This is a modified excerpt from my master’s research project in 2022.
“Burke,” a 53-storey condo tower being erected on the corner of Sherbourne and Howard streets, just steps away from Sherbourne subway station. On the same site as the new condo there are two heritage buildings – the Anson Jones House built in 1895 and the Sherbourne Street Row Houses. built in 1875. The developer agreed to rehabilitate the heritage buildings as part of the condo project.
The plans include digging a carpark underneath the Victorian residences, but developers had to move the Sherbourne Street Row Houses out of the way to avoid damage. Workers dug a hole under the row house complex and supported it with giant columns. Then, they gingerly inserted long steel beams between the columns and supported the steel beams with wooden platforms. The red brick building looked like it was hovering on a giant Meccano set.
Heavy-duty rollers placed between the platforms and the steel beams allowed workers to slowly tug the building out of the way. Once the building had passed over a pair of rollers, the rollers were moved forward, in the same way the ancient Egyptians used huge logs to move giant limestone blocks for the pyramids.
Daniel Lewis and Michael Otchie from ERA Architects don reflective jackets inside a 40-foot-long shipping container acting as the site office for a construction project in downtown Toronto. Everyone has to sign in for COVID-19 contact tracing and put on protective gear before they venture onto the construction site.
Lewis and his team worked hard to avoid damaging the Victorian structures while construction went on around it. But not every heritage building in Toronto is lucky enough to be conserved with the backing of a large property developer – some are neglected to the point of collapse.
Toronto’s St. James Town is a microcosm of modern housing history. The intersection of Sherbourne and Howard streets is already flanked by two tall condos. Both the 30-storey Linden Cooper House and 50-storey The Selby are towering behind existing hundred-year-old buildings. Burke is sprouting up just across the street.
In 2010, Toronto City Council designated 27 buildings along the 425-metre-long neighbourhood flanking Howard Street. Between 2017 and 2021, one of those buildings was demolished, one was relocated, and the conservation process began for another.
Burke’s site is complicated. There used to be four designated buildings on the land bordered by Sherbourne and Howard streets and Redrocket Lane. The neglected and demolished James Chalmers Building used to be part of the site.
Lewis didn’t just work on moving the Sherbourne Street Row Houses, he also helped preserve the 1884 Queen Anne Revival C.H. Gooderham House just across the street from the Burke construction site. Today, The Selby condo rises 50 storeys from behind the historic house. Two members of the Gooderham family co-founded the Gooderham and Worts Distillery, which has since become the heart of Toronto’s Distillery District, complete with chic restaurants and art galleries. The C.H. Gooderham House became the Selby Hotel in 1912 where Ernest Hemingway once stayed during his brief career with the Toronto Star.
When ERA Architects began restoring the C.H. Gooderham House in 2014, part of it was sinking into soft ground. Lewis and his colleagues had to move the building out of the way to reinforce the foundations and raise it by about two feet before moving it back into place.
The developer wanted to restore the exterior of the building as close to the original as possible. Apart from raising the building, Lewis had to get new wooden windows, replace the slate roof, clean the brick surface, put in lead-coated copper piping and restore the woodwork on the porches. The restoration was so well done it was nominated for the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario’s Paul Oberman Award for Adaptive Reuse in 2020. It’s easily the prettiest building in the neighbourhood.
On the other end of Howard Street, the William Whitehead House was moved 130 metres from 76 Howard Street to 28 Howard Street to make way for the two-tower Via Bloor condo complex.
“Some buildings really should not be moved because their original site is so deeply important to what makes them interesting,” said Scott Weir, a principal at ERA Architects who was involved in moving the house. “But other times it’s just part of a street scape. It’s not clear that it has to stay exactly where it is, but it could move to another location.”
Weir and his colleagues determined that William Whitehead House was suitable for moving. It was a designated heritage building constructed from standard patterns from the 1880s like the hundreds of other Victorian houses in nearby Cabbagetown. Weir said that the location of the house was not intentional, and it could fit into any gap on the street and still look at home.
“It was a really successful move,” said Weir.
Shawn Micallef co-owns Spacing magazine, a publication on urban issues in Toronto. He is also the urban affairs columnist for the Toronto Star. He found out via social media that the William Whitehead House was moved and decided to walk his dog there to witness the event.
“As a non-engineer, I was sort of fascinated by all of it. Just kind of being a sidewalk performance and watching it,” said Micallef.
He knew that other buildings in Toronto had been moved before and appreciated the effort because it showed that the William Whitehead House had value.
But it wasn’t like they just agreed to unplug the utilities, pick it up and plop it somewhere else. Developer Tridel Condominiums originally wanted to demolish the house but faced fierce opposition from the neighbourhood. At the time, it was the only structure standing in the way of an otherwise large, empty lot.
Once the underground carpark was sealed with concrete, workers tied a bulldozer to the steel frame supporting the rowhouse and started towing it back into place. The Burke construction site was only about 70 metres long by 30 metres wide, so moving the rowhouse was a precision exercise. Slowly but surely, it was pulled back into place at two metres an hour.
As the rowhouse neared its final position, workers got busy lining up the two walls to make sure they fit back together. The jagged edges of the walls were supposed to join back up like a jigsaw puzzle, but some of the bricks fell off during the removal process. The workers used cement to fill in the “bad teeth” to fit the Sherbourne Street Row Houses back together with the Anson Jones House.
“That piece sticks out a little bit,” a worker pointed to the jagged edge. “We’ll get it back in place. I can’t guarantee it, but it may or may not be within five mil.”
“Five mil, that’s pretty close!” said Lewis, the heritage architect for the project.
Lewis and his colleague Michael Otchie were trying to find suitable material to restore the brickwork.
When the Henry Joselin House was demolished, the developer preserved the old brick so it can be used as reclaimed material for the restoration of another heritage building. Reclaimed brick of the same type is hard to come by and very expensive. The next best thing to do is to match contemporary brick to the old one. They compared four pallets of new sample brick from England to try and find a match to the old brick for restoration.
Lewis ripped the sample bricks off their cardboard base, labelled the back of each brick with a marker and got Bell to take photos of them next to the existing bricks on the building. Two colours made it to the semifinals – Priority Red and Red Blend. By the end of the exercise, Lewis prioritized Priority Red.
Across the street, the old Gooderham House is now home to a classy restaurant – Maison Selby. An 1892 black and white photograph of C.H. Gooderham and his family hangs in the hallway behind the room where the picture was taken. The fireplace from the background of that image looks as it did in 1892. The city required that all fireplaces and the staircase in that house be preserved.
There’s a case for preserving the history of yesteryear, but there’s also a case for meeting the housing needs of Ontarians today. Whether it’s moving a house, adaptively reusing it, or restoring it, heritage architects choose how to restore a building. But it’s up to the cities and their residents to decide which buildings need to be preserved – and which to let go.
