“I have Toronto City Hall tattooed on my arm”: Dave LeBlanc is championing the hidden gems of Toronto architecture

For over 20 years, architecture lover Dave LeBlanc has been highlighting the hidden gems of Toronto’s built environment in his column for the Globe and Mail. A self-described “architourist,” he brings the gawking wonder usually reserved for visitors to Rome or Paris to his own home city, combining a canny knack for detail with the genuine enthusiasm of a true fan. Now, he’s compiled his eagle-eyed insights in a new book, Hidden Toronto, out April 21. It combines LeBlanc’s decades of writing with new research and material to form a bible of often overlooked Toronto artifacts. We caught up with LeBlanc to talk about his love of architecture, the dance between heritage preservation and Toronto’s building spree, and his bold new foray into drag-powered architourism.

When did you first discover your love for architecture? I like to tell people that, when other kids were following the Maple Leafs and trading hockey cards, I was charting the progress of CN Tower construction. I was born in ’68, so I was a seven-year-old kid watching this thing go up, and I was fascinated. I grew up near Coxwell station. Before the top antenna was installed, the builders were letting the public sign their names on it, so my brother took me down to Harbourfront so I could add my name. I drew a picture of my teddy bear too.

Then, at nine years old, I was awestruck by the Mies van der Rohe TD Centre: it was so black and austere. It sent a chill down my spine. I never considered being an architect, though—too many people told me I needed to be good at math. I was content to admire it from afar, until I got a newspaper column.

You’ve developed a near-encyclopedic knowledge of Toronto’s various building styles and architectural quirks. Where did all that trivia come from? I’ll admit that, when I started out, I was no expert. But I think that’s why people responded well to my column: I’m a fan, not an ivory tower academic. But I am the kind of person who looks up past the first level of a building, past the retail part, to the second or third floor, to see if there’s a year carved up there or some cool panelling. I’m curious, and I want to understand my city.

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What’s your favourite architectural quirk you got to dive into for this book? I have a real soft spot for terrazzo, which are marble mosaics that shops used to place on their front stoops spelling out their names. They remain long after the original businesses move on. Any time I see a building with one, I say to the owner, “Do not get rid of this. It will outlast you.” Some of those shops closed in the 1950s, but the aprons are still there. There are also these apartment buildings, built around the same time and all identical, that tried to stand out by adopting names like “The Skyliner” or “King’s Court.” They were these weird little moves places took to stand out from the crowd, and they just give me a charge.

What advice would you give a person looking to understand the city’s architecture? Go for a walk. If you’re in a car whizzing by, you’ll miss the details. My wife and I will just go into neighbourhoods we don’t know well and spend time walking them. That’s how I noticed the little street signs on the second storeys of some houses. As I write in the book, those are up high because the drivers of horse-drawn buggies would have sat at that level, and the font is small because the drivers weren’t moving particularly fast. You can also learn a lot by looking for the year on things, like sidewalks or keystones. Find the oldest sidewalk stamp in your neighbourhood, and that’s a clue to when your house was built. Everything’s there for you.

Anthony Bourdain famously said during his episode of The Layover in Toronto that “it’s not a good-looking town. You’ve got all the worst architectural fads of the 20th century.” What was he missing? First of all, Anthony Bourdain was a grump. People liked him for that. It’s always easier to make fun of something or to write a bad review than to write a good one. I do think that Toronto is not a city where new visitors go, “Oh my god, look at the beauty!” It’s the kind of city you should spend a week in. A lot of our treasures are hidden and far apart from one another. If someone goes to a Blue Jays game, will they also drive to Cabbagetown? It has the largest collection of Victorian architecture in North America, but the tour buses don’t go there. Our good stuff is scattered around, and we don’t broadcast it properly. Our hidden pockets shouldn’t be so hidden.

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In the book, you talk about how having a mix of young and old buildings makes a neighbourhood feel nice and walkable. Toronto does this well, but we’ve also got loads of new buildings going up. How do we keep the mix? Toronto has more development than any other city in North America. That means there’s no model to follow when it comes to preserving heritage: we have to figure it out as we go. Sometimes it’s okay to save just a facade if you’re building a high-rise. Overall, I think the city and the developers have done a damn good job at that. When it comes to multiplexes, you can turn two nice old brick semis into one 10-unit building just by adding a door or two. And we have so much room in the city that there’s no need to put up 10-storey mid-rises on the leafy streets that everybody loves. Nobody has to touch High Park, Cabbagetown or Leslieville, and even in those places there are opportunities for four- or nine-storey buildings. I know a couple of people at city planning. I have faith that they know what they’re doing.

How impressed are you with the latest wave of architecture in the city?
Aqua Luna, that copper-coloured tower by the water, is really beautiful. I think the era of the anonymous glass tower is over. We’re starting to understand that, with our winters, we live in a climate where all-glass facades aren’t the best. We’re more like Sweden or New York, and that begets creativity. Architect Stephen Teeple just did a building at the corner of Coxwell and Eastern Avenue that’s a sprawling white thing with punched windows instead of sheer glass walls. It’s probably 60 per cent opaque. Or there’s King Toronto: that thing is cool. It’s this five-peaked mountain with heritage facades out front. It’s like Habitat 67 for the 21st century. That thing kicks butt.

Is there any Toronto architecture you don’t care for? I really liked the facade at the ROM, designed by Daniel Libeskind, before it got clad over: it was beautiful as an engineered crystalline shape. Then they made it look like a garden shed. And then there are the anonymous condo towers with fake historical details, like stucco or keystones. If you hit them with your bicycle, you can expose the Styrofoam underneath.

Which Toronto neighbourhood is the most packed with architectural gems? I’ve always told visitors to check out Exhibition Place. It has architecture from every era, and the buildings are spaced out so you can really go around and check them out. There’s art nouveau, art deco and modernism. The food building is one of my favourites. It’s such a great ’50s building. The Better Living Centre is a great ’60s one. Dufferin Gate is a mini version of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. The Medieval Times building is beautiful too. There’s architecture from the end of the 19th century all the way to the end of the 20th. Except for the Hotel X, which is terrible.

Do you have a favourite building in the city? That’s not hard at all: Toronto City Hall. I have it tattooed on my arm. When it was first proposed, in the mid-1950s, the design was a huge boring slab. Several classes of U of T architecture students convinced the city to hold a design contest. One of the judges was Eero Saarinen, the famous designer of the womb chair, who arrived a day late. The other judges had already picked their winner, but he asked to see the discards, and in that pile was this spaceship-looking entry from Finnish architect Viljo Revell. Saarinen convinced the judges to put it in the top three—and it became the winner. One would think that this sleepy British colony town would reject such a futuristic design, but we embraced it. Residents said, “This actually does represent what we’re becoming.” It’s hardly changed since then, either. If someone said, “Take me to your leader—of architecture,” that’s where I’d bring them.

What’s next for you? I’m thinking of doing walking tours in drag. This past June, I was at a tiki resort in upstate New York with my wife. We’ve been going for 15 years, and every year the place does a themed room crawl. Ours was Tim Hortons themed, and all the men dressed up as doughnut waitresses. That was the first time I did drag, and I was amazed at how powerful I felt. On the way home, I said to my wife, “I swear I am a heterosexual man. But I want to do drag again, and I want it to be meaningful. What if I combined it with architecture?” So I created Irma Girdle: the sassy drag queen architecture expert who gives tours in four-inch heels, starting this month. My hope is that it will let me reach new people. Architecture is such an exciting and visceral part of the city, and I want everyone to love it as much as I do. I can’t be alone in this.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.