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Minto wants to tear down its Fifth Avenue Court building in the Glebe, ending a 40-year run for an interesting public space that’s never quite lived up to its promise.

Under plans submitted to the city and now up for public comment, the commercial strip along Bank Street between Fourth and Fifth avenues (home to Von’s restaurant at one end and Pure Gelato at the other) stays intact but everything behind it goes. That’s a combined office and retail complex constructed in the late 1970s, with a fountain, benches and gardens in the middle.

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Where the courtyard is now will be the lobby of an eight-storey condo building, plus other private things like a residents’ gym, party room, bike storage and garbage room, surrounded by a ring of ground-floor condo units. The courtyard is toast, which seems both a shame and inevitable.

The courtyard and its surrounding storefronts replaced a parking lot in about 1980, joining up with the Bank Street retail strip in an unusually creative effort for the time that combined old and new and added a bunch of room for people to just hang out.