Tent city site to become mixed-use development instead of waterfront Home Depot
After years of being a purposeless weed field, that post-apocalyptic plot of land at Cherry Street and Lake Shore Boulevard has found a raison d’être. The Star is reporting that the property—once slated for the most hated Home Depot never built—has been sold to Castlepoint Realty. The 5.54-hectare site has been in limbo for over a decade, since Home Depot, the former owner, couldn’t manage to do anything with it aside from eradicate the vast shantytown that had sprung up. Among the possible tenants at the new development? A Home Depot.
Now that it’s been purchased by Castlepoint and a consortium of developers (including Cityzen Development Group and New York’s Continental Ventures), the property will most likely be used for a combination of retail, hotels, offices and, of course, condos. Alfredo Romano, one of the new developers, won’t rule out a Home Depot “if it fits the sensibility of the area and works within an urban setting.”
Based on some of the developers’ previous projects, whatever gets built should give revellers something glittery to look at while cabbing from The Sound Academy back to civilization. Castlepoint is the company responsible for some of the more interesting projects in town, including the forthcoming Daniel Libeskind–designed L Tower and the Palace Pier. The developers estimate that it will take up to three years to start building, then 10 years on top of that to finish the project.
To maximize the marketing potential of the new development, might we suggest leaving its name up to the denizens of the Internet? Cityzen has had such great success with that in the past.
• Controversial waterfront site sold to developers [Toronto Star]
Well now thats just great. Just what we need MORE FRIGGIN CONDOS. Come on people cant you come up with something a bit more inventive then CONDOS? they really mess what Toronto is all about. Besides we have enough condo’s we dont need anymore. Put a park and some shops there so people can enjoy it instead of condo’s!!!its ridiculous how all these developers seem to think that condo’s are the only thing you can plop on a 5 acre pc of land. WAKE UP
yo toronto has too many ppl moving in and nowhere to put them, we need more residential areas, and condos are the only way it will work
If we know one thing about ourselves, it is that we are continually reinventing our urban centers. Despite some star successes for the most part urban development is a haphazard disaster of unplanned buildings in various stages of disrepair. Urban architecture on the whole is uninspired, questionably functional and built to standards of the lowest economic denominator with the exception of a few strategic buildings.
It is most exciting to see the new “Grand Visionaries” like “Castlepoint” planning for whole synergistic communities. I love their concept of integration with theater/film sets (Pinewood Studios Project. Yes people do live and work in a city – but it can be planned to be so much more. Recent shopping center development in South Park Royal in West Vancouver has “street scaped” “Home Depot” into building that delightfully compliments a charming village atmosphere!
If you took time to actually look at the plan you would see the site has plans for a new beach, a beautiful promenade built from the distillery into the new community, and dedicated areas for cultural use, not to mention well designed street level retail.