Does the city need ugly buildings?

The shabby and unfashionable, the weirdo huts and half-abandoned malls and rundown plazas. Could it be they actually serve a valuable purpose in the life and evolution of the city?

It’s a question raised recently by the imminent demolition of a strip of stores near Yonge and Eglinton that virtually everyone, it seems, agreed were a blight on the neighbourhood. As Joshua Errett, of CBC News, reported this week, even the architect who designed the wheelchair-inaccessible, above-and-below-ground plaza in the 1980s, Lloyd Alter, has long thought it was horrendously ugly. It’s a sentiment Alter told me local residents shared with him almost immediately upon its construction. So when it was announced that it would be demolished to make way for a condo tower, everyone was ready to celebrate.

Except the family-run businesses that leased space in it, like the Korean Cowboy restaurant and the Hollywood Diamond jewellery shop, whose owners and families have commented that they are sad to be forced out. And except for those who have long visited the two video-gaming shops that had been in that plaza. And except those residents of a neighbourhood recently overwhelmed by the Firkin & Starbucks main-street redevelopment routine who now wonder: Where in their area are these kinds of tiny, independent enterprises likely to fit in?

In a city where every new condo development brings a podium filled with banks, big-boxes and chain stores, and where every remaining lovely Victorian century-building attracts a pet spa or a high-end coffee house, the question is: Do unloved, ugly commercial buildings — ones no self-respecting Pottery Barn would consider moving into — serve a purpose by providing viable places for quirky mom-and-pop enterprises to set up shop?

Alter ruminated on this for the CBC and in his own blog post at the site Treehugger, and again when I spoke to him on the phone, invoking Jane Jacobs’ old maxim, “Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”

When she wrote that, in her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she meant that old buildings, a type synonymous with low-rent at the time, provide a home for riskier and lower-profit types of businesses — the kinds of businesses that might innovate but also provide neighbourhood diversity and character.

“As for really new ideas of any kind — no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be —” she wrote in the same passage, “there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction.”

Considering my experience of recent trips to San Francisco and Manhattan, and looking around downtown Toronto and the rapidly gentrifying south of the city, I had started to think that this concept was outdated. Because in modern urban real estate, old buildings are often as “high-overhead” as new ones, or more so. A former warehouse in the Distillery District or Liberty Village is no longer a cheap place for artists to live or a sketchy bootstrapping startup to house offices — such a brick and beam and stone and wood heritage building is now a prestige address.

Old no longer equals undesirable, or cheap. But ugly? Well, perhaps that’s a different story.

And, I think, it’s not just innovative “new ideas” that require a lower-rent, less desirable home, but all manner of independent businesses — the “record shop, tattoo parlour or video game store” that Alter mentions to the CBC, but also the sari shop, the old family-run diner, the pho counter, the Bollywood film rental store, the two-stool barbershop. The kinds of low-margin, low-prospect, no-chain businesses that make a neighbourhood an interesting place to live.

You can wander around in the older parts of the city, the gentrified or gentrifying ones, and notice that it is the tinier and uglier storefronts that tend to house the remaining outposts of eccentricity. Almost more so, you can go to the less-trendy, farther-flung areas of the city and see that while international chains of varying price levels occupy the massive, renovated malls and new-built big-box complexes, the truly interesting independent joints are clustered in ugly old parking-lot strip malls, or in ugly old neighbourhood malls like Agincourt or Galleria.

The concept does present a bit of a riddle when it comes to what to do about it. After all, the reason such a place remains low-rent is its undesirability. The quality that makes it a community asset is the same quality that would lead to widespread celebration at its destruction. “Save the eyesores that humiliate even the architects who built them” seems like a misguided kind of rallying cry.

Still, you seldom see a neighbourhood’s character displayed in the commercial spaces of the buildings that braggarts would say give a neighbourhood its beloved character — the heritage-proud architectural treasures and new-built condos both more often house a less interesting kind of place. I’ve heard it suggested, for a start, that condo towers should have smaller store spaces in their base, perhaps sold as independent units themselves rather than leased. Perhaps.

Whether there’s anything to be done or not, perhaps it’s a start to just look upon those ugly buildings in your neighbourhood and, before uttering your ritual wish for their erasure, wonder if they’re actually doing some good.

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Galleria Mall

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Galleria Mall, at Dufferin and Dupont, is also slated for demolition to make way for a new mixed-use condominium complex — years after big chains abandoned it and left it to quirkier neighbourhood businesses.

Gerrard and Carlaw plaza

When the Riverdale dining institution The Real Jerk lost the lease on its newly gentrified longtime home at Queen and Broadview, it found a new one in an unfashionable, half-abandoned strip mall at Gerrard and Carlaw — one that became fashionable after being featured in a Rihanna and Drake music video.

King Palace Restaurant

A space apparently custom-built for an out-of-business doughnut shop, sharing a lot with a car wash, provides a home for Indian and Pakistani cuisine at King Palace Restaurant, in the rapidly redeveloping Davenport and Yonge area.

Jim’s Best Westerns

A little hole-in-the-wall adjoining an auto body shop continues to house a diner institution — Jim’s “Best Westerns” Restaurant — in Riverside, long after trendier bars and organic butchers moved into the area.

Alexandro’s gyro shop

Captain John’s restaurant ship has hauled out of the harbour, but the neighbouring independent takeout institution Alexandro’s is still serving gyros from its strange little hut next door on Queens Quay.

Keele Centre warehouse building

Directly to the south is the Dundas West strip of the Junction that the New York Times recently called “Toronto’s most stylish neighbourhood.” Directly north is a newer set of big-box complexes filled with the likes of Home Depot and Winners. But the aging industrial monstrosity of the Keele Centre at West Toronto St. still stands, home to small businesses such as Fabric Fabric