Abstract
The Shell Oil/Bulova Tower in Toronto was built as an “elaborate billboard” but became a real public space because of its vital role in the Canadian National Exhibition. As a place marker in the literal and perceived landscapes of its site, it overcame its corporate origins to serve important social and cultural needs. It was demolished for many reasons: the lack of heritage awareness in Toronto, the unsympathetic nature of neoliberal planning initiatives, and the liminal nature of the park it occupied. This demolition both further impoverished the city’s historical landscape and impelled its preservationist community to act; though no longer a physical landmark, it remains a dialectical one.
Introduction: In Medias Res
Toronto, like the Senate of Canada, seems ever fated to be the place for sober second thought. Blessed with undeniable urban vitality, it is yet weighed down by a serious case of the “what-ifs,” by the burden of histories it doesn’t have. Some of these histories never existed; some have been demolished.
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Does anyone in Toronto have a sense of history? Are we that apathetic? Is our self-esteem as a people and culture that low? Can we not integrate old and new architecture and preserve more of our past?
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The nine-story climb must have been unpleasant for Hiram McCallum. The Assistant General Manager of the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) was a businessman, and he was a politician, but at fifty-five he was no longer spry and slender by any stretch of the imagination. Laboring beside him was William Harris, the CNE’s President, himself no spring chicken. Both men braved considerable heat as they mounted the 144 steps between the ground and their destination, the top of the structure whose glass walls surrounded them. Though undoubtedly miserable, the climb was unavoidable due to the nature of the landmark whose final weld they were about to make: it was an observation tower in the center of Toronto’s Exhibition Park (today called Exhibition Place), the CNE’s historic staging grounds, and if everything went according to plan, over a million fairgoers would follow in their footsteps every year. They would climb the same stairs (or take the elevator, not yet functional) to look out over the historic fairground and enjoy the simple pleasure of watching their fellow human beings from ninety feet above the steaming tarmac. What McCallum and Harris couldn’t know was that the presence and patronage of these fairgoers would transform the Shell Oil Tower (later known as the Bulova Tower) into something much more than a corporate icon. 3
The Tower was a bold modern structure with many potential interpretations (Figure 1). Though it was one of the largest permanent advertising attractions in the world, a billboard for the Shell Oil Company who had sponsored and paid for it, when it opened for its first CNE in 1955 it became a piece of dialectically (if not legally) public property. The tension between these two owners, one literal and one figurative, would dominate the discourse surrounding the Tower for the next thirty years; at the same time it would serve as a metric of space, temperature, and time for Torontonians and visitors to “the Ex,” telling them where they were and if they were hot or cold, early or late. Gone now for a quarter century it tells us much more, revealing how an essentially consumerist site can be transformed into an essentially civic one and how advertising, architecture, modernity, and memory might affect the nature of public space. The Tower should have been preserved, both as an exemplar of its architectural style and as a valuable public landmark. Because it was not, however, it became an excellent didactic tool. The Tower’s narrative reveals not only the potency but also the fragility of Toronto’s physical heritage and the vital role played by the built environment in cohering and preserving metropolitan consciousness and identity. To the extent that these lessons have been learned, they have served as sobering counterpoints to the assumptions underlying current neoliberal planning trends. 4
Shell Oil Tower (first configuration), c. 1955.
Preface: The Urban Interplay of Landmark Spaces and Advertising Architecture
The Canadian National Exhibition began as an outgrowth of a peripatetic agricultural fair that cycled annually through the major population centers of Ontario. In 1878 Toronto built an impressive waterfront fairground as part of a gambit to keep the fair in their city on a permanent basis; when this bid failed they decided to host their own instead. The Toronto Industrial Exhibition, which became the CNE in the early 1900s, was promoted as the “show-window of the nation” and offered world-class entertainments, expansive consumer displays, and early glimpses at the latest technological innovations. As decades passed and the CNE outgrew its initial facilities, its organizers built increasingly larger and more impressive exhibit halls across the breadth of Exhibition Park. This resulted in what might be called the densest concentration of mixed architectural styles in the city. The western block contains the oldest structures, reminiscent of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago; the eastern entrance features monumental stone and concrete edifices in the expressive Art Deco and Beaux Arts styles; the central block is dominated by gleaming Modernist pavilions. In recent years these historic structures have been overshadowed by impressively scaled postmodern convention centers. The eclectic site and the events it hosts entertain millions of visitors every year. 5
Recent scholarship has revealed the role played by public spaces like Exhibition Park in the formation and interpretation of civic identity: they serve as central anchors around which neighborhoods and districts revolve like satellites. Properly located and maintained, they can acquire a subtle gravity that shapes the city around them; this phenomenon enables a process known as “place memory,” where the experience of persistent streets and structures helps citizens to develop mental metropolitan maps. As these maps become more sophisticated, the mapmakers can move with increasing confidence through urban space and connect themselves more deeply to the built environment; in other words, they grow more comfortable in their interactions with the city as they acclimate themselves to its elements. Once citizens develop a coherent experiential iteration of their city, once they can view a mental map of its physical form in its imagined totality, they can conceive of it in concrete terms and begin the process of identifying themselves with that conception. The development of “Toronto” in psycho-spatial imagery allows for the development of “Torontonians”; without such imagery, the civic connection between city and citizenry is only shallow at best. 6
This civic connection is especially important in the post-memorial paradigm described by Pierre Nora that we now inhabit. Having become self-consciously “historical” in our discursive relationship with the past, we have lost a more primal connection to it. Events and traditions that would once have been links between ourselves and our surroundings have disappeared into the inaccessible realm of “history,” and we feel that nothing is current or permanent. This enhances our interest in sites where the old ways of remembrance persist (places that have not lost their “sense of historical continuity”), les lieux de mémoire. In those sites of memory our recollections and their physical triggers support each other: memories, normally fleeting by nature, are made stable and retrievable by their associations with the places in which they are created, and those places are in turn interpreted and made meaningful by their filtration through memory. The persistence of civic artifice is therefore a central element in the persistence of accessible, meaningful history. Unfortunately, our disconnection from les milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory, has contributed to the feeling that so much of our past has slipped away into an unrecoverable void that there is little point in saving what remains. 7
Buildings that once physically documented the characters of their builders and owners, that acted as historical shorthand for their eras, are now demolished because their function as punctuation in the city’s narrative has become invisible as that narrative tears and frays. When a thread is removed (a structure is destroyed or altered), the memorial fabric is torn and the identities dependent upon it become torn as well. As each thread is pulled loose, the deterioration of the city’s narrative accelerates, perpetuating a vicious cycle where we perceive our continuity to the past less, consider it even more expendable, and demolish it further. In this way, Torontonians have become accustomed to bulldozing the architectural legacy that could provide them with a solid connection to their heritage and help them to better understand themselves, resulting in a city famously stricken with a sustained identity crisis. Worse, most citizens have become ignorant of the process that renovates and restructures their experienced landscapes; buildings seem to disappear without warning, taking with them the memories their presence once triggered and kept fresh. When this is combined with the widespread apathy (or even antipathy) toward architectural heritage endemic to modern Canadian cities, what results is an environment of polite disinterest in the fate of each successive metropolitan iteration. 8
This passively iconoclastic atmosphere is the primary obstacle faced by historical preservationists, who value the built environment for its intrinsic virtues. From a preservationist standpoint, historic structures belong to the citizens of every era, both as testament to the worlds left behind by the flow of time and as instructional devices for the world of today. For at least five decades Toronto has harbored a passive current of preservationist sentiment, running almost invisibly below the surface of public discourse. This sentiment only rarely solidifies into collective action; development schemes that prove unsympathetic to well-loved bellwether spaces, such as Old City Hall in the 1960s and Union Station in the 1970s, are the only harbingers of demolition to have proven sufficiently odious to inspire active resistance. In both cases, a collective identity formed around structures that loomed as dialectical landmarks over the mental and social maps Torontonians used to navigate their city; in both cases the expansive commercial projects that had jeopardized them were halted by the timely awakening of an otherwise inarticulate heritage mentality, which immediately returned to its slumber once the visible danger had passed. 9
