: the establishment of a common address for a wide variety of social agencies, some non-profit, others for-profit. It would become the Centre for Social Innovation.
"I had been talking to people around the city who were doing things in the social sector, and who needed a fax machine, a desk, and a phone, and camaraderie. It started with 14 tenants from the cultural sector, the environmental sector, and so on." Today the Centre hosts 100 tenants, spread out over 20,000 square feet.
"It's about social innovation and entrepreneurship," Ms. Zeidler said. "They are doing things to make the world a better place."
