Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1089

Over the past few weeks we’ve been talking about the future of the mall on this blog. It’s a topic that I’m very interested in.

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published an article talking about the trend of converting retail/shopping facilities to logistic centers. 

Here’s an excerpt:

“In Mesquite, Texas, FedEx Corp. next month will open a 340,000 square-foot distribution facility on what once was the site of the former Big Town Mall. Located along U.S. Highway 80 in Texas, the mall declined after newer malls were built nearby. It was demolished in 2006 and the land was later rezoned for industrial use.”

It turns – and we’ve talked about this – that good retail locations are also good distribution locations. They are usually located close to humans and infrastructure.

Here’s another example from the article:

In North Randall, Ohio, Amazon.com Inc. is considering the site of the former Randall Park Mall as a fulfillment center, according to Port of Cleveland, a local government agency focused on spurring job creation and economic growth in Cuyahoga County. Amazon didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

For a short time when it opened in 1976, Randall Park Mall was the largest shopping center in the world and had been “a thriving heartbeat” for the local economy, according to Mr. Davis. But the mall closed in 2009 as stores struggled with fewer shoppers.

Assuming this trend continues and people continue to buy things online, one has to wonder about the placemaking that should or needs to happen in these areas.

Over the weekend Richard Florida sent out a tweetstorm that compared Toronto and New York City, and made the argument that Toronto’s “incredible diversity, density, and industry mix” is making the city feel a lot more like New York and London compared to any other North American city. 

He even went so far as to say that, even though it may not be the bigger metro in terms of raw population, Toronto increasingly feels like North America’s second city after NYC. I’m obviously incredibly biased in this discussion, so I would be curious to get your thoughts in the comment section below.

If you can’t see the embedded tweetstorm below, click here . Regardless, you’ll likely need to click through to see the entire thread.

1. Just back to Toronto after a week in NYC: Got me thinking about what Trump could mean for US cities.

— Richard Florida (@Richard_Florida)

August 5, 2017

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After Junction House was announced , an interesting discussion emerged on Twitter around 2 storey suite designs.

There are, of course, many examples of multi-level apartments in the city. There’s 75 Portland by CORE Architects. There’s District Lofts and Mozo by architectsAlliance. And there’s Village by the Grange (pointed out during the discussion), which has a number of 2 and even 3 storey suites.

Another example that was raised by Gil Meslin is 14 Blevins Place . Now demolished, Blevins Place was designed in 1955 and completed in 1957 as part of the Regent Park South urban renewal project. It was designed by the British-born Toronto architect Peter Dickinson and by Page + Steele.

In 2005, prior to its demolition, the building was identified as a listed heritage building, but it was never elevated to a designated  heritage building.

Perhaps most notable about the building are its “skip-stop corridors” and its 2 storey suites. See below images taken from this Heritage Impact Assessment by ERA Architects.

The reality is that modern architecture has had a long history of employing multi-level units and skip-stop corridors. Le Corbusier and Oscar Neimeyer were said to be experimenting with them as far back as the 1930s .

But I think most would agree that Toronto is a very different city today compared to what it was in the 1950s. Some still believe that no child should grow up in an apartment, but I disagree with that belief system. I lived in an apartment as a kid and somehow I survived.