A landmark site can survive even the most dramatic of paradigm shifts if it can inspire collective action, but the capacity for inspiring such action is by no means assured. It is heavily contingent upon spatial, demographic, chronological, and linguistic elements that are easily knocked out of sync. All of these elements can be addressed together under the blanket term of community, a group of individuals sharing some combination of a location, a time, a sense of belonging, and an open discourse who can muster their collective identity to assert their commonly held values. In modernity, due to the issues already described, such communities have become more nebulous and less solid; they may form around residential neighborhoods, but they are less likely to form around nonresidential public spaces. Citizens whose homes surround a park may work in concert with their neighbors to protect it, but they may not organize to save an equally dear park that exists beyond the range of their daily perception, particularly if they only interact with each other there for short periods of time. Key to creating an active community in such locations is the presence of multiple legitimate uses. 10
The more reasons there are for people of different races, creeds, and economic situations to occupy a space, the more capable its community will be at responding to threats. If it is infrequently patronized and purely ornamental, and if its location is too liminal, it is hardly a public space at all and it may disappear without fanfare. The situation worsens if the space was created for commercial purposes. A community making an argument for the preservation of such a space typically must demonstrate its value as historically unique, exceptionally representative, or incomparably iconic; unfortunately, advertising architecture never occupies an ideologically empty container to be filled with such identities but instead comes complete with a practical commercial message. It cannot be easily extricated from the marketplace to which it is conceptually bound and automatically represents corporate and financial interests rather than local or national ones. This leaves little room for making claims of social legitimacy on its behalf, and even if they are made they may not be able to overturn the perception that the property is still primarily a commercial one. In these cases it is necessary to attempt an objective assessment of the structure in question and identify which characteristics it might possess that could identify it as a legitimate public space outside of any commercial concerns. 11
The factors that create a legitimate public space are the same factors required to create a legitimate community. We are speaking here not of locations that are only nominally public, the greenbelts and plazas and congregational centers erected to uplift the theoretically benighted denizens of a city; they are not public spaces unless the public chooses to make use of them. We are speaking about locations that a city’s population claims as their own, with or without prompting. The old view, which led to many dispirited social vacuums masquerading as parks, was that open spaces were intrinsically positive developmental devices bestowed on city neighborhoods for their improvement. It is now more common, thanks to Jane Jacobs, to reverse this assumption and see those open spaces as requiring the validation of their users. Only the public, therefore, can create a true public space. They must choose to occupy it, they must develop a linguistic and memorial relationship with it, and it must become part of their perceived civic landscape. The absence of one or more of these characteristics reduces the civic utility of any space, no matter the intentions of its creators; conversely, their presence can create a public space out of the unlikeliest of materials. 12
This is the story of how an “elaborate billboard” acquired such characteristics and kept both its site and its city conceptually intact. Little has been written on the ways in which consumerist architecture can develop genuine civic qualities, or how developing them might change its nature; in the absence of a detailed case study, the assertion that these transformations are unlikely to occur has had to suffice. 13 The Tower’s narrative will hopefully open the topic for further study and allow us to correct this heretofore necessary oversight. When it aged beyond its intended use and was threatened with demolition, interpretations casting it as either a corporate construct or a vital societal tool created a thematically rich collection of sources about the tensions between culture and commerce, progress and heritage, urban consciousness and modern planning. Like Old City Hall or Union Station, the Tower inspired collective action, but of a strange new kind: the dialogue between its supporters and the rest of Toronto shifted the paradigm of preservationist thought, revealing the once-invisible processes of urban renewal. As a chronicle of its physical and metaphorical importance, the four remaining sections of this article will (1) briefly tell the Tower’s story, (2) describe how its corporate origins were overcome by its development of civic qualities, (3) explain why it was demolished despite those civic qualities, and finally (4) reveal how that demolition transformed it into a dramatic ideological symbol. As this article is obviously not a definitive treatment of the complex interplay between public and private spatial ownership, it is my hope that it will provide an impetus for further case studies and discussion; the themes it will address should resonate well beyond the borders of Toronto.
Gasoline and Watches: The Life Span of a Corporate-Sponsored Monument
The continued relevancy of the CNE depended in part on its sensitivity to national trends. In the late 1940s the Canadian oil industry expanded to unheard-of dimensions, making petroleum one of the country’s most valuable natural resources. Canadians began a love affair with their automobiles and became the third-largest consumers of oil in the world. 14 In this light it is unsurprising that the CNE would seek a relationship with the Shell Oil Company, one of the largest and best-known actors of the gasoline era. 1955 was already shaping up to be a banner year for the fair with world-class acts and advertisers like Ed Sullivan, Marilyn Bell, Lassie, and the Ford Motor Company, but CNE President Robert Saunders was infected with the germ of an idea. While visiting the Hanover Fair in Germany he had seen an impressive observation tower that was a constant hub of activity; he started negotiations with W. M. V. Ash, the president of Shell, to construct something similar at Exhibition Park. After holding a limited, invitation-only design competition, Shell chose an ambitious design by nineteen-year-old Toronto architect George Robb. They signed a contract with the CNE to erect and operate it free of charge and also agreed to pay the fair $10,000 annually in rental fees for the proposed site. After a whirlwind three months of construction, the Shell Oil Tower was ready for the 1955 CNE. 15
The Tower was built in roughly the center of the Park on a hundred-foot paved elliptical plaza ringed with flagpoles. Its name was emblazoned on a freestanding awning in front of the ground level entrance. The structure’s frame, primarily supported by eight exposed vertical struts, was built with welded steel. It had ten rectangular floors, which were each ten feet tall, ten feet wide (facing north/south), and forty feet long (facing east/west). The shorter walls were fitted with standard glass, and rippled glass was installed in the longer ones. A ten-by-twelve-foot elevator shaft ran from the ground level to the tenth floor, flanked symmetrically by staggered staircases that provided access to each level. The tenth floor opened to an outdoor observation platform jutting ten feet in every direction, surrounded by a ten-foot enclosure of wire mesh. The Tower continued for a further nineteen feet above the tenth floor, paneled with cream-colored siding. The long upper walls each framed a sixteen-foot mechanical clock with three-foot numerals. The exterior was illuminated by fluorescent lights, the interior was fitted with incandescent fixtures, and the clocks were both lit in neon. In all the enormous structure required over one hundred tons of steel and nine thousand square feet of glass, standing fifty feet taller than any other building on the grounds. 16 The Tower’s most objective, physical claim to historical significance is the fact that it was the first structure built using welded steel in Canada, pioneering a technique that is more strongly associated with Modern architecture than any other characteristic. With its clean, elegant lines and thin “curtain of light” walls, it was one of the best exemplars of its era in Toronto.
The Tower was an immediate hit, credited with attracting 11 percent of 1955’s record attendance figures. 17 This is particularly impressive when one considers that it had to compete with well over thirty other structures, plus countless exhibits and features. Security guards from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency were hired to keep traffic flowing both through and around the Tower, and Shell employed uniformed girls to pass out informational brochures and postcards. The Tower became the de facto meeting place for separated children and parents. By all accounts, the oil giant’s money had been well spent; as an oasis of calm in the raucous, macaronic cacophony of the midway, their physical icon fit seamlessly into several niches in the CNE’s milieu. 18 Shell renewed their contract in 1959, and again in 1964 with a few changes: in the more advertising-friendly atmosphere of the 1960s, the Tower’s conservative branding seemed outdated, and Shell wanted to put up ten-foot illuminated crests on the shorter walls flanking the clocks. They also wanted to replace those clocks with digital displays that could provide temperature readings. All four walls above the observation platform would be repainted in Shell’s trademark red to match these new components. Despite one CNE director’s opposition to the escalation of advertising on the Tower, these conditions were met (Figure 2), and Shell continued to operate the Tower until 1973 when the Bulova Watch Company took over their contract. 19
Shell Tower (second configuration), c. 1965.
