The dramatic transformation of an abandoned railway land into a vibrant downtown community, home to more people than many Ontario towns, is almost complete. Along with being an experiment on rapid community building, City Place says Canada House can also serve as a blueprint for how planning such huge projects can be improved in the future.

Concord Adex Inc.'s presentation centre — a longtime fixture along Navy Wharf Drive at Bremner Boulevard — is now gone. In its place, heavy machinery, large boring drills and excavators work on what will be known as Concord Canada House.

Nestled beneath the CN Tower, the 59- and 69-storey buildings will be the tallest in the City Place project. Concord calls them the crowning jewels of the entire development.

Jen Yeaman, Development Manager at Concord Adex Inc. is a long-time resident of City Place. She says the developer has learned from the experience and has brought social infrastructure in earlier at its project in North York. (Gary Asselstine/CBC)

They are the last pieces of the puzzle, started 18 years after the company began transforming an empty stretch of land north of Lake Shore Boulevard between Spadina Avenue and Bathurst Street.

Jen Yeaman, development manager at Concord Adex Inc., isn't just an employee. She has also been a longtime resident of City Place. When she looks at construction of the last phase of the development, Yeaman says she can't help but get emotional.

"For me, seeing this, seeing what we have built around us, you kind of can't believe it," she told CBC Toronto.

"It's even better than than what we envisioned when we started."

How the land was transformed

The land was part of the city's Inner Harbour before Concord started development, says David Robertson, a senior archeologist for Archeological Services Inc. (ASI), a Toronto-based company that does heritage assessments and preservation.

A view of Toronto's Inner Harbour in 1883 after the shoreline was extended into Lake Ontario for more than a century. (Submitted)

"The whole Bathurst to Spadina area that they've developed — all of it was originally the lake," he said, noting the shoreline was gradually extended using timber crib walls, which would then be filled with earth, construction debris and other waste material starting in the early 1850s. This process was finished in the 1890s, added Robertson.

In fact, an ASI excavation of one site in 2015 turned up what was left of a wooden schooner.

Robertson says these lands were created for three main railroad companies at the time — The Grand Trunk, the Northern, and the Great Western. Over the decades through competition, mergers and bankruptcy, the Spadina Railway Yard was eventually used by the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Railways.

Toronto rail lands circa 1946. Busy railway corridor began contracting in the 1950s through the 1970s as cars and trucks become the primary transporter of people and goods. (Submitted)

But in the 1950s and through the 1970s, he explains, much of the land fell into disuse as a proliferation of cars and trucks meant fewer passengers and freights were transported by rail.

"By the 1990s, the active rail corridor was narrowed to what's in use today," Robertson said. "That land sat vacant, just scrub really."

$2B redevelopment commenced in 1997

In 1997, Concord bought the land from Canada Lands Company, a federal Crown corporation that sell surplus former government properties, and soon after announced a $2 billion redevelopment.

Construction began in 2000 with the Matrix and Apex projects, and continued until a dozen buildings occupied 10 blocks in the district.

"It's an all-encompassing community and everything is accessible from here as well, which is really great," says Yeaman of Concord. "So you can have that very urban downtown lifestyle and it's very convenient for me. Personally, I love it. I can walk to work."

City Place 2007. Highrise condos rise from the former rail lands. (Submitted)

But it hasn't been without challenges.

In a relatively short period of time, a community with the population of the town of Cobourg arose in an area without schools, community centres or grocery stores.

The new community would also have a significant impact on other infrastructure, such as the downtown power grid and sewage treatment.

Matti Siemiatycki is interim director of the University of Toronto's School of Cities where he's an associate professor of geography and planning.

"To build for that large a population has really been an experiment in pop up, fast city building and you've seen both the pros and the cons of that," he said.

"I think the key challenges have been around infrastructure and around the staging of the project. The buildings went in first and the private developments really led the public planning. And I think that's posed challenges in terms of the physical infrastructure for electricity, for sewage, but also the social infrastructure that makes a real community, like grocery stores, parks, community centres and libraries."

Matti Siemiatycki, interim director of the University of Toronto’s School of Cities says building a community for such large a population in such a short period of time has really been an experiment in fast city building. (Gary Asselstine/CBC)

In 2016 and 2017 a series of power outages required the replacement of two primary and backup feeders servicing the area. And Toronto Hydro's recently completed $200-million underground Copeland Transformer Station on Bremner Boulevard was built to add capacity and stability for all those new downtown developments.

Siemiatycki says retrofitting the needed infrastructure is more expensive and disruptive than planning it beforehand. But he says as City Place phases were built out, there were unpredicted changes in the demographics of those living in the new community.

"I think when it was being built, the expectation was that it was going to be all young people, that it was going to have a lot of singles, and what we've now started to see is a lot of families, a lot of seniors — a much more well-rounded community has evolved there," he says.

Yeaman — who has a child and lives in the community — says those sorts of amenities and needed social infrastructure are being built. A library, schools and community centre have all been added over the years or are now being built.

"Development is a process — a learning process," says Yeaman. "I think having the infrastructure in early, you know we've got the school coming, the community centers coming. Having those items in there early for the community, those amenities along with having retail in there early really helps jumpstart the community."

And Yeaman says Concord Adex is putting those lessons into practice at its other big Toronto redevelopment Concord Park Place — a multi-tower condominium complex under construction near Sheppard Avenue and Leslie Street.

She says the company realizes that these are not just buildings rising from abandoned brownfields and transforming skylines, but people's homes and communities. And if those communities are desirable to live in — then good city planning is also good business.