The Globe and Mail

As every Torontonian knows, the junction of Bloor and Yonge streets is the most prominent orientation point in the city's urban layout. Everything in town is east or west of Yonge. Everything south of Bloor is downtown, while to the north lies little Yorkville and Rosedale, and, beyond them, the forbidding vastness known as suburbia, from which few travellers have ever returned to tell the tale. But despite its historic importance as the focal point on everyone's mental map of Toronto, Bloor and Yonge has gotten precious little architectural respect. The intersection should have been distinguished long ago by some bang-up, exclamation-point skyscrapers punching up through the clouds. Instead, the crossing is little more than a smudgy comma in the street grid, marked by low, mean buildings of no architectural merit, the massive, ugly hulk of Hudson's Bay Co., and a couple of awesomely bad high-rise office towers.