The transition to Bulova was physical as well as contractual. The oil company’s signage was removed, as were its digital clocks; unsurprisingly, Bulova wanted to install their own. 20 The top of the Tower was repainted blue, and the large illuminated Shell icons were replaced with Bulova’s stylized tuning fork heraldry. At roughly the same time, Exhibition Park was rebranded as Exhibition Place; the new name carried sinister undertones of commercial redevelopment that were to prove prophetic. The Tower became Bulova’s with little in the way of fanfare and few indications that anything meaningful had occurred, but a slow process of deterioration began almost immediately. The plaza and surrounding lawns were maintained less frequently, the elevator began stalling like clockwork, and the seemingly invincible steel frame developed signs of decay. In 1985 Molson Breweries expressed interest in holding an Indy-style car race at the Park and indicated that the Tower’s site would be required for the pit area. With concerns already mounting over its safety, the Board of Governors of Exhibition Place signed a contract with Molson, closed the Tower to the public, and applied to the City of Toronto for a demolition permit. Alderman Joe Pantalone immediately raised his voice in opposition, demanding time to fundraise for repairs, and local history buff and documentarian John Martins-Manteiga provided him with the solution: ask the Toronto Historical Board (THB) to consider designating the Tower historically and architecturally significant. 21
As part of preparing their recommendation, the THB reviewed reports from the CNE about the potential costs of repairing the structure. The fair’s experts estimated that between $250,000 and $500,000 would be required to restore its physical integrity, without taking into account the elevator, which had been broken since the early 1980s. In contrast it would cost only $150,000 to demolish, and Molson had already agreed to foot the bill. The THB reached an obvious conclusion: the CNE no longer wished to pour money into repairing a permanent fixture that conflicted with alternative revenue streams. (In all fairness, they did not consider that the fair’s operators might have thought the proposed race more socially valuable than what was, perhaps, nothing more than a large metal trademark.) The THB soon found themselves fielding calls from “interested citizens” asking them to pursue any possible opportunities for preventing the demolition, and a group calling themselves the “Save the Tower Action Committee” began actively campaigning to stop the wrecking ball from landing. Ultimately, THB Managing Director R. Scott James recommended that the Tower be given the requested designations. However, when the CNE claimed they had a legal obligation to attempt the Tower’s removal because of their contract with Molson, and when it became apparent that neither the fair nor the brewery were willing to compromise on their agreement, this decision was qualified. The THB designated the Tower as significant “for record purposes only,” meaning that they backed its preservation ideologically but would offer no material resistance to its destruction. On October 24, 1985, Toronto City Council issued the demolition permit; tenders for the Tower’s removal were sent out soon after, and it was gone without a trace before the 1986 CNE. 22
“Elaborate Billboard” or “Foregathering Place”? The Evolution of a Civic Landmark
In November of 1985, Toronto Star columnist Joey Slinger penned a curious opinion piece titled “Bulova Tower’s Fate Ranks Low on This Scale of Grief.” He claimed its destruction was not only less troubling to him than the loss of a family member or pet, but that he would more dearly miss a single cufflink or the top of his toothpaste tube. He found the Tower’s sentimental equal in “the plastic thing at the end of my shoelace, the thing that prevents the end of the lace from fraying and becoming unsightly.” The word he was looking for was aglet. To Slinger, the Tower was only an “advertising gimmick” or an “elaborate billboard,” something for which he was not prepared to grieve. Was its commercial nature the reason it fell? Was it because, as Slinger contended, “advertising isn’t real” and advertising architecture had no claim on the public’s affections? 23 This argument is not a new one; the existing literature on consumerist structures suggests that the manipulative nature of advertising and the exploitative relationship it has with the public undermines their social value. 24 However, Slinger was the only financially disinterested party in 1985 to damn the Tower for its commercial stripes; examining the interplay between the structure, its site, and its visitors will instead reveal how its consumerist origins were gradually obscured by the development of real civic qualities.
For over forty years the CNE’s central locus was the Gooderham Fountain, described as “the most famous foregathering place on the continent” during the fair’s annual run. 25 Beyond the obvious hyperbole, there was a note of truth to this. Located near the middle of the western block, once the heart of the CNE, it was both a natural spot for the weary and lost to congregate and an excellent landmark for reunions. For years, visitors to the Ex had been saying “Meet me at the Fountain” to each other, creating a spoken link between the site and themselves that would have been difficult (if not impossible) to break. To their credit, Shell didn’t try to break it; they tried to reassign it to their Tower. The oil giant took out half-page advertisements in all three major Toronto newspapers (the Star, the Globe and Mail, and the Telegram), as well as full-color spreads in the CNE’s souvenir programs, featuring an artist’s rendering of the Tower’s profile overlaid with seven words in bold copperplate lettering: “MEET ME AT THE SHELL OIL TOWER.” These ads were run annually for six years, with minor variations in copy to sustain the company’s dialogue with its clientele. 26
Shell strengthened their case for the Tower’s congregational prominence with each successive ad. They lauded its unrivaled view of the city and the Park, its free admission, and its unmistakable outline, which was visible for miles. It was an excellent vantage point from which to plan one’s day at the fair, or a treat to savor like a fine wine when the midway lights came on at night. 27 Shell’s promotional agents were masters of both the soft and hard sell, and with the full weight of advertising’s golden age behind the campaign, its success was a foregone conclusion. The phrase spread like memetic wildfire, entering the locational lexicon of the CNE’s patrons; some combination of its linguistic simplicity, its practical utility, and its connection to the existing framework built around the Fountain made it the perfect storm of marketing and social interaction. This fait accompli was passed on to Bulova in 1973, and fairgoers like Nick Solty started saying “Meet me at the Bulova Tower” to their friends. 28 The advertisements accelerated a process of landmark identification already native to complex physical environments like Exhibition Park; they made the Tower more real by keeping it constantly on its visitors’ tongues. Successfully insinuated into the Park’s physical and dialectical context, it came to serve a primal social purpose.
Beyond its use as a meeting place, it loomed large in visual utility. Anyone on Toronto’s waterfront could look up, see the Tower, and know exactly where they were. It also offered free and immediate access to the time of day and to the current temperature after digital displays were added in 1964; during the brief period between Bulova’s removal of the original digital clocks and the installation of their new ones, a man checking his own watch on the grounds was an event worthy of minor news coverage. 29 The Tower was a measuring stick with multiple scales. By accessing the metric interactions it offered, its observers incorporated it into their personal and public narratives as well as their mental maps of Toronto. 30 It assumed such a place of prominence that it could sever both new and existing connections to nearby landmarks and take their roles for itself; for example, it became common to refer to the 1840 Stanley Barracks as “near the Tower” and the Alpine Way Skyride as “stretching from the Pure Food Building to the Shell Oil Tower.” 31 These imprecise statements sacrificed exactitude for familiarity. The Tower served as the gateway for the “World of the Child Midway” in 1979 and was the site of the Toronto Star’s booth in 1980; it was the perfect orienteering aid, never out of sight and therefore never out of mind. 32
Those who interacted with it were equally visible. One of the best-known observational constructs in human history is Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a prison concept facilitating anonymous central observation. 33 The Tower facilitated a different but related social interaction of a more honest and open nature, one much better suited to the CNE’s festive theme: it was an omniopticon, a site demanding mutual observation. Standing on the viewing platform, visitors observed not only the vista of Toronto spread out before them but the crowds gathered below as well. They were themselves part of a human display for those crowds, and the endless images of people waving from the gallery testify to the fact that many were aware of this visibility and were sanguine about it. With its dramatic profile the Tower engaged the attention of pedestrians, pulling their gazes skyward to meet distant eyes arrayed along the wire mesh, just as the sensation of extreme height encouraged those distant eyes to drift downward at the pavement. Benches encircling the plaza were filled day and night with recumbent fairgoers watching the steady stream of feet from the gates at Strachan Avenue to parts unknown; picnickers lay on the surrounding lawns, looking up at the Tower, watching the clouds reflected in its windows or the distorted images of stair-climbing visitors. Everything was public, nothing was hidden. 34
Some things were obscured, but this was part of George Robb’s ingenious design. Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier (with whom Robb would have been intimately familiar) frequently conceived of structures and their contents as machines: a house was a machine for living in, a chair was a machine for sitting in, and so on. 35 This was a foundational concept of Modern architecture. In the same idiom, an observation tower would be a machine for moving people to a great height, providing them with a temporary space there, and returning them to the ground. An efficient machine achieves harmony between its moving parts, and the moving parts of an observation tower are naturally the visitors mounting, occupying, and dismounting it. Imposing harmony on fairgoers was a Herculean task, but the rippled glass achieved part of this difficult goal: unable to see outside clearly, the aforementioned stair climbers were unlikely to stop before they reached the viewing gallery. The twin staircases and elevator, with their separate entrances and exits that competed but did not conflict, and the wraparound observation platform, which kept jostling for space to a minimum, achieved the rest. 36 The Tower made functional efficiency with human elements seem effortless, but it did not sacrifice beauty to achieve this.
