The disappearance of surface parking lots in Toronto is a great thing. The scourge of the city for half a century after being devoured by the automobile and its auxiliary needs, Toronto has been luckier than most cities in North America in correcting these historic mistakes as most downtown lots have been filled back in with more city.

One of the most recent to disappear was at Queen W. and Soho Sts. Unfortunately it’s been filled in by a new mistake.

MEC opened their new three-storey Toronto flagship here in April, a squat, ugly and cheap-looking big box building that would be more at home in a parking lot by a highway interchange rather than in the dense urban core of a big city.

The store’s frontage along Queen has two entrances, one for the store itself and another for the daycare on the top floor, with windows in between offering limited interaction between inside and out. Alternating roofline heights and facade sizes awkwardly try to mimic the older, individual Queen storefront and lot sizes but it’s so obviously part of one large building the gesture is lost in the mess.

The Soho side of the new MEC is almost entirely a massive blank wall save for a few windows and an underground parking entrance. The sidewalk expanse along here has concrete benches for sitting and room for a Bike Share stand. Useful things, but considering the prominent location of this corner all of it is hardly beautiful, and now mostly forgettable.

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Inside, the store is bright and open with a central staircase in an atrium-like space that includes a rather nice wooden ceiling suspended from the roof, but it is otherwise indistinguishable from other big new retail spaces. It is just a box, in this case filled with outdoor sporting goods and displays. One saving grace is the great city view from the second floor window directly south, down the urban canyon Peter St. has become.

A partial culprit that led to this dismal design is the Queen St. W. Heritage Conservation District guidelines that say “new and renovated buildings must be designed to be sympathetic” with the existing character of the surrounding historic streetscape. Yet it would take many leaps of the imagination, perhaps with the aid of hallucinogenic drugs, to think this prefab-looking warehouse contributes anything to Queen St.’s historic or future character.

It has all the urban charm of a generic condo podium without the condo on top. While the daycare is a good and needed amenity, there should be four or six or eight more stories of also-needed housing here, or more daycares or more offices that could thrive on a major street like Queen. This rump building diminishes other noble heritage efforts and ultimately diminishes the character of Queen St. itself.

“Neighbourhood character” has sadly sometimes become a code word for keeping people out: just look at the recent “two front doors” issue that will make it just a little harder to allow more people to live in this city. If this is what conservation guidelines help deliver architecturally and socially, they are civic policy failures.

The bitterest irony of all this is MEC’s old building on King St. was just fine. With its rather unique wooden frontage and grand interior ceiling, it only just opened in 1998. I never had a problem buying skis, bike lights, long distance cycling clothing, or backpacks in the old store. It, too, was essentially just a box, and if MEC’s needs had changed the store could have been altered or renovated, the greenest things to do.

Indeed, MEC makes a big deal about their social and environmental responsibility and their commitment to “green buildings” and “lightening their impact.” Yet there are few bigger impacts than abandoning an already built, perfectly fine building that will soon be torn down, and constructing a new one a couple blocks away. Walmart does this, MEC shouldn’t, as land use planning and adaptive reuse of existing buildings are integral to sound environmentalism.

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When they rebranded as MEC from Mountain Equipment Co-op a few years, they dropped the “mountain” in word and logo, a reference to the actual landscape of this country, adopting a bland boardroom-inspired corporate identity, a long way from the co-op’s scrappy 1971 roots.

The energy and carbon emissions that went into building the King St. site are now wasted. Add to that the additional energy and consumption needed to build the new store it renders MEC’s self-laudatory rhetoric into little more than feel good consumerism that masks itself as environmentalism.

An environmental, architectural, and heritage shame for both Toronto and co-op members, MEC will likely abandon this temporary debris pile again in 20 years and build a new store, if its idea of sustainability hasn’t expanded.

MEC lost their mountain, but they also lost their way in the city too.