It took the prospect of rapid transit rolling through Mount Dennis to uncover the significance of one of the community’s landmark buildings.

Squat and grey, the Scotiabank branch at the corner of Weston Rd. and Eglinton Ave. W. does not convey the gravitas normally associated with heritage structures.

Yet resident Simon Chamberlain has long sensed it is a building worth saving. From the Bluenose schooner carved into the stone façade to the steel-framed windows, it stands out along the down-at-heel strip.

“The building itself is a very lovely piece of modern architecture,” said Chamberlain, a retired urban planner. “It’s very well thought-about, very carefully designed.”

But it wasn’t until late last year, when Chamberlain learned the bank would be razed to make way for the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, that he dug a little deeper. As he discovered, the building at the heart of Mount Dennis is in fact deeply embedded in the DNA of the working-class community, with roots tracing back to 1913, when Kodak first set up shop there.

The city’s heritage planners concurred, and after some negotiation, Metrolinx agreed to reconfigure the track design. On Thursday, the Toronto Preservation Board will consider giving the building official heritage designation.

Slated for completion in 2020, the $4.9 billion Crosstown LRT will unite more than a dozen diverse neighbourhoods along 19 km of one of Toronto’s longest, busiest thoroughfares. Not since the Bloor subway line was conceived a generation ago has a transit project prompted such a significant exercise in city planning.

The result: a rare chance to be forward-thinking about heritage, and weave the corridor’s unique past into its future.

“There’s a sense of a real need to ensure that we’re not dismissing those areas as suburban, or making value judgments that don’t really represent the interesting buildings that can come out of modernization,” said Mary MacDonald, acting manager of the city’s heritage preservation services. “Those are opportunities to expand our understanding of the history and heritage of those areas as we push our transit out.”

Building on the past

Growth on Eglinton has largely been driven by north-south transportation infrastructure, from the concessionroads that bisected it in the 19th century to the more modern rail lines, highways and subways.

“All of them cross Eglinton, and all resulted in different patterns of development,” said Brian Gallaugher, a senior city planner who is working on the Crosstown planning project, dubbed “Eglinton Connects.”

As transit once again spurs growth, this time with Eglinton as the anchor, Gallaugher said many of the new connecting hubs will be built around tangible vestiges of the past.

“Eglinton is not really thought of as a street with a lot of heritage, but it does have a lot of character, and we need to maintain that character and celebrate it as the street develops,” said Gallaugher, whose team is part of a massive planning effort that involves Metrolinx as well as private architects and designers.

At Mount Dennis, for instance, where there will be an LRT station, bus terminal and future GO rail station, Metrolinx’s latest plans envision repurposing the former Kodak employee building, much beloved by local residents. The sole remaining structure on a sprawling property where thousands once worked will become “the heart of the station,” complete with offices and retail space.

It will be a difficult task. After years of neglect, “Building 9,” as it was known, is covered in graffiti inside and out. Its once grand auditorium has been ransacked. When the Star visited the site earlier this week, the auditorium doors were secured by a ladder propped up against a sheet of plywood. Discarded office chairs bobbed around in the sludgy pond below.















Metrolinx plans to spend up to $2 million in the coming months just “to ensure the building doesn’t deteriorate any further,” said spokesman Jamie Robinson.

“While we’re building transit, and we recognize that heritage buildings are often at intersections and close to where we need to build our stations,” Robinson said, “we’re interested in preserving properties wherever possible.”

Building 9 is not currently listed as a heritage property, but Gallaugher said it’s likely to be added to the inventory “as part of the Metrolinx process.”

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Farther east, near Spadina Rd., Metrolinx plans to convert a 1970s addition to the 1932 Forest Hill Fire Hall, which is listed as a heritage property, into a secondary entrance for Chaplin Station, while preserving the rest of the structure.

On the northwest corner of Eglinton Ave. E. and Mt. Pleasant Rd., the former CIBC building, currently a Second Cup, will be renovated and become the main entrance for Mt. Pleasant station. Although not technically a heritage building, it bears the distinctive architecture of a 1920s bank — and “does contribute to the fabric of the neighbourhood,” Gallaugher said.

Preserving Eglinton’s character

Eglinton is what Graeme Stewart, an associate at ERA Architects, calls a “metropolitan avenue.”

There are highrise condos around Yonge St., lowrise apartment buildings from the 1930s in Forest Hill, single-family homes in Leaside and the giant tower blocks of the high-modern neighbourhoods that define Don Mills.

“Eglinton is really interesting because it’s the only street that really covers the entire city east to west. Also, it’s the only street that captures every single type of development in Toronto,” said Stewart, whose firm provided the historical analysis for Eglinton Connects.

With that in mind, Stewart and others have proposed guidelines for growth that consider the distinct characteristics that define 18 so-called “character areas.”















A report available on the Eglinton Connects website highlights the “conservation elements” that should inform future development in each of those areas, such as the intersection of Dufferin St. with a former First Nations trail, pre-war residential buildings at Bathurst, and the relationship of Eglinton to the Golden Mile industrial district.

“It’s kind of everyone’s Toronto. For that reason, there was not a one-size-fits-all solution,” Stewart said. “It’s about: How can the Crosstown as a project spur development that really reinforces the individual identities of these very different neighbourhoods?”

It will still be many months before Metrolinx awards contracts for construction of the Crosstown stations, and design plans — which need approval from both Metrolinx and the city — are finalized. But Robinson said Metrolinx is “committed” to preserving the heritage buildings that have been identified as significant though the public consultation process.

Standing on the grass in front of the Scotiabank building in Mount Dennis on a recent morning, Chamberlain said he is relieved the bank will be spared.

As he points out, it’s the second time the building has avoided the wrecking ball. To accommodate the widening of Eglinton Ave. in the mid-’60s, Metro Council voted to relocate the bank, and the city paid to move it 27 metres back from Weston Rd., where it currently sits.

“It’s just another piece of its history that makes it important,” Chamberlain said.















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