It couldn’t, since it needed visual appeal to entice its observers to use it. Besides its striking angular design, Robb endowed it with several pleasing visual elements. Its staircases were painted in bright reds and yellows, which both evoked the Shell Oil Company’s logo and made it more attractive to photographers. 37 The rippled glass made ascending visitors look like they were swimming upward through an aquarium filled with clear liquid, not unlike the effect of an antique glass gasoline pump; they thereby became part of the structure’s ornamentation. By employing innovative welded steel construction methods, Robb was able to liberate his walls from the need to provide structural support; with columns and struts now bearing most of the Tower’s weight, those walls became thin glass curtains that shimmered in the sunlight and glowed with color and vitality at night. 38 The Princes’ Boulevard was lined with lamps and crisscrossed with strings of smaller lights, a corridor of illumination to a column of neon that stretched to the heavens. The CNE advertised this “Arcade of Light” as the brightest spot on earth; though again indulging in hyperbole, they were again not far off the mark. 39
According to the architectural firm George Robb founded, these visual elements were not only crafted to help fairgoers understand the Tower’s purpose but also to help define the relationship between the CNE and Toronto. Glowing like a brazier in the night, emphasizing “openness, freedom of movement, and purpose,” the arrogant lighting was meant to make a statement of preeminence in the city’s skyline on Exhibition Park’s behalf. 40 The mammoth clocks were kept lit year-round, despite the fact that the CNE was only open two weeks annually; early reports weakly suggested that this was to help improve navigation on Lake Ontario, but the real reason is obvious. 41 By securing a bright place in the darkness for the fairground’s tallest structure, its owners and operators were ensuring that the Park would remain part of Toronto’s consciousness even when not in use. In a stroke of appropriately modern thinking, it was insinuated into the municipal landscape through illumination. The loss of this electric reminder impoverished the visual accessibility of a site that was already by its nature quite liminal.
The summer light display had a festive hibernal counterpart in December, which further strengthened the connections between the Tower, the Park, and the city: an elaborate holiday event featuring carolers, a nativity scene, and the Tower itself wrapped in a gargantuan bow with a banner bearing seasonal greetings. What was once again a contender for being the “brightest spot on earth” now also boasted “the biggest Christmas tree in Canada,” and for a change this may have been no exaggeration; the 1960 specimen was taller than its rivals in both Washington, D.C., and New York City. The entire affair was promoted with a print campaign in the same vein as the “MEET ME AT THE SHELL OIL TOWER” ads; the first of these made the somewhat unsettling assertion that Santa Claus would be “looking for your children.” (It probably read differently in 1956.) 42 Shell also hosted a toy drive on the plaza to brighten Christmas for some of the city’s “less fortunate” youngsters, and provided gifts to seniors visiting from the Hilltop Acres Home for the Aged. 43 These Christmas events weren’t just a triumph of public relations for the oil company, they were a terrific way to develop a relationship with the children who would one day be the Tower’s primary patrons (and the families that would raise them). These off-season gatherings both enhanced the Tower’s civic utility (by giving it multiple uses) and kept the Park relevant during the cold winter months.
Each of these functions deepened the Tower’s social dimensionality, and the more practical uses it had the better it served as a realization of Modernist architecture’s primary goal: functional design. However, it was also built to help cohere Exhibition Place’s perceived environment in collusion with the comparatively ancient and stylistically eclectic structures that surrounded it; its site had been anticipated for landmark architecture since the 1920s, when architect Alfred Chapman had drafted a site plan for the fair’s eastern entrance. Chapman conceived of a boulevard stretching from a monumental set of gates, past two immense exhibition halls, to a rotunda of smaller structures in the center of the Park. The largest of these was slated for the Tower’s eventual location. 44 Chapman’s plan was only partially implemented: the Princes’ Boulevard was laid from the Princes’ Gates (1927), past the Electrical and Engineering Building (1928) to the north and the Automotive Building (1929) to the south, but the central rotunda was never attempted. 45 This was unfortunate, because each element of Chapman’s plan contributed to his desired effect. The Gates separated the Park from Strachan Avenue, where its eastern border was fixed; from there the archway served as a window into the grounds, but without the rotunda to serve as a focal point, the sight line through this window was dismal indeed. Intersecting with no existing structures, it stretched out to Lake Ontario and into the horizon, making the Boulevard seem like a desolate road to nowhere important. 46
The Tower completed Chapman’s vision (Figure 3). It was symmetrically oriented to the Gates and both exhibit halls, so that an observer looking inward would see it perfectly framed in the archway. The two flanking exhibit halls formed a hallway with the Tower as its destination; the endless vista of the Princes’ Boulevard was finally terminated. The THB called the interplay between these four structures an “axial relationship,” and it was so essential to the atmosphere of the grounds that it was cited by nearly every argument made in the Tower’s defense, by architects and average citizens alike; after the demolition, it was cited as a reason to rebuild it. 47 The Electrical and Engineering Building was torn down in 1972, which when combined with the loss of the Tower had the effect of dispelling the “sense of place” Alfred Chapman had carefully cultivated. The eastern entrance reverted to its original featureless state, with nothing to draw prospective visitors inside. The construction of the 2002 Windshare Turbine along a similar axis repaired some of the damage, but the effect is not the same. It provides a sense of motion as it turns, but this is a false drama; there is no reason to visit it, and nothing to do there. The vista terminates at a dead end instead of a lively meeting place, and the contextual linkages are gone.
Shell Oil Tower and Princes’ Gates, axial relationship, c. 1955.
So are the memorial ones; the Tower was an anchor for memories, some ephemeral, some not. It was easily the most popular spot on the grounds for photography, owing to the excellent visibility afforded by its height (structures at Exhibition Park rarely crept above its knees). The keepsakes produced by photographers pointing their cameras through the gaps in the wire mesh would serve as souvenirs in years to come, reminding their owners not only of the objects captured in their lenses but also of the place from which they were first espied. Sometimes, due to the Tower’s omnioptical nature, the process of commemoration was metatextually layered as photographers were themselves photographed. The observation gallery also offered a more exotic pleasure, the opportunity to make an outdoor telephone call from nine stories up. The conversations visitors engaged in on those telephones would be subtly connected to that tiny rectangle of real estate in the sky; so too would be the conversations between those gathered together on the platform. 48 Some lascivious souls might even stand along the tenth floor walls and watch skirts flapping in the altitudinal breezes, forming more risqué memories pleasantly in tune with the CNE’s carnivalesque nature. 49
Thousands produced memories of their family members, friends, and significant others at the Tower. Although they may not have consciously recognized its presence in those memories, it was definitely there, existing on the periphery of recollection as part of the memorial landscape. When subtly commemorated in this way, while it still existed, it was no lieu de mémoire but instead part of that primal lived memory that internalizes the experience of tradition and ritual without requiring a deliberate effort to remember. The Tower is not, of course, uniquely representative of this process among Toronto’s catalog of public landmarks, but few other pieces of corporate advertising can claim to be so memorially dense. Each year its presence would have triggered the memories it had helped to create, allowing visitors to inhabit their past at the CNE; in its absence these memories are scattered, difficult to recall, and unlikely to be passed on to others. There is no plaque, no celebratory volume, no solid piece of history to give definition to this shapeless mass of collectively held remembrance. It persists in its nebulous existence until those who hold the memories die, and then is lost forever. Mike Rohricht remembers mounting the Tower every year with his four siblings, Nick Solty noticed its absence when he revisited the Ex in the 1990s, and Don Sywak remembers being told as a child to find it and stay there if he became lost, but none of them transmitted these memories to their children. My own parents remember it vividly, but never mentioned it until I began this article. 50
Memories are often unquantifiable, doubly so when there is no forum for expressing them, as is the case with the disappeared and intentionally excised Tower. Nevertheless, tokens of recollection can be collected to affirm each of the themes we have already discussed. Fairgoer Shawn Micallef remembers the Tower’s place in the contextual layout of the Modernist block; he also wistfully recalls its role in the experience of lived history, calling the entire area “a landscape of our collective memories, the best days of all our lives.” 51 Mike Rohricht vividly remembers how perfectly the Tower was framed in the arch of the Princes’ Gates; he even remembers the abortive attempt to rebuild it years later, a testament to the visibility of the preservationist rhetoric it inspired (more on this to come). The memetic phrase also endures, but its commercial origins have not. 52 Remembered less as an advertising icon and more as a meeting place, the Tower has become shorthand not for the corporate system but for supposedly happier, more innocent times; one Star writer cataloged it among the “simple joys of old Toronto” and wished it was still there for him to climb. Another ended her cheerful reminiscences about the CNE with a bittersweet reminder that the Tower, as with many other structures in Exhibition Park, had passed into collective history. 53 Memorialized examples of its functions and virtues are omnipresent, and there is little point in pursuing a complete inventory of them; they may be frequently left unspoken, but they are always accessible on request.
