Tent city site to become mixed-use development instead of waterfront Home Depot

Tent city site to become mixed-use development instead of waterfront Home Depot

(Map: Google)

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]