Help might be on the way for Yonge and Eglinton’s screaming condo tower

Help might be on the way for Yonge and Eglinton’s screaming condo tower

Toronto’s condo towers take a lot of criticism for being too tall, or too plain, or far too expensive for normal people to buy into. The E Condos, a new 58-storey tower at Yonge and Eglinton, has found an entirely new way to offend the senses: a quirk of the building’s design has turned it into a massive wind instrument. Every time the weather gets gusty, the tower starts to vibrate, filling the intersection—one of the city’s busiest—with terrible noise.

Turn up your volume and give a listen to this video, posted to Reddit late last week by user Tonezinator.

What do you hear? Is it the lamentations of an entire inferno’s worth of condemned souls? A swarm of five trillion angry wasps? The condo tower itself crying out in pain?

The E tower has been committing this same aural offence on windy days for at least the past two months. The building is already partially occupied. A resident, who asked not to be identified because he rents his condo and fears upsetting his landlord, tells us that the sound is even worse on the inside.

“What you hear is sort of a reverberation, a moving pitch that goes up and down,” he says. “It’s absolutely hellish. It started giving me a headache after about two hours.”

“I would say it’s violin-loud. Like someone playing it in the bathroom with the door closed. My girlfriend, who has a hearing aid, would not be able to hear me properly if I was speaking in a regular tone.”

The tower’s developer is Bazis, a builder with a few other Toronto towers to its credit, including Cystal Blu, near Yonge and Bloor.

Veronika Belovich, director of sales and marketing for Bazis, tells us that the company is aware of the problem. “The building is still under construction and we are working on fixing the noise issue,” she wrote in an email. “[The] noise is created by wind interaction with balcony railings. Once all the railing components are installed, the noise will cease.”

Belovich says Bazis is aiming to have all those balcony components installed by spring, meaning Yonge and Eglinton has at least a few more months of intermittent condo scream ahead of it.