Catch a glimpse of the Sheraton Centre from the west, around Queen and University, and it seems impossibly thin, cutting through the skyline like a knife.

At night, especially a misty one, the big Sheraton S on each end lights the way as if the hotel is a giant concrete Rudolph.

Seen from the front, its thinness gives way to wideness as the facade is an impossible expanse of concrete and glass, at night appearing like a space-age analogue control panel with individual rooms lit up randomly.

They don’t build them like this anymore. Really, they don’t, save for a few exceptions in these parts. New hotels tend to be smaller, more boutique and if they’re part of a big building are often combined with a residential component such as the Four Seasons and Shangri-La hotels.

The Sheraton Centre is an old-school mother ship that goes deep into the earth and high in the sky, with more than 1,300 rooms and 12,000 square metres of event space.

“It has a scale that is profoundly metropolitan,” wrote architect Michael McClelland in “Concrete Toronto,” the 2007 guidebook to the city’s concrete architecture between the 1950s and 1970s. “It was built on the idea that Toronto was a place for phenomenal growth and bold new urban enterprises.” It represents a time when, civically speaking, the city was thinking big.

McClelland points out that the Sheraton was meant as a companion to new city hall, and even had a bar overlooking the square. The City of Toronto expropriated the land in order to have a suitably impressive modern building framing the south side of Nathan Phillips Square, and it still owns the land and leases it to the hotel.

Though the surroundings have changed and the square has received a gentle update in the last few years, the view from city hall to the Sheraton is nearly the same as it was in 1972, when the hotel was completed. It’s a genuine, modernist mid-century period view, though Toronto did lose an interesting mishmash of burlesque theatres and shops along this stretch of Queen Street with the expropriation.

City hall connections run even deeper as Seppo Valjus, a member of its Finnish architectural team led by Viljo Revell, also consulted on the Sheraton with John B. Parkin Associates, the local firm that worked on both buildings. It’s a cohesive landscape. Whenever there’s an event or rally in the square I look over to the tower and there’s inevitably people in hotel rooms looking down on us. What a civic view they get to behold.

That’s something to cherish, just as other period landscapes, like Victorian ones, have been. They’re at risk though. Consider calls to tear down the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts on Front Street, a 1967 centennial project. Any city that is sincere about its commitment to mitigating climate change would strongly resist tearing down buildings, wasting all the energy it took to create them, and expending even more energy on the replacement. Such waste.

Not far from the Sheraton is the Chelsea hotel, a Toronto home for decades of visitors in town to catch a game or a show. Despite its size and being perfectly fine, it too is slated to be torn down and replaced with new towers.

This ought to be illegal. Respectful renovation, not tear downs, is the only moral choice at this scale.

As for the Sheraton, it was purchased for $335 million in 2017 by Brookfield Asset Management, though it’s still run by Sheraton’s parent company, Marriott. It had also received $110 million in interior renovations not long before.

Still, like any building nearing 50 years old, it could use additional updates. It is, of course, anti-urban at the ground floor. Walking along all three sides of it is unpleasant as it offers little for the pedestrian. To enter the hotel on foot is to dodge SUVs and taxis in the massive pickup and drop-off zone, and along Queen Street there’s a ramp a half-block long leading to underground garages.

Just like the ceremonial vehicle ramp to the podium roof at city hall, this is a product of its era. All of it can be fixed.

The sheer size of the motor court reveals the size of the hotel podium, often obscured by the tower’s visual domination. Filled with meeting spaces and ballrooms above and below ground, there’s even an indoor-outdoor pool atop it, a secret, if decadent, tree-filled elevated oasis downtown.

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Inside the hotel is another oasis, the courtyard with a terraced garden with waterfalls, a duck pond and bee hives designed by landscape architect J. Austin Floyd.

The hotel’s prefab concrete looks as good as it did when it opened. Correct the sidewalk level of this sleek beast, give it proper heritage protection, bring back the bar with the city hall view, and may it welcome guests to Toronto for decades more.

Shawn Micallef is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @shawnmicallef

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