Robert Smythe
Here’s a twist on the office-to-residential story.
GWL Realty Advisors – the blue-chip, long-term property investment arm of Great West Life – has abandoned its previously approved, but still unbuilt, 20-year-old plans for a second office tower on its through-block (Slater to Laurier Avenue West) property, just east of Bank Street.
Instead, they are now proposing two apartment buildings where a grim public parking facility currently sits at the site’s eastern flank. It will be a somewhat complicated process.
What’s more interesting is the fact that this area has a rich development history going back more than 50 years. It’s been, as one planning consultant once said, “in play” forever.
A parking lot buying binge
Responding to the downtown business community’s outcries for more customer parking, the City of Ottawa Parking Authority purchased this wide swath of land for $1.7 million in 1971. It then cleared away numerous older but interesting commercial and residential buildings. Within a few years, their parking lot buying binge would leave the city with more than half a dozen large new lots in the central area.
Two years later, the Authority was toying with the notion of hooking up with a developer, who would build the city an enclosed parking garage on the block (supposedly for free) while being granted massive development rights on top.
An early P3
So the advent of “triple P” private-public-partnerships, now often seen by many as dubious arrangements, is not so fresh and new. Two competitors came forward.
Quoting The Ottawa Journal of February 1, 1973: “HIGH-RISE-ITIS SPREADS. Gradually Ottawa’s blocks of small, squat buildings are being gobbled up by soaring towers of glass and steel. One proposal for the doomed block at Laurier, Slater, O’Connor, Bank is from MerBan Capital Corp. Ltd of Toronto, who would like to build a three-tower apartment hotel, 18 storeys high with parking for 580 cars. And all for a modest $9.5 million.
“Byward Holdings Ltd. and Ron Engineering Ltd. have a slightly less modest proposal. They want to build $30 million twin office towers with parking for 800 cars and a shopping mall. The city’s property department is studying both proposals and will report to the Board of Control by Feb. 20.”
Ron Engineering’s entry would be a stupendous scheme designed by modernist turned brutalist architect George Bemi, who imagined conjoined aggressively modelled towers inspired by the then avant-garde Japanese “Metabolist” style. It would also include that mall, enclosed parking with entrances from Slater, and a landscaped deck chock full of recreational diversions.
Their “Laurier-Slater-Center” came to naught, but Bemi was soon engaged to design the bunkerish former EDC Headquarters building at the O’Connor Street end of this block. Incidentally, that building was recently rejected by Montreal’s Groupe Mach (the new owners of Place Bell Canada) for office-to-residential conversion. They deemed the project impossibly expensive and technically difficult.
The development concept was not forgotten. In the late 1970s, Olympia and York, the mighty international developers, pleased with the successful delivery of L’Esplanade Laurier, their white marble behemoth in the block to the south, announced the launch of something similar on the north side of Laurier Avenue.
They had asked to be considered should the first two plans fall through and had even begun to expand the project’s potential by buying up some of the adjacent properties fronting Bank Street. This collapsed when O&Y turned its attention to more high-profile ventures, like east end London’s Canary Wharf.
After all of this, and apart from handsomely landscaped screening around its perimeter, the Laurier-Slater lot would remain a relatively undisturbed unit within the City of Ottawa’s land portfolio until the turn of the last century.
Amalgamation forced a sale
It was then that the spectre of regional municipal amalgamation, as decreed by the Government of Ontario, came to rear its head.
In order to bring cash to the merger with cities like Nepean (whose motto was “We are Debt Free”), Ottawa was forced to liquidate many of its most valuable assets like its new Moshe Safdie-designed building on Green Island plus valuable downtown parking lots. This one got swept up in the sell-off.
This land would be picked up by investors like Great West Life – which finally brings us to present day conditions. In 2003, GWL was granted approval for a two-tower office development, one on Laurier and the other facing Slater.
A fine plaza was promised at total completion, but they only proceeded with the very utilitarian 269 Laurier Avenue tower designed by architect David McRobie.
In the interim, adjacent to this a multi-level concrete parking structure to be operated by the City of Ottawa was constructed. Dry assembled with precast parts, it would be easily deconstructed and removed when the Slater tower was built. A small but bleak surface parking lot filled out the block.
And there matters stood for more than 20 years.
No date for the second stage
Their residential rejigging of the abandoned office concept is to be designed by NEUF Architectes. It will be another two-phase project, with the 25-storey Laurier Avenue West tower, a partial podium, and low-rise link building going first.
The second stage, 26 storeys on Slater, comes at an undetermined date in the future, leaving a vacant patch with a granular surface treatment (gravel?) that looks like it could be used for some surface parking.
As well, the parking lot connected to 269 Laurier continues unchanged – an obnoxious land use in an area with an LRT line running steps away.
The twin towers’ appearance could best be described as anodyne, barely challenging the existing office building that started the original complex in 2003. But it certainly meets the city’s stated desire and urgent need for more residential intensification downtown.
At its hearing on April 4, the city’s Urban Design Review Panel had plenty to say, but nothing of great import. It sought lighter colours, greater facade articulation such as more protruding fins, and perhaps a pointier crown. They even suggested picking up Art Deco details from the 1950s six-storey building down the block.
Pedestrian through-block praised
Thirty-one comments in all, most notably against the surface parking. Praise for the pedestrian through-block connections although the one at the eastern boundary line is going to be occupied with enclosed dog runs for the residents. The developers took all of this under advisement.
The vital stats? 586 apartment units. 98 parking spaces for residents when the zoning bylaw requires none. 297 bike parking spaces – two more than dictated. Add to that 3,732 m2 of amenity space, also more than the minimum amount required.
The site is currently zoned as a “mixed-use downtown zone” and with the relatively minor adjustments being sought it is likely to be readily approved.
Let’s hope that it isn’t bedevilled by the ghosts of schemes past.