Alone among the “advertising gimmicks” at the CNE, the Tower persists in many facets of the shared public memory of Toronto. The photographs will someday be ciphers to the generations who never experienced it, but they were nevertheless important memorial talismans for the people who snapped them on warm summer days between 1955 and 1981. Its connection to these memories and to the remembered topography of the city is one reason many mourned its passing. One former fairgoer feels that “the collective memories attached to a place” are “a sure indication . . . that something is worth saving.”
54
Another claims that many Torontonians persist in the delusion that the Tower was never demolished, and this should not be surprising; it had so many connections to specific configurations of both the Park and the city that anyone identifying with those configurations would be seriously disoriented without its psycho-spatial mediation.
55
Architect Edward Jones gave perhaps the most visceral testimonial:
Only the insane would deem the requirements of a one day motor-racing event more important than a familiar city landmark. For a building or structure to become familiar and a landmark is to say that it has passed into collective ownership. Then only with collective agreement can it be demolished.
56
In this conception the Tower’s loss was considerably more traumatic to its community than the prospect of having unsightly footwear; it was not shoelaces, but shared memories and identities that it and the rest of the Park helped to shape and keep intact. Was it unique in that respect? Certainly not; it was only one strand in a complex web of metropolitan meaning. However, with each thread removed the web grows weaker, so while its removal did not destroy the memorial landscape of Toronto, it is certainly an indicative example of the destructive process.
“Sense of Place” in a Liminal Space: Why the Tower Was Demolished
This leaves us in the unenviable position of having to determine why Torontonians failed to rush to the Tower’s aid when it apparently enhanced and institutionalized multiple social functions for them. First: had they lost faith in it? The question is valid, particularly in the context of the CNE’s history. According to Keith Walden, the modern urban world was a place where identity was in flux, merchants and neighbors were anonymous, and the claims of legitimacy made by strangers both public and corporate were difficult (if not impossible) to verify. The Industrial Exhibition was established to act as an “engine of confidence,” assuaging concerns about modernity and providing a forum for explicating its facets. Vendors used that forum to assert the sophistication and durability of their products, employing solidly built displays to imply their own strength and permanence. 57 Decades later, when the Industrial had evolved into the CNE, the situation hadn’t changed much; the displays were still there, and they still promoted confidence in otherwise impersonal and faceless brands. The Tower was a logical extension of this tradition, but unlike a booth in an exhibit hall it didn’t just imply permanence, it was permanent. Shell was taking an incredible risk. While most vendors could pack up their displays and transport them to other venues, this new kind of physical trademark was effectively frozen in place. (This innovation does have a recognizable precursor of sorts, which I will later address.) It was far more difficult to maintain than a house of orange crates or a pyramid of tin cans, and the results of failing to maintain it were potentially disastrous.
Designed to develop the affection of fairgoers and transmit that affection to its sponsor, the Tower had a great deal to lose if its façade of modernity began to crack. Once the veneer of novelty had worn away, such cracks began to appear. In 1971 the glass elevator stopped moving six feet from the ground, trapping seven visitors and two employees for over an hour before a mechanic could coax it back into place. Two years later the failure was more dramatic, as firefighters had to climb down the glass shaft to release twenty-five would-be riders. In 1974 the CNE Works Department used the car’s emergency hatch to keep seventeen new victims supplied with cold drinks; the mechanics had it unstuck within half an hour. Perhaps they were getting used to the breakdowns, but many fairgoers weren’t: one woman claimed she would never ride an elevator again. A failure of confidence was definitely occurring, and it was rapidly sapping the Tower’s image of futuristic utility. By 1976 the fickle elevator was as much an unknown element as the weather, and by 1981 the CNE considered it an active menace to both their reputation and to the safety of fairgoers; they soon began looking for a reason to demolish it. 58
Such a reason materialized in 1981, when an especially embarrassing incident grounded the elevator for good: five teenagers were trapped for well over an hour, in weather similar to what McCallum and Harris had suffered through during their fateful climb a quarter-century earlier. One of the teens had to be physically removed from the car by firemen and was carried away in an ambulance chair, perhaps suffering from heat stress. 59 The Tower no longer emphasized “openness” or “freedom of movement;” its elevator was now a prison with mutual surveillance, and the allegory to Bentham was complete. The stairs and frame were aging too; Mike Rohricht remembers “seeing all the big rust blisters on all the frame steel, just blistering up, and I guess that was weakening the structure over time.” 60 Reports commissioned by the CNE reached the same conclusion, and the decision was made to close the Tower. 61 It would never reopen. Did the loss of confidence caused by its deterioration result in a lack of concern for its fate? Surprisingly, this does not appear to be the case. Whenever the elevator broke down, fairgoers simply shrugged and made the ascent on foot; their concern about the Tower’s physical state seemed only as deep as their concern about summer rain or minor midway mishaps. 62 For their part, Bulova seemed willing to continue renewing their advertising contracts indefinitely. 63 Visitors voted with their feet, and Bulova voted with their wallet; when either expressed an opinion about the Tower’s claims on their confidence, it was to validate them.
But why did the structure decay so rapidly? The answer can be found by examining the relationships between the fair and its advertisers. Shell and the CNE worked well together; the oil company efficiently addressed all maintenance issues as per their contract, and together with its landlords kept the Tower and its demesnes pleasant and presentable. One example occurred in 1955: just after their first season in partnership, Hiram McCallum and W. M. V. Ash combined their energies to provide benches at the Tower’s plaza for weary fairgoers or those waiting to ascend. 64 This cordial relationship did not transfer to Bulova along with the contract; the CNE frequently considered the watch company uncooperative and uncommunicative, and Bulova frequently considered the fair belligerent. The planters at the Tower’s base began rotting, pavestones began to crack, and chain link fences began bristling with weeds. After several irritated attempts to have these issues corrected, CNE staff were rewarded with a bellicose letter from Hugh Mulligan, Bulova’s President, threatening to prematurely end their sponsorship. 65 Here perhaps is a genuine flaw of consumerist architecture: if the relationship between owner and advertiser decays, so too may the quality of care given to the structure.
Of course, the opposite was also true; it might be more accurate in this case to say that consumerism provided an early outpouring of positive effort that slowly declined after the honeymoon period between Shell and the CNE ended. As that effort declined, so did the Tower’s physical state. In 1985 CNE General Manager Bill Stockwell reported that he could not recommend spending half a million dollars to repair it; in response, architectural photographer Peter McCallum retorted that the cost should have been closer to $350,000. Stockwell also said that the Tower could only attract $10,000 in advertising revenue annually; McCallum again demurred, claiming that billboards on the Frederick G. Gardiner Expressway, from which the Tower was easily visible, usually earned between $8,000 and $15,000 monthly. Closed to the public, the Tower essentially was a billboard, and if McCallum was right, it should have been able to pay for most (or all) of its repairs in short order. Bulova was paying the same rent in 1985 that Shell had paid in 1955; had advertising somehow escaped the effects of inflation? The opposite is probably true, and accusations that the CNE wasn’t managing their billboard’s contracts effectively seem difficult to refute. 66
Did the CNE have an ulterior motive for running down the Tower’s physical condition and understating its commercial appeal? In fact, they had three. First of all, in 1985 there was a very real possibility that the stadium that would one day be called SkyDome (and that is today called Rogers Centre) would be built at Exhibition Place. Clearing the Tower’s site for the Molson Indy, their second reason, would kill two birds with one stone. Their third reason, perhaps the most important one, was the trade show complex they had wanted to build on the grounds for fourteen years. In 1971 Toronto adopted a “Master Plan” to address the decaying quality of the CNE: historic structures had been neglected, parkland had become parking lots, and the site had lost its “sense of place.” For most of the year there was no reason to go, and nothing to do if you went. The Master Plan’s solution was to create an event center that would encourage a multitude of local, regional, national, and international uses. This involved building roads through the park, pouring even more asphalt to accommodate even more automobiles, and demolishing fourteen “functionally or structurally obsolete” structures. Among these were the Tower and its immediate neighbors, the Flyer rollercoaster and the Alpine Way. 67 While the Master Plan was never fully implemented, the CNE let most of its demolition targets slowly deteriorate anyway (Figure 4); by 2011 most of them are gone or repurposed for commercial use. 68
Bulova Tower, decaying and doomed, c. 1985.
