Toronto Star

Love, hate, suspicion. Big-city folks harbour mixed feelings about their soaring office towers, and always have. The early Toronto skyscrapers, declared the early critics, had ugly backsides – "a Queen Anne front and a Mary Anne behind," complained City of Toronto architect J. J. Woolnough in 1925. And almost everyone agreed that tall buildings blocked "light and air." As for new skyscrapers, whether condominiums or offices, well, déjà vu. To old beefs, add vaguer sentiments – that they create traffic congestion (as Chris Hume reports, not everyone agrees) or are simply ugly (doesn't much depend on the site, the architect and the eye of the beholder?). The biggest early skyscraper fans were beholders of their towering economics. "Skyscrapers are not built for the sake of being skyscrapers," architect Eustace Bird told an enquiring Star reporter in the 1920s. "The higher the business buildings are built, so much the greater is the intensity of the central business development, so much the more rapid and easy is the meeting of business men, so much the more is commerce facilitated, and so much the more is our economic life served."