Banksy will be coming back to Toronto — but perhaps not in a way he would approve of.

The legendary graffiti artist first visited the city in 2010 and left behind seven pieces on Toronto’s walls, signs and, in one case, fallen foliage. The art has mostly been painted over or otherwise destroyed, but two pieces survived.

Crews working with development company Menkes saved a stencil of a police officer, painted on a pillar at 90 Harbour St., as the building was being knocked down. The artwork, which depicts a police officer holding a balloon dog, is sitting in a crate in a warehouse awaiting its next life in Harbour Plaza, the new building being constructed on that site.

“The thought was it would be natural to put that back there and let the public enjoy it,” said Mark Karam, vice-president of Menkes. “The idea that’s being talked about would be to put it somewhere where it’s accessible to the public, in a high pedestrian area.”

Banksy is an international artist based in England whose true identity is unknown. He is often credited with the mainstreaming of graffiti art. His work is prolific, poignant and frequently illegal.

The piece at 90 Harbour St. was part of a tour Banksy did prior to the release of his 2010 film Exit Through the Gift Shop. Karam pegged the value of the piece at around $1 million, and said they hope to restore it to its original state and try to remove graffiti applied after its painting.

“Place matters to him. He’d hate to see it in a condo building I’d think,” said Will Ellsworth-Jones, author of Banksy: The Man Behind the Wall. Ellsworth-Jones said Banksy’s work is designed to stay where it was created. In this case, the artist picked the former OPP headquarters for the stencil lampooning the police.

Three of Banksy’s other original pieces in Toronto have either been painted over by other graffiti artists or, in one case, the property owner. Another was on a since-removed fallen tree that crushed a car (“Take that!” it read) and one was on a sign long since recycled.

Just one piece remains where it was originally placed, near Church St. and the Esplanade. Covered in Plexiglas, the piece shows three people looking in appreciation on a red scrawl that reads “Banksy.”

The pieces are notoriously difficult to sell at auction, but a mural cut out of a wall in north London was recently put up in a private auction and reportedly sold for $1.1 million. Last week, another enterprising property owner in London removed a wall containing a Banksy mural. It is also expected to fetch more than a million dollars at auction, according to a BBC news report.

The Banksy piece still remaining on the wall near Church and the Esplanade isn’t going anywhere, according to the building’s owners.

“To my knowledge there are no plans to do anything. We just want to protect it so it doesn’t get damaged,” said a representative of the company that owns the building.

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According to Karam, the Harbour Plaza piece of the police officer will sit in a publicly accessible part of the condominium towers, likely the PATH system — a place counter to the notoriously anti-commercial artist’s tastes.

“He’d probably come along and try to deface it,” said Ellsworth-Jones. “I’m joking . . . or at least I think I’m joking.”

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