Exaggerated financial issues, then, were used to mask real financial intentions. The Tower was likely quite capable of supporting itself, but the CNE wanted its site for features that would require less overhead and produce more directly attributable revenue. They seemingly did not consider its social or cultural uses when they resolved to demolish it. Perhaps this is the true negative legacy of its consumerist origins, that they accustomed its caretakers to view it in purely economic terms; they saw it not as a civic monument but instead as a commercial device. We have probably uncovered the CNE’s motivations for sacrificing the Tower; however, this is only half of the equation necessary to result in the deletion of a valuable public space. We must also ascertain why no effective public resistance was mounted by the Tower’s community; is there a better explanation than fiscal tightness that can reconcile the Tower’s proven popularity and its documented demise? The story of Toronto’s “other” tower might suffice.
There is a reason why the CN Tower is usually referred to by its initials: it has evolved beyond the corporate origins its name connotes. Few today would suggest that the city and its tallest structure are not strongly linked, and even fewer would suggest that the old commercial linkages survived long past the mid-1990s. Many of the few who do know the CN Tower’s full name likely think it refers to some intangible “national” quality it possesses, rather than what it actually refers to—the Canadian National Railway, which built it. Had the Bulova Tower been allowed to survive, it is entirely possible that it would have undergone a similar transformation. The CN Tower isn’t only valuable to us as an illustration of what might have been, however; it may also have played an active role in its counterpart’s fate. Bill Stockwell believed it had made the Bulova Tower functionally obsolete—a viewing gallery ten stories up could not compete with the newer structure’s stratospheric views. 69 But perhaps a different and more insidious kind of harm was done—perhaps George Robb’s brainchild also lost its much more important social roles to the new trademark on the block. It was taller, it was more unique in appearance, and it was located far more centrally; there exists a very real possibility that the CN Tower’s symbolic monumentality eclipsed that of its smaller cousin, made it redundant and expendable. Certainly it serves as a nexus of identity in ways the older edifice never did. 70
Even if the CN Tower had eclipsed the CNEs, does that justify the demolition? Why could the Molson Indy’s pit area not be moved to a less contentious location? In a meeting with a representative of Molson, the Save the Tower Action Committee determined that an alternative route sparing the Tower and requiring relatively minor alterations to the grounds was feasible; this stands in sharp contrast to the CNE’s assertion that Molson was hostile to the idea of moving the pit outside of the proposed track’s infield because this would make it less attractive for “VIP seating and catering.” Furthermore, the Committee pointed out that the Tower’s “heroic slenderness” and its “vibrant glass and steel construction” would make it an attractive visual element of the proposed event; if Molson was willing to help meet the cost of repairs it could even be retained as an observation platform for the race itself. That none of these considerations were given any attention by the CNE suggested, at least to the frustrated architects and historians, that the demolition was being pursued simply “as a matter of convenience.” 71 It didn’t help that the decision was only unevenly opposed by those in power in Toronto; sitting Mayor Art Eggleton said he felt the Tower possessed no particular historical or architectural value. 72
How does one determine such value? One common rubric for historical consideration in North America is the “fifty-year rule”: for a structure to possess objectively “historical” characteristics it must not have been constructed within the past five decades. 73 At a scant thirty years of age the Tower obviously failed this test. Eberhard Zeidler, architect of Toronto’s famous Eaton Centre, felt that if the Tower was allowed to persist for another fifty years it would become as invulnerable as Old City Hall; however, in light of the increasingly rapid pace of urban redevelopment that was chipping away at the city’s Modernist inventory, he expressed doubt that many exemplars of the style would survive that long. By the time Modernism became historical, therefore, it might also have become extinct. For architect Ruth Cawker this erasure was particularly troubling because without the retention of Modernist works, it would be far too easy to repeat Modernism’s most fatal mistake—“the wholesale imposition of functional imperatives on the existing urban fabric.” Arts consultant Peter Day imagined the Tower as a water mark in Exhibition Park’s architectural layers, standing in place of both its lost contemporary structures and the era that had created them; in the words of Pierre Berton, it was as much a part of Toronto’s heritage as its famed Victorian row houses. 74 Whether twenty or fifty more years would have vindicated the Tower will never be revealed; it is enough to say that both its supporters and opponents felt its youth undermined the arguments for its retention.
There are also aesthetic and ideological elements to consider. Could the Tower’s Modernist architectural design have made it unsuitable, and therefore indefensible, as a public site? Modernism was a cultural movement born in the chaotic upheaval of the Second World War whose architecture was characterized by a conscious break with the past and an optimistic attitude toward the future. Modernists aimed to reconstruct the built environment in a more inventive manner, with the embrasure of a “machine aesthetic” which incorporated a sense of industrial production and engineering into a structure’s visual presentation. Following architect Louis Sullivan’s dictum that form should follow function, Modernist architecture also frequently subordinated artistic flourish to streamlined utility. This, however, was not a rejection of beauty; it was rather a reflection on the particular beauty of refined and purposeful artifice. In any event, Modernism’s most vicious critics take issue not with its aesthetics, but with its ideology. Modernism was anti-traditional; in the postwar program for radically reforming the shape of the city, many historic landmarks were unceremoniously demolished. Decades later this iconoclastic zeal would be applied to Modernism itself, with the assertion that anything built with such distaste for heritage and historical context could not possibly have accrued any for itself. 75
However, we have already seen in part how the Tower contributed to that context in Exhibition Park. It helped interpret the fairground’s physical landscape in many ways, as did the other Modernist structures in the central block. The Better Living Centre (1966) featured a rectangular column on its roof, built in black steel and colored Plexiglas, which aligned with the Tower and spoke directly to its shape and dimensions. This allowed the Tower to mediate a visual relationship between the eastern entrance and the newer pavilions. A third tower in the older western end of the Park, the Carlsberg Carillon, completed the trifecta by linking the historic turn-of-the-century cluster to the other two sectors of the grounds. These visual markers helped visitors to the CNE to cohere their mental maps; without their influence the center cannot hold, and the once tightly knit pieces fall away from each other and become vulnerable to assertions of obsolescence and irrelevance. Just as the CN Tower helps punctuate the skyline of Toronto as a whole, the city’s individual neighborhoods require visual markers to delineate their borders and orient their residents and visitors. The Tower did this for Exhibition Park, which needed such markers even more than most of Toronto’s districts because of the liminality experienced by isolated fairgrounds. No wonder the THB called the Tower an indispensable element of the Park’s architectural layering; it was a lynchpin keeping the disjointed districts together, an aglet preventing the thread of continuity from unraveling. 76 How could an ostensibly Modernist structure be so sensitive to historical context?
Supporters of postwar architecture contend that Canada acquired Modernism later than most countries, and never fully invested in its rhetoric; the country’s postwar structures are therefore a part of, and not a threat to, its historical narrative. Much of the distaste architects and planners have for Modernist architecture belongs more properly to “modern planning,” an umbrella term for development schemes largely concerned with dividing cities into single-purpose districts. Modern planning is held accountable for many of our present urban ills: suburbs that stymie collective action, dangerously alienated industrial parks, and commercial centers that snub their neighbors like inanimate hermits and refuse to interact contextually with the streets that serve them or the city as a whole. Historic structures are bulldozed under the rationale that they are incompatible with the new mode of planning, which desires to root out the causes of functional variety and systematically destroy them. Modernist architecture has suffered under development schemes inspired by modern planning as much as, if not more than, the architecture of any preceding period, and we have already seen that the Tower, Modernist or not, was intimately connected to the historical context of Exhibition Park. 77 It was aesthetically Modern but not idealistically Modern. Neoliberal urban development schemes prioritizing commercial interests over civic ones, and “mega projects,” which radically and unsympathetically restructure the built environment, are the real culprits in the erasure of our public spaces—the Tower was a victim, not a tool, of historically disrespectful modern planning initiatives. 78
One such initiative was the Master Plan, which in fact hides within its pages the seeds of a primary reason the Tower was not saved. It states that Exhibition Park lacked a “sense of place” because it had been severed from the rest of the city: the Gardiner Expressway blocked the park from view and made access impossible except at its two main gates, and Lake Shore Boulevard carved a path through the waterfront terrace where Torontonians had once looked out over Lake Ontario. This worsened the site’s already almost crippling infrastructural isolation, forcing it so deeply into the metropolitan background that it could only emerge briefly each year when the CNE reminded citizens of its existence. 79 It might be more fair to say that the Park had a sense of place that was damningly temporary. It was tantalizingly close to the Toronto neighborhoods of Niagara and Liberty Village, but may as well have been in another country; warehouses and factories and a massive highway prevented them from claiming it as their own. It had no permanent community to defend it, and the community that it did have was dispersed over other parts of the city, other municipalities in Ontario, and other parts of the world. Brought together for one short event, in a diffuse and formless mass differing wildly across each of the fair’s fourteen days, they were not a revolutionary group. They probably dispersed after the 1985 CNE and returned the next year confused by the Tower’s absence—we know it was a popular fixture, but we also must realize that those who might have protected it from harm were too far removed from its physical site to even recognize the danger, much less organize to meet it. This line of reasoning will reward further attention.
