By any measure, Bloor Street — the Mink Mile part of it at least — is a mess. Brutalist slabs rub shoulders with two-storey Gothic houses left over from an earlier age. Shiny transparent towers look onto dull concrete heaps.

Yet it works. If ever a street added up to more than the sum of its parts, this is it. People flock to Bloor today as they have for decades — and not just for the shopping. It is the closest Toronto comes to a Strip, a promenade.

As a record of different eras, intentions, planning regimes, good intentions and bad results, Bloor has it all. Though inconsistent, incoherent, confused and contradictory, it’s irresistible.

But as Jane Jacobs reminded us, “The city cannot be a work of art.” That’s for sure. With the exceptions of buildings such as the Colonnade, the Royal Ontario Museum and the Church of the Redeemer at Bloor and Avenue Rd., there’s barely a decent structure on this stretch of Bloor. The intersection with Yonge, one of the most important in the city, ranks among its least attractive.

The wretched Hudson’s Bay Centre on the northeast corner could kill a lesser corner all by itself. Who in their right mind would have buried retail underground in the city’s premier shopping district and put up empty facades on the street? That requires a special kind of stupidity, civic and corporate. Across the road, Cumberland Terrace is a tired old complex waiting patiently to be put out of its misery.

With the disappearance of the old Frank Stollerys store on the southwest corner, there’s almost nothing to balance the garish steel-and-glass clad remakes that have turned Bloor into a showcase of architectural kitsch.

The big news is One Bloor East, a 75-storey condo tower now under construction. Though far from completion, its curved glass exterior has already taken on a strangely retro aesthetic — yet another voice added to the cacophony. On the other hand, no one could say the new development turns its back on its context; it will bring 100,000 square feet of retail space to the corner.

Anchoring the Mink Mile at the west end is the ROM, altered and expanded by Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind. Where One Bloor East is all rounded edges and soft corners, his contribution to the museum, the Crystal, is hard and angular. Farther west, Bloor enters University of Toronto territory and becomes briefly civilized before returning to form at Spadina.

Interestingly, Bloor’s two great pieces of architecture — the former Meteorological Building (now Munk School of Global Affairs) and the Gooderham Residence (now the York Club) — are both more than a century old.

One can’t help but wonder what our predecessors knew about city-building that we have forgotten. Fortunately for us, Bloor remains vital despite the damage done since the 1960s and ’70s. Though landowners, planners and their architects have come close to killing the goose that lays their golden egg, they haven’t quite succeeded.

Still, it’s extraordinary to see how poorly they have treated the street in recent decades and how little they seem to understand its needs. Certainly, the new streetscape helps, but the sidewalks are still too narrow, the trees too dispersed and buildings too disconnected. Clearly, architects need to relearn the art of infill, of how to be a part of something larger.

Fortunately, though Bloor is a hodge-podge, it’s not homogeneous. It could do with a bit more harmony. Even if the players aren’t all on the same page, at least they could act as if they’re on the same street.

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca