Читать книгу Toronto Sketches 11 - Mike Filey - Страница 15

In the ongoing race to present the city with the ultimate in condominium towers, a 2010 announcement trumpeted the news that the nation’s tallest residential building, a seventy-five-storey, 931-suite skyscraper to be known as the Aura would soon soar to a height of 245-metres (804-feet) at the northwest corner of Yonge and Gerrard. As exciting as that announcement may have been, it was probably no more exciting, in relative terms, than the announcement made in the spring of 1895 by the Independent Order of Foresters that the organization was going to build the city’s very first authentic skyscraper. Not only that, but it would also be the tallest building in the entire country, nay the entire British Empire. And befitting its lofty place in the world of architecture, it would be known as the Temple Building.

The idea of creating this million-dollar landmark, one that would dwarf all the other buildings on the city skyline, was presented to the officials of the Independent Order of Foresters (IOF), a member-based insurance organization, by Dr. Oronhyatekha (“Burning Sky”), its popular leader, a full Mohawk chief who was born at Six Nations in 1841. He was also an accomplished medical doctor.

The new IOF building was designed by prominent city architect George Gouinlock, who was also responsible for several of the CNE’s older structures, including the Main, now Press Building (1905), the Horticultural Building (1907), and the Dominion and Provincial, later Arts, Crafts and Hobbies, and now Medieval Times Building (1912).

The view looking north on Bay Street, circa 1900, shows the clock tower of the brand new City Hall in the background and the spectacular (for the day) Temple Building at the corner of Richmond Street.

The Temple Building at the northwest corner of Bay and Richmond streets, circa 1910.

His towering new structure would consist of a massive stone base and thousands and thousands of bricks churned out by the Don Valley Brick Works (located adjacent to the Bayview Extension) all wrapped around a cast-iron skeleton, a building material that was soon to be replaced by structural steel. The structure would soar twelve storeys into the heavens. Canadians had never seen anything like it.

Tenants moved in to the state-of-the-art building (it had electric lighting and two elevators) in 1897. For the next seven decades it was home to a wide variety of companies, although the original IOF offices outgrew the building and in 1954 moved into a new building on Jarvis Street, and then, in Canada’s Centennial Year, to a modern new building at the southeast corner of Eglinton Avenue East and Don Mills Road.

By the end of 1970, Toronto’s Temple Building had been reduced to rubble.

May 16, 2010