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Forever Yonge

“Between Gould and Gerrard, it’s not the highest level of retail on the east side of [Yonge]” – Linda Grayson, then Ryerson’s VP of Administration and Finance, 2008

I’ve been thinking of that comment over the past couple weeks.

In June 2008, I interviewed Grayson for an Eye Weekly story about the development at the northeast corner of Yonge and Dundas that was then known as Toronto Life Square. (The magazine’s parent company later went to court to get out of the naming deal.) Ryerson had swapped the air rights over its parking garage for the right to use the AMC theatres as classrooms, and I wanted to know how the university felt about having its students use a building whose revenue model was premised on subjecting its visitors to video billboards hung throughout its interior.

But our conversation eventually turned to the Sam the Record Man site and Ryerson’s vision for the Yonge Street Strip. Very little of that made it into the final piece.

I typed up the following notes as Grayson spoke to me on the phone:

– Between Gould and Gerrard, it’s not the highest level of retail on the east side of the street

– you want to kickstart city-building by attracting first-class retail, destination retail – think of some of the wonderful stores in New York

– architecturally they make a statement

– engage their public

– not just a transaction

– have interactive displays

That is all to say that Ryerson had a fairly low opinion of that stretch of Yonge – the way it was and the way it had historically been – and has now spent years taking active steps to gentrify it. That had always been the implicit goal, of course, but I was surprised Grayson would just lay it bare like that.

Ryerson’s attitude toward the Sam the Record Man sign should probably be viewed in this context. It represents the old Yonge for which they don’t much care.

Grayson, who left the school in 2010, also happens to be the person whose signature graces Ryerson’s January 2008 contract with the City concerning the future of the signs.

I can’t definitively state that Ryerson never had any intention of reinstalling them on Yonge, but it seems plainly evident that the new Student Learning Centre was designed without any thought to doing so. (Zeidler Partnership Architects was a once-great Toronto firm whose local landmarks include the Eaton Centre and Ontario Place, but whose most notable building in recent years is infamous for the fact that no one wants to live in it.)

The Student Learning Centre designs were unveiled in April 2011, three months prior to Ryerson’s contractual deadline for figuring out what to do with the Sam’s records. The contract said that Ryerson should incorporate the signs in the new building, but that if they couldn’t find an appropriate way to do so despite their “reasonable best efforts,” they were to turn to plan B: affixing them to the south side of the Ryerson Library immediately east of there.

In the report that went to the Toronto and East York Community Council last week [pdf], City staff recommended that Council release Ryerson from its obligation to re-erect the sign but also that the school should continue to hold on to it “for a period of no less than two years while other preservation opportunities are explored.” It also accepted Zeidler’s opinion that the Ryerson Library, fewer than 10 metres away, “was too remote from the original Sam the Record Man location to have value, and that mounting the signs could damage the building façade.”

But the committee approved a motion from Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam that instead asked staff to work with Ryerson to “secure the restoration and installation of the neon signage in an alternative location satisfactory to the Chief Planner, in consultation with” Wong-Tam herself. The Chief Planner would also have to report back to community council “within one year on Ryerson’s attempts to find a new location for the signage.” (At its October 8-9 meeting, the full City Council will weigh in and – despite Josh Matlow’s best efforts – almost certainly rubberstamp the TEYCC’s recommendations.)

On Metro Morning the next day, Ryerson president Sheldon Levy pretended as though the university had never rejected the secondary (library) option. He went back and forth between insisting Ryerson would honour the agreement by putting up the sign at that site and saying they wanted to explore further alternative locations.

This could very well represent yet another attempt by Ryerson to evade their responsibilities. Or it could be that Levy has finally realized that the university doesn’t have the right to unilaterally redefine its surroundings and scrub Toronto of its history.

UPDATE (September 18, 5 pm): See what you’ve done, Sheldon? Now you have to deal with Mayor Ford.

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