Paradoxically, the Tower’s marginal location may have both reduced and enhanced its visibility. Though only poorly accessible from Toronto’s major streets and footpaths, it was nevertheless excellently placed to take advantage of sight lines from two of Toronto’s most important arterial roads, the Gardiner Expressway and Lakeshore Boulevard. Many thousands of motorists would have observed it every day, every year, for three decades; its symmetrical construction meant that it would be a major part of the visual landscape for each of the morning, afternoon, and evening rush hours, presenting a clock face to both eastbound and westbound traffic. It was in fact the only landmark in Exhibition Park to be fully visible from the Gardiner’s raised roadway. Ironically, these observers who undoubtedly encountered it more often than any fairgoers or architectural buffs were likely the last members of the Tower’s community to discover that it was in danger. Most travelers on either road were commuters to and from Toronto who did not reside in the city, and they therefore were unlikely to be aware of the CNE’s intentionally demure demolition campaign. Their relationships with the Tower add a layer of complexity to the argument that it was destroyed because of apathy or invisibility; it was exposed to an endless stream of perceptual patrons every day who became accustomed to its familiar profile but never got the opportunity to speak out on its behalf. 80
We can extend that line of reasoning even further: what if virtually no one was aware that the Tower was in danger? The CNE made no effort to canvas for opinions and issued no public statement about their intent to seek a demolition permit; when questioned, Bill Stockwell somewhat arrogantly stated that he would be willing to listen to anyone “who feels strongly enough to put up the money.” Since he didn’t personally believe that tax dollars would be well spent on repairing the Tower, he didn’t present the issue to the city’s taxpayers; the CNE was apparently only interested in the opinions of investors. 81 Brigitte Shim of the Save the Tower Action Committee was outraged: “The tower occupies a special place in the memory of the CNE and nothing has been made public about the demolition.” 82 The Committee and its supporters felt that both the fair and the city were attempting to stonewall and rout them. Adele Freedman of the Globe and Mail was particularly incensed that the THB had failed so spectacularly at providing the architects with enough time to reveal the CNE’s plans to the general public; she wasn’t alone in expressing dissatisfaction with the efficacy of Toronto’s historical preservation system, but others found the blame misplaced. 83
R. Scott James brusquely blamed the Tower’s demise on the ineffective tools the THB had to work with rather than any lack of effort on their part; however, he had earlier been quoted making the rather defeatist statement that they would have “only” been able to grant a reprieve of 180 days, a full six months, which could certainly have been put to good use raising awareness. 84 No wonder the Committee suspected the other actors in the Tower’s drama of conspiring against them! “I think it’s a tidy little arrangement, but then so is everything here,” muttered Committee member Peter Heywood in disgust; he couldn’t believe that Exhibition Place’s Board of Governors hadn’t created a forum for the public to express their opinions on the plans. 85 Never mind the relative strength or weakness of its community, its architectural merits, or the cost of repairs or its potential redundancy—no factor is as important in the failure of the Tower to excite collective action as the near-complete lack of awareness that it was in danger of demolition in the first place! In this light it is easier to reconcile its popularity with its demise, and its community of summertime visitors cannot in all fairness be blamed for their failure to organize around it.
BAU, Dominion Modern, and the Rise of Historical Consciousness in Toronto
The Tower had a second community, however, in the artists and architects whose metropolitan consciousness could not be fooled by distance or liminality. The Save the Tower Action Committee was made up of such professional urbanists, who objected to both the concept of demolishing the Tower and to the way that its fate was being decided behind closed doors. They articulated most of the arguments we have already explored for its importance to both the CNE and Toronto, particularly regarding the memorial roles it played and its architectural significance. They circulated petitions, and were quoted in almost every newspaper article on the Tower in 1985 stating their opposition on moral grounds to its destruction. They also wrote letters to various Toronto administrators and politicians begging them to help refurbish the Tower and redirect the course of the Molson Indy. This plea had broad support, with writer Pierre Berton, theorist Jane Jacobs, former Toronto Mayor John Sewell, and George Robb himself backing the Committee wholeheartedly. More aware of the urban framework than the average citizen, these individuals could and did come to the Tower’s defense, and even succeeded in impelling others to share their outrage. If the Tower had been anywhere but at Exhibition Place, it might very well have been saved. 86
As the last fragments of the Tower were removed from Molson’s future pit area, the Save the Tower Action Committee prepared to reinvent themselves. They issued a blood-red missive to their supporters that both marked the end of a long and frustrating campaign and announced the beginning of a new one. Their failure to save the Tower had not killed their urge to campaign on behalf of Toronto’s beleaguered public structures, but had rather broadened and enhanced it. Recognizing that their efforts had opened a dialogue with the public about the issues facing Modern architecture, they announced their intention to reform as a permanent, dedicated lobby group for the preservation of all postwar landmarks threatened with demolition in the city. Their premise was that recent architectural works were at least as deserving of recognition and respect as their nineteenth-century counterparts; their name was the Toronto Bureau of Architecture and Urbanism (BAU). The first task they set themselves was to catalog the Modernist inventory in hopes of further educating Torontonians about the merits of their built environment. 87
Their two-pronged approach was to stage an exhibition for public consumption about Modernism and to plan a symposium between Modernist authorities both local and international. They also intended to produce publications covering these two events. Aiming to make as impressive a showing as possible, the BAU hoped to hold their presentations in Toronto’s 1961 City Hall, itself an excellent example of late-period Modernism; in a testament to their tenacity they sought and received approval for this. 88 The overarching event, held between May 9 and June 5, 1987, was dubbed “Toronto Modern: Architecture 1945-1965” and featured ten structures that Adele Freedman of the Globe called “a carefully selected cross-section of buildings and developments that marked expansive, optimistic times.” The exhibit and symposium were very well attended, and the book of essays BAU produced on various Modernist themes remains a high water mark in Toronto’s narrative of architectural preservation. 89 The Tower, then, did not produce groups that could raise their voices loud enough to save it; it instead produced groups that would work to ensure that other public spaces did not suffer its fate.
Is less professional, more personal involvement visible both during and after these debates? It is, but without a central forum for discussing the topic (which neither the CNE or Metro were able or willing to provide) it was regrettably but necessarily scattered in nature; this is almost certainly one reason why the defenders were unable to mobilize cohesively or effectively. Nevertheless, various city figures went out of their way to use their influence to engage the public’s attention, taking on the cause as a personal crusade. John Sewell, who had nothing political to gain from the Tower’s salvation, dedicated several of his weekly columns in the Globe to passionately defending the Tower and providing its proponents with a soapbox from which to expound; he called it one of Toronto’s “great trees” and pled with his readers not to allow it to be felled. 90 Art critic Christopher Hume was equally committed to keeping the issue in the papers; months later one of his peers, Carole Corbeil, concluded wryly that some kind of malefic, mentally debilitating radiation (perhaps emanating from the CN Tower) was the only possible explanation for why Torontonians had stood idly by as the CNE’s landmark faced its doom. 91 Attempts to awaken the sleeping preservationist beast proved moderately successful, although they could never quite overcome the geographical displacement of the CNE’s annual community or the damnably low-key nature of its site.
