The Colonnade

Photos by Alan L Brown - Posted May, 2010

Here at 131 Bloor Street West is a very unusual staircase. A plaque attached to it on the north side has this to say:

Plaque coordinates: 43.668608 -79.393001

His worship the late Donald Summerville, Mayor of Toronto officially opened the Colonnade on October 16th, 1963 with these words.:

"A creative and imaginative answer to the pressing problems of urban renewal."

Thousands of Canadians attended the opening to tour the building and view handicraft and ballet demonstrations arranged in support of Canada's National Ballet Company.

The 45,000 square metres of residential, commercial and retail selling space was planned and financed through the resources of Revenue Properties Company Limited.

The Colonnade is a totally Canadian project.

The one and a half turn spiralling staircase you are now looking at is the only one ever built without a central support.

The broad beams at the top of the arches distribute the weight of ten stories of apartments to the curved gothic-like arches.

No other building in the world profitably combines residential, commercial and selling space to the same degree.

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Posted December 22, 2011
The plaque mentions "Canada's National Ballet Company", instead of simply calling it the National Ballet. A related institution, the National Ballet School, has recently started billing itself as "Canada's National Ballet School". These are just two of myriad examples which insert 'Canada' as if to suggest a need for explanation. It smacks of a lack of self-confidence, and, by its ubiquity, has become a grinding irritation. It's bad enough "Canada" is used as a knee-jerk tag-line to the names of most federal departments, and appended, without thought, to corporate names in this country. It's unnecessary to continually hammer at a domestic audience as if there's some chance we'll forget which country we're in. We're not pinheads. Let's use 'national' and 'federal', full stop, with confidence in people to know in which nation they stand. Only sparingly, when there's a possibility of confusion with other bodies referred to in the same text, should we insert "of Canada". That's rarely, if ever, the case for plaques located right here.Normal custom is to specify a country of origin when referring to non-domestic groups, not for domestic ones. But we've inverted that common-sense approach. Somehow, the Royal Ballet and Royal Navy (of Britain), the FAA, NASA, and General Motors (all of the United States), among dozens of other foreign organizational names, aren't qualified in Canada with the names of their countries of origin. If we can express such confidence for non-Canadian bodies, it behooves us to do the same for domestic ones. Let's give "Canada" a much-needed vacation in our nomenclature, and project the confidence befitting a great nation.
-Wayne

Posted December 20, 2011
Toronto needs more concepts similar to The Colonnade - Alan E Devine

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