Toronto Star

The problem isn't that Toronto tears down so many buildings, but that it tears down the wrong buildings. Instead of destroying the good stuff, which is in short supply, we should be ridding ourselves of architectural blight, of which there is plenty. Rather than tearing down landmarks such as the recently disappeared Inn on the Park, the soon-to-be-gone half-round building at Bridgepoint Health (formerly Riverdale Hospital), and the former Bata Shoe Headquarters, not to mention Walnut Hall, the last remaining row of Georgian townhouses in Toronto, which is being demolished by neglect, why not take the wrecking ball to, say, the Holiday Inn on King St. W., the depressing Sheraton Centre across from City Hall, the dreary slabs at Eglinton and Yonge, the three Huang & Danczkay condos on Queens Quay W., Dragon City at Spadina and Dundas, the painfully kitschy New York Towers at Bayview and Highway 401, the bunker-like Metro Convention Centre, even that monument to mediocrity, First Canadian Place?We haven't even mentioned the high-rise residential heaps at the north end of Scarborough, the slick banality of Mississauga, those proudly ordinary commercial and condo towers (and condos) in North York, the mess that is south Etobicoke, or sad, desolate St. James Town.