Without the financial failure of Bramalea Limited, the Toronto Maple Leafs and Raptors would have had to find somewhere else to play.

An international real estate company, Bramalea had other plans for the land the Air Canada Centre is built on, pictured in a series of images from the City of Toronto Archives.

After decades of discussion with the City of Toronto, CN Real Estate was allowed in 1985 to sell their rail yard for redevelopment. By 1990, hundreds of millions of dollars in preparatory work on the site had been done by three companies, including Trizec Equities and Bramalea Limited’s “40 Bay Street Holdings Inc.”

Yes, that's the same Bramalea that developed a namesake “satellite city” between Brampton and Malton, which quickly built up a long list of investments in the United States and Canada.

The 40 Bay Street Holdings partnership intended to redevelop a site owned by Canada Post, known as the Postal Delivery Building. Completed in 1941, it's perhaps best known for a 13-part series of carvings by the acclaimed stone-carver Louis Temporale Sr. (1904-1994), chronicling the history of human communication. Operating first as a storage facility for the Department of National Defense, and from 1946 onwards as part of Canada Post, it was outmoded by Mississauga's Gateway Postal Facility at Dixie and Eglinton.

Bramalea and Trizec were to keep the building's exterior facade, but build two office towers, each around 31-storeys tall. The 1.8-hectare (4.5-acre) site would cost $300 million to purchase from the Crown corporation, and include two highrise residential towers, with roughly a thousand units total.

It would be joined by even more office towers and residences built by the other companies, on nearby lots, and even the Olympic Village, should Toronto have won its bid for the 1996 event.

Worried that the area would be choked in the dense development, the City of Toronto froze development for a year. A resulting Ontario Municipal Board case in 1990 led to a new city plan in 1991, and public consultation in 1992. Thanks to a recession, the partnership convinced Canada Post to shave $100 million off the price, but Trizec backed out in 1993. Later that year, Bramalea also retreated, with the property returning to Canada Post.

New offers were slow. The Canadian Auto Museum in Oshawa offered $5 million for the property, less than two per cent of the original asking price.

In autumn 1994, the Toronto Raptors announced they were interested in four sites across Metro Toronto, one being the Postal Building. But soon they were distracted by a plan from Leafs ownership to build a facility on the Union Station grounds. The two teams finally set their sites back on the property, and the rest is history.