Revised Submission: 2400-2440 Yonge Street

From Eglinton Park Residents’ Association

To: LPAT

Date: February 13, 2020

Re: Revised Submission: 2400-2440 Yonge Street

Background

Eglinton Park Residents Association is a party on this file. Our territory is the nine square blocks between the northwest corner of Yonge and Eglinton and Eglinton Park. Our eastern boundary is Yonge Street, our southern boundary is Eglinton, our western boundary is Eglinton Park, and our northern boundary is Roselawn. The proposed development is slated for the northeast corner of our domain. We have been actively engaged in discussion of the site and tried our best to prevent the destruction of the BMO building at the hands of Main and Main, the previous developer.

To the north is another residents’ association, LPRO (Lytton Park Residents Organization). EPRA and LPRO are closely allied on this file. LPRO drew up a detailed critique of the new development, to submit to the tribunal. Our board has reviewed that document and voted unanimously to endorse it and to co-sponsor it.

As we do so, we wish to underline our central considerations.

We begin by acknowledging that in many ways the current proposal is an improvement on its predecessor. The architecture has a good deal more life; the street frontage on Yonge is more lively.

But, as LPRO also notes, this project, when rejected by planning in 2017 as too massive, came back not smaller but bigger.

The podium rose from nine storeys to twelve, an extraordinary height for a podium.

The towers, no shorter than before, grew fatter: their floor-plates increased.

The height of the towers concerns us. From Eglinton, going north, the towers step down, from 31 storeys (107.2 metres) at Whitehaus, to 27 storeys (84 metres) at Montgomery Square, to 14 storeys (50 metres) at the Capitol Theatre site. Supporting Document 2, the formal submission for the new project, shows the proposed new 27 storey tower, at 97.2 metres, to be some four storeys, or 13 metres, taller than Montgomery Square (84 metres), immediately to its south.­­ The the planned towers in this project should step not higher, but down further, to maintain a harmonious progression.

In addition to the points raised in the submission from LPRO, we point to the following:

1. In the blueprints, the apartments are almost always very small, generally one bedroom. Meanwhile, in North Toronto, ever more, apartment towers are full of children. We need a mix of housing types to accommodate families of every shape.

2. Although the Yonge frontage is more articulated, and more lively, than in the 2017 design, it offers nothing public: no space to retreat from the street, no place to sit, no place for public art. In that, this plan is far less successful as a public place-maker than is the Montgomery, to its south. We would like to project to contribute more to enlivening Yonge Street as a public place.

3. The Montgomery, adjacent to the south, gestures to the history of the space, site of Montgomery’s Tavern. This new building, on historic Yonge Street, adds nothing to our sense of collective history. Meanwhile, the Capitol Theatre, two blocks north, is keeping its facade and movie marquee. We want the developers, through art and imagination, to join in the celebration of Yonge Street’s long history.