It’s a measure of how successful a building is that 50 years after its opening, people still call it New City Hall.
But that’s exactly the case with Toronto’s still triumphant new city hall, which turns 50 years young on September 13. On that day in 1965, Governor General Georges P. Vanier, Prime Minister Lester Pearson, Ontario Premier John Robarts, and more than 14,000 others gathered at the square in front of the building to celebrate its architectural triumph.
All these years later, you might think getting such an iconic building erected was a slam dunk. Not by a long shot. In fact, in 1955, Mayor Nathan Phillips had a plebiscite put on the municipal election ballot asking the people of Toronto if they’d be prepared to spend $18 million to build a new city hall. Even taking inflation into account, that’s only $162 million in today’s dollars. (By comparison, the aquatics centre built for the recent Pan Am Games cost $205 million.) The answer came back: NO, by more than 4,000 votes.
Undaunted, Phillips went to work. He convinced Metro Toronto to buy the old city hall building on the northeast corner of Bay and Queen (now a provincial courthouse) and got the Metro Chairman, Frederick “Big Daddy” Gardiner (yes, the expressway guy), to rent space in the new city hall. That reduced the cost to $13.5 million. And so when Phillips had another plebiscite a year later, this time it passed by more than 5,000 votes.
What happened next was unprecedented both then and now. The city held a competition and received 510 entrants from 42 countries. It struck a panel of architectural experts including the world famous Eero Saarinen to consider the bids. The winner was Finnish architect Viljo Revell’s design. Phillips, himself, also liked the winning bid saying: “It departed from the usual traditional matchbox embellished with gingerbread.”
But it was still not full speed ahead. Council almost pulled the plug on the project when it was learned that the underground parking lot was going to cost an additional $6.3 million. But somehow, Phillips stickhandled his way through the opposition and got council to approve both the design and the added costs.
The first sod-turning happened on November 7, 1961 – coincidentally, Mayor Phillips’ 69th birthday. As fate would have it, Phillips would not be the mayor when the building was officially opened almost four years later. He was defeated in the ensuing election in November 1962 by Donald Summerville (who sadly died less than a year into his term).
Councillor William R. Allen (yes, the other expressway guy) moved the motion to name the square in front of new city hall after Nate Phillips and the name of Toronto’s first ever Jewish mayor remains on the square to this day. For the probably vast majority of Torontonians who know Nathan Phillips Square but have no idea who it’s named after, now you know.
Half a century later, Revell’s brilliant design and Phillips’ championing of it remain a testament to the ability of Ontario’s capital city to – from time to time – think big. The new city hall is still so iconic; it even made a guest appearance in an episode of the original Star Trek series and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Happy 50th birthday, Toronto City Hall! You still look plenty new to me.
Image credit: benson kua/flickr.com