More Toronto Roundhouse Lunacy...

In my previous post “Toronto’s Roundhouse Madness” I commented on the sad fact that a low-end furniture store was moving into our last surviving roundhouse from the 1920’s and how this was a really inappropriate use of an important heritage civic asset.

Since the news broke the story gets worse. We now learn that the city’s mission with respect to the roundhouse was two fold; one, create a railway museum at no cost to the city, and two, find roundhouse tenants. On the first objective the new deal gives 3 of 32 train bays for a small museum, and on the second objective, 15 bays to the furniture store (the remaining bays presently occupied by the tourist-friendly Steam Whistle Brewery).

From a space perspective a 3 bay museum would all but useless (even if the remaining locomotives on-site were left outside to rust), what really seems so short sighted is that the city left the job of finding tenants up to a developer and as we well know in Toronto, what our developers what they get regardless of what the rest of us might have wanted.

So in a nutshell the city has a rare heritage civic asset across the street from a major tourist attraction, the CN Tower, and doesn’t want to spend a dime developing the site never mind leveraging CN Tower’s capacity to draw tourists to the area; gives a developer the job of finding a tenant without so much as demanding a heritage sensitive re-use and tourist-friendly outcome, and oh yes, throws in a token museum at no cost to the city. The heritage department we are told “is pleased” and so it is mission accomplished!

In reality, don’t spend a dime city marries “don’t pay a cent event” furniture store. Too bad few tourists are going to show up this for wedding. Even the Steam Whistle Brewery looses out in that their plans for a railway museum/event space were turned down by the city.

(See Chistopher Hume's recent Toronto Star article titled "Toronto's don't-pay-a-cent event, the Toronto Star, June 16, 2007)."