Old Fort York -- located just a cannonball shot away from Toronto's downtown waterfront -- has been languishing in obscurity. Rich in history, it is poor in visitors.
That promises to change when a huge development called Fort York Neighbourhood (FYN) reconnects the fort with the city. The project will consist of about 5,200 condo apartments in 22 towers -- fashionably thin "point" structures, some rising as high as 36 storeys. The towers are already under construction across the road from the fort; in due course, the development will extend under the Gardiner Expressway. FYN will cost more than $750-million to build; the value of the 21 acres and the bill to clean up the soil on the former industrial site could add another $250-million.
Fort York, designated a national historical site, is the second fortification to exist on the property; the first one was destroyed in the War of 1812.
Four-storey condo townhouses will be built the closest to the battlements and block houses of the fort -- just across Fort York Boulevard. Building heights will rise gently through parkettes and mews-like streets to the tallest towers at Lake Shore Boulevard West and Bathurst Street. There also will be two sites set aside for low-cost housing under the city's Let's Build program.
Residents will be able to enjoy two parks nearby -- the 32-acre Fort York Mustering Ground park and Coronation Park's 33 acres. The lake is a 10-minute walk away. FYN has been planned as a cohesive community and in the context of the larger neighbourhood, with special attention paid to traffic and pedestrian flows, street grids and sightlines. It will incorporate 4.5 million square feet of gross floor area -- second in size only to CityPlace, the largest master-planned residential development in Toronto's history and FYN's closest neighbour. FYN will have two more towers than CityPlace, but they will not be as tall.
Unlike CityPlace, there is not one but four different developers on a fiendishly complicated tract of land, including city-owned roads and rights of way, and a functioning business, St. Marys Cement.
Most prominently, there is Wittington Properties Ltd., chaired by Galen Weston, who presides over a multibillion-dollar Canadian retailing empire. Then there is H&R Developments, a rising star on the national development horizon.
The other companies are Plazacorp Investments Ltd., whose president is a nephew of Paul Reichmann; and Malibu Investments Inc., one of Israel's largest contractors and relatively new player in Toronto.
Plazacorp is noteworthy because its partners in FYN are investment banker Lehman Brothers Inc. -- which has offices worldwide, and manages more than $100-billion (U.S) in assets -- and Berkley Developments Inc., a local residential builder with, coincidentally, strong ties to Lehman Brothers.
No less remarkable is the fact that a consensus on FYN was achieved through an intensive three-day design workshop or "charrette" last January. About 40 developers, a few neighbourhood residents, members of the Friends of Fort York, city planners, architects, urban planners and various consultants managed to find a common purpose by the end of the process.
Les Klein, a principal in Toronto-based Quadrangle Architects Ltd., which created the master plan for FYN and designed the Wittington and Plazacorp buildings, recalls: "The best thing about the charrette was that everybody had relatively low expectations.
"It was incredibly empowering because it [a charrette]allows people to drop their guard. They don't always have to speak from their own parochial viewpoint, but start to work toward the same objectives. What surprised them was the power of the interactive process."
Brian Curtner, a Quadrangle principal, added: "All the stakeholders were brought into a non-threatening type of environment. In a more confrontational approach, people keep stuff in their pockets because if you have more information you have more power and can orchestrate a solution that meets your demands.
"Every one of the stakeholders made a presentation on a particular piece of the puzzle. The background information was very broad and well understood by the participants," he adds.
In terms of the community development process in Toronto, it was historic, and may well set the stage and tone for future consultations between developers and residents affected by projects.
General agreement at the charrette pre-empted a hearing before the Ontario Municipal Board, although H&R had won OMB approval earlier to proceed with a higher condo tower on the site in spite of strenuous opposition by the Friends of Fort York.
Moreover, the developers paid the cost of the charrette, which typically ran 12 or more hours a day.
Plazacorp also paid for a small-scale pilgrimage to Vancouver a few months later to run the plan past that city's widely admired planners -- the urban design equivalent of a trip to Lourdes. As hoped, the planners gave their blessing.
The previous city council approved the zoning changes and gave the developers the green light. H&R has one of its condos very much out of the ground, and Malibu has a sales centre up; both condo projects are said to be selling well.
Bronwyn Krog, Wittington's vice-president of land development and planning, says the company has bought the cement plant site within the FYN boundaries after finding a suitable new site for the operation on the city's port lands.
Ms. Krog also says that Loblaws Cos. Ltd., a sister company of Wittington, will build a supermarket at Bathurst and Fleet streets after the food retailer demolishes its 1927-vintage warehouse on that corner. As well, Wittington is exploring the possibility of building a library next to the supermarket; a school and community centre are already contemplated by the city, to be financed by all the FYN developers.
"When you have land like this, you have stewardship, because it is next to one of the most important historic sites in the city," she says.
Robert Freedman, director of the city's urban design department, who was closely involved with the charrette and subsequent negotiations with the developers, says FYN will succeed because of "the power of bringing the right people together for a decent amount of time, not just scratching the surface.
"We have also made the best public realm that we could. Fort York Neighbourhood can be a fantastic place, whether the Gardiner Expressway stays up or comes down," he says. "The fort was right on the lakefront at one time and the area rich in history. Every neighbourhood in the city is precious, but it has to feel like it is part of the city, that it belongs there."