College Park (Toronto)

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Eaton's College Street Store in ca. 1930

College Park as it looks today

7th Floor Lobby Sketch - 1930 Plan

ca. 1930 Interior of the department store

ca. 1930 Yonge Street Entrance - Sketch

College Park is a shopping mall, residential and office complex located on the southwest corner of Yonge Street and College Street in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. An Art Deco landmark, the building was built between 1928 and 1930 by the Eaton's department store, and was designed by Ross and Macdonald (in association with Henry Sproatt), the Montreal architectural firm that also designed the Royal York Hotel and Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, the Château Laurier Hotel in Ottawa, and the Montreal Eaton's store.

1 Eaton's College Street
2 Life After Eaton's
3 Today
4 External links
5 Recommended Reading

[edit] Eaton's College Street

Eaton's began secretly assembling land at Yonge and College Streets in 1910 for a new store. The First World War put the plans on hold, but Eaton's retained the land. During the 1920s, plans were made to shift all Eaton's operations from their existing location at Yonge Street and Queen Street West to the College Street site. Eaton's even offered to sell part of its landholdings to its main competitor, Simpson's, in an effort to shift the heart of Toronto retailing northward and to preserve the synergy created by having two retail giants next to one another. The effort was unsuccessful, and Simpson's chose instead to expand its Queen Street store.

In 1928, Eaton's announced plans for the largest retail and office complex in the world to be constructed on the site, featuring 5,000,000 square feet (465,000 square metres) of retail space and a 38-storey New York-style skyscraper. Just as the war had intervened a decade earlier, however, the Great Depression curtailed the grandiose plans for the site. The first phase of the project, a department store of 600,000 square feet (56,000 square metres), was the only part of the complex that was ever built. On October 30, 1930, the new store was opened by Lady Flora McCrea Eaton, the matriarch of the Eaton Family, and her son John David Eaton, the future president of the company.

Even though the rest of the complex was never constructed, the new store was nonetheless a true retail palace, the likes of which had never been seen in Toronto, and was a testament to the retail dominance of the Eaton's chain at that time. Tyndall limestone and granite were used for the imposing exterior, and marble was imported from Europe for the interior columns and colonnade. Lady Eaton arranged for two entire rooms to be removed from two manor houses in England and reassembled in the furniture department of the College Street store. The French architect Jacques Carlu (who later designed the Rainbow Room in New York City and the Eaton's Ninth Floor (or the "9ieme") in Montreal), was retained to design the interior of the Eaton's Seventh Floor, including the 1300-seat Eaton Auditorium and the elegant Round Room restaurant. Itself an Art Moderne masterpiece, the Eaton's Seventh Floor was at the heart of Toronto's cultural life for many years. The Auditorium played host to the major performers of its day, including Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra, not to mention the National Ballet of Canada. Canada's own Glenn Gould, fond of the Auditorium's excellent acoustics, used the hall for a number of his recordings.

The focus of Eaton's College Street, as the store was known, was on furnishings and housewares, although the latter was very broadly defined. In fact, Eaton's boasted that the store was "the largest furniture and house furnishings store in the British Empire". The larger Eaton's Main Store, only a few blocks south on Yonge Street, was never closed, as had been originally intended in the 1920s, and Eaton's ran a shuttle bus between the two stores for two decades until the Toronto subway opened in 1954.

[edit] Life After Eaton's

With the opening of the Toronto Eaton Centre in 1977, the Eaton's Main Store and Eaton's College Street were both closed in favour of the new Eaton's flagship store at Yonge Street and Dundas Street. Fortunately, the College Street store was spared the fate of the former Main Store, which was demolished to make way for the second phase of the Eaton Centre construction. Instead, the College Street building was sold to new owners, and was rechristened College Park. The lower floors of the store were converted to a shopping mall of small, high-end boutiques and a subway concourse (with the marble and Art Deco stylings of the Eaton's store carefully preserved), and the upper floors were converted to nondescript office space.

Although the new owners had originally agreed to preserve the Seventh Floor, they eventually determined that its preservation and restoration was not financially feasible, and they applied for a demolition permit to convert the entire floor to office accommodation. After a lengthy court battle with the City of Toronto, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled in 1986 that the 1975 designation of the building under the Ontario Heritage Act protected the Seventh Floor from demolition. (See Re Toronto College Street Centre Ltd. and City of Toronto et al. (1986), 56 O.R. (2d) 522 (Ont. C.A.) Despite several changes in building ownership, and the efforts of local heritage advocates, the Seventh Floor was sealed off for many years and allowed to deteriorate; although it was protected by law, there was no legal obligation to use or restore it.

Over time, College Park was expanded through the addition of a residential apartment building in 1978 and a 30-storey glass and steel office building in 1984 (which housed the offices of the Maclean-Hunter media empire). Although neither addition was architecturally sympathetic to the original building, the heritage and architectural integrity of the former Eaton's store was somehow preserved.

[edit] Today

By the 1990s, it was clear that the boutique-concept shopping mall in College Park was not successful, in part due to the physical design of the ground floor of the building, which was intended for one retailer (Eaton's), not a series of boutiques. The elevator and pedestrian arcade running north-south along the interior east side of the building (along the Yonge Street frontage), while a notable aspect of the original design, prevented smaller retailers from having a significant street-front presence (or, for the most part, having direct access from Yonge Street). In 2001, City Council approved the construction of demising walls throughout the arcade, allowing for the use of the ground floor by 4 or 5 larger retailers, all with direct access onto Yonge Street. The mall now counts Winners, Dominion and DeBoers Furniture as anchor tenants. A provincial court house occupies one of the upper floors.

The heritage character of the building, which was perceived by previous owners as a liability and an obstacle in the late 1970s, was increasingly seen by subsequent owners as an important attribute. In the mid-1990s, the architect Joseph Bogdan was retained to design special lighting to highlight the crown and sides of the building at night, reinforcing its landmark status. More importantly, the Seventh Floor was eventually restored, after years of neglect, and was reopened in 2003 to much acclaim as The Carlu event venue.

To the west of the College Park complex, lands originally assembled by Eaton's along Bay Street are now being redeveloped with residential condominium buildings. Although the various buildings on the former Eaton's lands are now all under separate ownership, the entire city block, including Barbara Ann Scott Park at its centre, is popularly known by many as "College Park".