Bruce Bell, History Columnist –
One of my earliest memories of Toronto while visiting from Sudbury in the early 1960s is standing on the corner of King and Yonge Streets with my dad. Staring up at the foreboding skyscrapers, I felt overwhelmed yet fascinated at their looming immensity.
Sudbury, while having the tallest smokestack in the world, had no skyscrapers.
The buildings I saw are today completely overshadowed by newer, taller and sleeker skyscrapers like the TD Centre, Commerce Court and Scotia Tower. But they still strike me with awe, as they dominated Toronto’s skyline for almost 60 years.
Built at the turn of the 20th century, those early skyscrapers transformed our city from a European design, ruled by church steeples and three-storey French Empire-style office blocks, to a very North American city on par with Chicago and New York.
The oldest of these imposing structures is the Trader’s Bank Building, built in 1905 at 67 Yonge Street at Colborne Street. Though only 15 storeys high, it was briefly the tallest building in the British Empire.
Designed by the architectural firm Carrère and Hastings of New York City (architects of the still standing 1897 New York Public Library), the Traders Bank Building has a brilliant terra-cotta exterior frieze of cattle skulls.
Next door at 69 Yonge Street on the southeast corner of King is the former Canadian Pacific Railway Building (CPR) with three copper domes rising from the roof. When opened in 1913 its 18 storeys made it the tallest building in the British Empire.
The CPR Building (the shadow of the original letters can still be seen on the exterior) was once covered in two-toned granite that gave it an exuberant, almost Spanish renaissance look. Unfortunately, when the building was renovated in 1930 the entire façade was refaced by grey limestone.
Another heartbreaking renovation to the CPR Building produced one of Torontos’s hidden treasures: the magnificent gold leaf-coffered ceiling of its former main hall, now a Shoppers Drug Mart. Obscured underneath a dull institutional drop ceiling, this wondrous work of art was revealed a few years back when the bland ceiling tiles were replaced with even blander ones.
Soon this century-old skyscraper will be transformed into a condo with an extra few storeys. I hope the original ceiling will be part of this alteration.
Across the street on the northeast corner of Yonge and King is the Royal Bank Building, Toronto’s third building to be the tallest in the British Empire when it was topped off at 20 storeys in 1914.
With its massive exterior Corinthian columns standing guard and a fantastic exterior frieze (also imbedded with cattle skulls) it too once had a glorious banking hall with a gold leaf-coffered ceiling. But the ceiling was destroyed when the bank was renovated decades ago; it’s now home to a mattress store.
An idea of these great banking halls is visible at the former Dominion Bank, built in 1914 on the southwest corner of King and Yonge (now One King West condo/hotel). It’s one of the most spectacular rooms in Canada.
Toronto lost a dozen or so of its early skyscrapers during the urban renewal of the 1960s and ’70s, including the Foresters Building, the Bank of Montreal, Ford’s Hotel and the former Toronto Star Building on King Street west of Bay – considered one of the finest art deco skyscrapers in North America. Today its original bronze front doors are the entrance to 357 Bay Street at Richmond.
Joe Shuster, co-creator of Superman, once worked as a newsboy for the Toronto Star. When his family moved to Cleveland, which didn’t have any tall buildings, he used the 1920s Toronto skyline as a blueprint for the fictional Metropolis city.
In an interview with the Star before his death in 1992, Shuster said “Cleveland was not nearly as metropolitan as Toronto, and it was not as big or as beautiful. Whatever buildings I saw in Toronto remained in my mind and came out in the form of Metropolis.” Portions of the Toronto skyline that inspired a young Joe Shuster are still around, through tucked away like blades of grass surrounded by mighty oaks. Toronto was the first big city I visited. As a wide-eyed little boy holding my dad’s hand looking skyward at the corner King and Yonge, how could I not think of Superman ‘leaping tall buildings in a single bound’?
