Toronto’s The Well refashions the urban mall

by Dave LeBlanc

Unlike fully-enclosed malls of the 1960s and 70s, the Well connections to the street grid outside - what architects call 'porosity' - in both expected ways, such as big glass walls, and unexpected ways, such as angled pedestrian bridges and pokey little laneways that pop out onto quirky streets such as Draper with its collection of 19th-century row cottages.

The Toronto Telegram newspaper, once known as The “Old Lady of Melinda Street,” moved from its old, Victorian pile to a shiny, new, modernist building at 440 Front St. W. in 1963. Designed by Peter Dickinson’s successor firm, Webb Zerafa Menkes Housden, the long, sprawling, white-brick building must’ve looked as if a spaceship had landed in the old warehouse district.

After producing a million (or so) stories, the Telegram folded in 1971. For a few years, the building and equipment were leased to the Toronto Star before The Globe and Mail took ownership in 1974. From within those white-brick walls, Globe journalists would write a million more stories until 2016, when it would lock its big art deco doors (which had been relocated from the 1937 William H. Wright Building on King Street West) for the last time. In 2017, truckload after truckload of old, broken white brick would be carted away to make room for a new development while the Globe set up shop on King Street East.

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