Toronto Street before the blight of Urban Renewal wrecked it.

As fantastic as our annual Doors Open weekend (May 26, 27) has been in giving us a chance to tour a vast number of wonderful buildings, it’s also a reminder of the vast number of wonderful buildings we won’t get to see.

Of the more than 20,000 structures that were demolished during the “urban renewal” of the 1950s and ‘60s, arguably the grandest was Toronto’s General Post Office that at one time stood on Adelaide at the head of Toronto Street.

Built to resemble a smaller version of the 19th-century Paris Opera House, the only remnants to General Post Office existence today are Toronto Street’s unusually wide sidewalks, originally laid out to give the landmark post office a grand vista.

Its destruction in 1958 marked the beginning of the brutish International Style of glass-and-steel highrise construction in Toronto and put to rest the romantic Second Empire period of architecture in our city. Built by architect Henry Langley after an inspiring visit to Paris between 1870 and 1873, the new federal government of the day commissioned the General Post Office as its first public building to be erected after the 1867 Confederation and that fact alone should have saved it from extinction. The 3-story front elevation with paired columns, a crowning pediment and clock were inspired by the east facade of the Louvre in Paris and just like other Victorian public buildings at that time in Toronto there was a ladies entrance to the left of the main door, done so to “preserve a woman’s modesty in the chaos of commerce.”

As stunning as the new Post Office was on the exterior its interior was just as luxuriant with panels of mahogany and walnut, gold gilt columns, marble fireplaces, oak staircases and richly appointed furniture filling every room. When the General Post Office opened it was the principal Federal Office Building in the city until the still standing Dominion Building on Front just west of Yonge Street opened in 1935. In the 1950s when Toronto began to reorganize its postal system the grand General Post Office was re-named “Postal Station Number 1” and in 1958 it was destroyed with little or no protest.

Henry Langley’s dream of a little bit of Paris in Downtown Toronto was gone. Ironically some architects of the 1960s were very much influenced by the Swiss-born French architect named Le Corbusier who once said, “A house is a machine for living in.” In the 1920s he had a vision that everything old be destroyed and that all new structures should be of clean lines, have no exterior garnish and the buildings should float upon pillars of cement and steel.

He once suggested that the middle of Paris should be bulldozed into the ground and replaced with a series of highrise towers surrounded by acres of sterile concrete. Sometimes the stark modernity of this new International Style works brilliantly, as with Mies Van der Rohr’s local masterpiece the Toronto Dominion Centre (1966) because the vast area beneath those great black towers comes together mixing green spaces, trees, public art and a concrete plaza to create a spectacular inner city landscape.

Not the case with the building of the new Post Office that replaced Langley’s magnum opus, to be named the William Lyon Mackenzie Federal Building after our first mayor. By not using the site at the head of Toronto Street to its fullest and creating a breathtaking panorama as Langley did, it’s as if the architects hired by the local Department of Public Works back in the ‘60s were devoid of any human emotion or personal drama.

A few years back the W.L. Mackenzie Federal Building under went a major face-lift and changed its name to just plain 30 Adelaide East then to State Street after the Boston based insurance giant that now owns it. (Could you imagine a group of Canadian investors buying the Ronald Regan Federal Building in Washington and changing its name?)

Ironically the Government Taxation office who were once the W.L. Mackenzie Federal Building main tenants moved into the Dominion Building on Front Street, a gallant Beaux Arts structure completed in 1935 and with its sweeping façade of gigantic columns and heaps of exterior adornments its the antithesis of the International Style. Le Corbusier must be rolling in his grave.

As part of Toronto’s annual “Jane’s Walk’ honouring author and urban activist Jane Jacobs, who died a year ago, I will lead a one hour walking tour of the Esplanade. Meet me Saturday May 5 at 9:45am in the ‘Kitchen Theatre’ on the mezzanine level of St Lawrence Market where after a short slide show depicting the history of The Esplanade and St. Lawrence Market we will embark on the tour. Admission is free. For more info on this and all my tours checkout www.brucebelltours.com