Letters to the editors of the major Toronto newspapers provided passionate statements of the Tower’s importance; perhaps the most eloquent pleaded that it “reflects a contemporary past, a design and architecture that creates a bridge from one age of this century to another. It has a place at the Ex, and in our hearts. Let’s fix it and keep it.” 92 On November 11, 1985, the Committee organized a rally at the base of the Tower, which had already been deprived of its entrance awning by the wreckers; over one hundred private citizens came to show their support. Their enthusiasm little dampened by the grey haze of rain hanging over the park, they released brightly colored balloons, circulated petitions, and chanted “Save the Tower!” in a vain attempt to be heard. A banner with a similar message was trailed overhead by airplane, and the protesters raised its twin over the aging metal structure’s frame. In addition to the one hundred who braved the rain, the Committee acquired almost three thousand signatures in support of retaining the Tower—a miraculously high number in light of both the difficulties they faced in being heard and Toronto’s proven ambivalence to architectural heritage. 93 The CNE may have felt that this sound and fury signified nothing, but it is clear that a base of public support did exist beyond the ranks of architects and historians. There was simply no way to harness this energy into successful collective action, thanks to the causes we have already underlined. More heartening, however, is the case of the amateur local historian who was transformed by this traumatic event into a professional urban crusader.
Like the BAU, John Martins-Manteiga was discouraged by the Tower’s fall but didn’t lose his interest in protecting Toronto’s Modernist heritage. In the 1990s he spearheaded an unsuccessful campaign to rebuild the Tower; in 2003 he founded a nonprofit organization called Dominion Modern to hold exhibitions, release publications, and generally raise awareness of Modernism. Manteiga has tirelessly promoted the value of the Modernist legacy and has published half a dozen books about its architecture. If his work often betrays a strong sense of urgency, it is because he perceives that “the preservation of Canadian Modernism is at a crossroads. Indifference and hostility have led to the demolition of modern buildings across Canada and as these buildings fall, those who designed and built them age and die.” 94 Among those who have aged and died is George Robb, six years after the Tower fell and nineteen years before his celebrated Valhalla Inn in Toronto was also condemned in favor of new development. Both structures have joined what Manteiga calls the “Catalogue of Destruction,” dozens of Modernist works lost in the name of progress. The fight to keep this catalog from growing often seems hopeless, but those inspired by the Tower’s example have not yet surrendered, and they have won some scattered victories as well.
The Tower did not face demolition alone in 1985. The Music Building (1908) was also slated for removal, for essentially the same reasons: it was old, it was deteriorating, it was unsafe, and it was in the way of new development—in this case the loading docks of the Queen Elizabeth Building (1957). Its connections to the Tower go even deeper than that—it too was a physical trademark, one of the first at the fair, built for the express purpose of housing displays for the Canadian National, Canadian Pacific, and Grand Trunk Railways. As they had with the Tower, prominent Toronto celebrities raised their voices to protest its destruction; this time the most vocal was Sam “the Record Man” Sniderman, who insisted that fundraising for repairs was a practical possibility. As they had with the Save the Tower Action Committee, the CNE stonewalled all attempts at opening a dialogue. The situation grew even more grim when a mysterious fire gutted the structure, causing $500,000 in damage. Despite facing that magic number for the second time in two years, the THB supported plans to restore the Music Building. As before, Toronto City Council’s Executive Committee noted these concerns and then went ahead with the proposal to demolish it—a ruling overturned by Council itself a week later, granting the fundraisers the six months they needed to gain support and collect donations. 95
At this point the similarities abruptly end. The money was found, the repairs were made, and the demolition was halted. Appearing prominently in the ranks of those who saved the Music Building was R. Scott James, the THB Managing Director who had failed to save the Tower. He urged Torontonians not to repeat the mistakes they had so recently made, and this stronger expression of support succeeded where waffling had not. Beyond James’ involvement, does an explicit connection exist between the Tower’s destruction and the Music Building’s salvation? Perhaps the Music Building, far more than thirty years old and far more visually ornate than the Tower, was seen as more legitimately historical; perhaps, however, it had become obvious that the CNE’s historic facilities were not sacrosanct to its caretakers and that those caretakers had ulterior motives that conflicted with their duty to protect those facilities. It seems undeniable that the machinery of change at Exhibition Place was made visible for the very first time by the debates surrounding the Tower’s fate, and that the visibility of this machinery was what allowed successful collective action to form around the Music Building. Though dozens of structures had been destroyed in previous decades without so much as an iota of outcry, the callous behavior of the CNE had finally raised public awareness to the point where such destruction could not go unnoticed. In 1985 the THB decried the lack of public interest in saving postwar architecture; in 1986 they were confident enough to declare that “architectural conservation has been institutionalized.” Even if Torontonians could still not be counted on to save the fairground’s landmarks, they were at least now conscious of their fragility. 96
It remains to be seen whether this heightened sensitivity to ahistorical development will prevent the erasure of Exhibition Place’s lieu de mémoire. A monolithic convention complex has been developing around the National Trade Centre (now called the Direct Energy Centre) since 1997, which has necessitated the demolition of four more structures and the permanent removal of three others from the public sphere. The ghostly influence of the Master Plan, which sought to repair the fairground’s sense of place but instead helped to further dissolve it, can be felt in each new phase of this development. Exuberant exhibit halls and historic pavilions have become cordoned-off restaurants, night clubs, and theaters. Some are open to the public for a fee, others are exclusive and elitist. With plans in motion for a sixteen-story hotel, and the recent closure of the Automotive Building (1929) for use as a conference center and ballroom, the municipal future of the CNE’s park is by no means assured. The arguments against the Tower’s demolition may have revealed the very real threat that modern planning still poses to public sites, but belatedly winning the battle has not assured the outcome of the war; the overall trend of neoliberal development proceeds apace, leaving broken and empty public spaces in its wake.
Conclusion: For Want of an Aglet . . .
The Shell Oil/Bulova Tower became a true public space. It was a piece of corporate advertising, owned and operated by foreign investors and located in a park so liminal that it disappeared from public discourse for many months each year, but it became a bold punctuation mark in the narrative of public historical awareness. Even more surprising is the city that claimed it: Toronto, so long considered a faceless and self-destructive entity, developed an intricate relationship with a supposedly soulless corporate icon that made both seem more solid and real. We have not proven that commercial properties are inherently public, but instead that consumerism does not necessarily impede the process of creating civic spaces. Further research will hopefully bear out this conclusion. Joey Slinger equated the Tower with an aglet on his shoelace, and the comparison was more apt than he knew; constructed not of plastic but of glass and steel, clarity and solidity, what it kept from fraying was the dialectical and physical fabric of one of Toronto’s most fragile historic sites. His scale of grief fails to effectively measure what was lost to the wrecking ball in 1985: a truly functional public monument that transcended its ignoble origins to become a landmark in every sense of the word, looming large in the discourse of the preservationist agenda even today and sorely missed by the rapidly emptying park it once helped to imbue with meaning (Figure 5).
Endless vista, 2011.
It is a blisteringly hot day in 2011, and I am walking to Exhibition Place. The sidewalks are festooned with banners advertising the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Honda Indy; Molson, like Shell, has surrendered their “advertising gimmick” to a new sponsor. Somehow this seems fitting. I make my way down the empty Princes’ Boulevard to the point where it bends northward and am struck by how desolate the Tower’s former site seems. There is no plaque or monument, just two asphalt roads joining the Boulevard in a cheerless race for the Princes’ Gates, which are obscured by scaffolding for repairs. On a whim I walk out to Strachan Avenue to see the vista terminate at the Windshare Turbine, but this too is a wasted effort. Promotional photographs have told a sorry lie; the Turbine is barely visible, and anyway it’s very poorly aligned with the archway. There is nothing to see from where I stand, but from lived experience I can picture the sculpted gardens, the Art Deco edifices, the malls and the fountains, and the dozens of heritage sites that wait silently and in vain to be seen and appreciated. Each of these elements can be conceived of and understood discretely, but their relationships to each other have become muddied, unclear. The overarching context of the site seems somehow flattened and obscure; for want of an aglet, the psycho-spatial threads have frayed. Despite decades of social and historical investment there is no action or vitality in evidence; the park seems featureless and empty, and the road stretches on to nowhere important. 97
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to the following individuals, without whom this article would not have been possible: my anonymous peer reviewers, whose insightful commentary has been invaluable; my colleagues Abril Liberatori, Shawn McCarty, and Hayley Goodchild; Linda Cobon at the Exhibition Place and CNE Archives; the staff of the City of Toronto Archives; Dr. Nancy Bouchier and Dr. Ken Cruikshank; John Martins-Manteiga; the staff of the Toronto Urban Affairs Library; the staff of the Toronto Star Reading Room at the Toronto Reference Library; Peter Stewart at George Robb, Architect; David Feldbloom at Royal Specialty Sales; my interview subjects; and my family for their support. I claim as my own any and all errors or omissions.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.