The new owner of Jilly’s wants to turn the building into a hotel and restaurant

Good news for anyone who guessed that the buyer of the building at Queen and Broadview that used to house Jilly’s strip club would try to renovate it into a Drake-style hotel and restaurant: you nailed it. A site-plan application filed with the city by the 123-year-old building’s new owner, Streetcar Developments, proposes gutting the interior and putting in a four-storey rear addition. The result would be a completely revitalized building with six interior floors, instead of the four it currently has. It would have a ground-floor restaurant and café, five storeys of hotel suites (including an “executive suite” in the structure’s turret) and a rooftop terrace.
Most of the existing exterior would be preserved. Some of the rear addition would be visible from the street, though it’s not clear from existing drawings exactly what the new facade would look like. The design, by ERA Architects, also calls for a lot of badly needed exterior renovations, including the installation of new windows and the restoration of the historic building’s cornices and parapets. There would be a total of 57 hotel rooms inside. The restaurant and hotel entrances would face Broadview.
An architect’s drawing of the way the renovated building would look to someone standing on Broadview is above, and the entire site-plan application is available on the city’s website. The design is only a proposal, and it would need city approval and a lot more fleshing out before Streetcar Developments could start building.
Nice, this is pretty much what I had hoped for. Preserve it, improve it, create an anchor for the neighbourhood.
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It’s an horrendously ugly building in a rather ugly location, surrounded for the most part by other ugly buildings and the tangle of streetcar and other ugly utility wires. Nothing about it merits preserving.
By that definition most of Toronto needs tearing down.
Correct. We are drowning in a sea of risibly bad Victorian brick “architecture”, most of it derivative, much of it cheaply built, almost all of it poorly maintained. It fairly boggles the mind that anyone would want to “preserve” such thrown-up junk. And we are shackled and dragged to the bottom of this abyss by a snaggled blanket of utility wiring of all sorts that should have been buried as far back as the mid 70s, at the latest. And don’t even get me started about our abhorrent signage and billboard issues…
It must be dark that far up inside yourself.
It must be darker still for you, stranded as you appear to be inside the CNIB headquarters. Does living in Toronto oblige everyone to unquestioningly and permanently love every zoning and architectural faux pas that has ever been committed within its borders?
ooh burn.
Redundant. You have already made an ash of yourself.
You’re clearly a last word kind of guy. All the best…
It’s a beautiful building, don’t degrade it by adding more floors. Fix it up without the additions. It can be done. As for turning it into another Drake/Gladstone, well most of the neighbour knew this was going to happen eventually.
Now if only Streetcar development would build affordable low rise apartments along Eastern Ave and stop building condos that no one can afford.
This is not a ugly building and was not thrown up junk like many of the buildings we see today on our streets. How original is a glass tower condo or office tower?
The owners refused to do any maintance on the building which isn’t unusual. Just look around you will see a lot of newer buildings and homes that need repair but their owners are too cheap to do anything. I wouldn’t be surprised if you are one of them.
Ugly is very much a matter of opinion. Personally I find it a revolting design and hate the exterior finish but then that is because I find little charm in Victorian architecture and even less in most brick, regardless of condition. However I am in ***complete*** agreement with the second sentence of your second paragraph. Your final sentence of that paragraph is rather accusatory however – and without cause.
Yay. Hooray. hooray. As long as the building is saved.