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A colourized postcard of the Manufacturers' Building, showing the building's main entrance.

Facades and Facelifts at Exhibition Place

This story was researched and written by Emerging Historian Ela Gach (2024) and made possible by the generous support of our Tours Program Presenting Sponsor, TD Bank Group through the TD Ready Commitment, Emerging Historian Champion Andrew and Sharon Himel and Family, and Exhibition Place.

Last updated: October 3, 2024

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A New Face for an Old Building

The year was 1922, and the Canadian National Exhibition had just revealed its newest building – the massive Coliseum.

Fresh off the drafting board, the Coliseum was everything the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) needed – it was modern and boasted over eight acres of exhibit space, sheltered by imposing arches and towers. It was designed in the grand Beaux-Arts style by G.F.W. Price to match seamlessly with its surroundings. On the inside, it hosted livestock competitions, exhibits, and musical performances. On the outside, it became a landmark focal point, featured on postcards, photographs, and promotional prints for the CNE.

But somehow, the building’s aesthetic appeal didn’t last long. In the 1940s, twenty short years after the Coliseum was built, its south wall was covered by a modern false facade. Less than twenty years after that, the cladding was torn down only to be replaced with yet another, even more modern facade.

It’s odd to think that a building as intricate as the Coliseum could have its brick features refaced with modern materials. Still, the years between the 1920s and 1960s saw architectural tastes shift rapidly from the ornate and detailed to the simple and streamlined. 

By the 1940s and 1950s, visitors to the CNE didn’t see its old buildings as treasures—they saw outworn buildings and a fairground that wasn’t keeping up with the times. A 1960 survey even revealed that visitors thought the CNE’s buildings were “old” and “unattractive.”

Why were these false facades built? Were other buildings also subjected to facelifts? And was the Coliseum ever freed of its metal cladding? The answer behind these facelifts lies in the ebbs and flows of Exhibition Place’s architectural history.

A black and white photograph of the Coliseum, showing the building's first false facade.

The Exhibition

Tucked away in Toronto’s west end, sitting on the shores of Lake Ontario, is an old fairground with a long history. 

Since 1878, the buildings, paths, and towers of Exhibition Place were built to amaze and entertain.

Exhibition Place was built for the Canadian National Exhibition, formerly known as the Toronto Industrial Exhibition. From the moment its gates opened in 1878, the Exhibition has showcased and celebrated Canada’s achievements in agriculture and industry. In its opening year, it welcomed some 100,000 visitors, who climbed off of trains, streetcars, and steamboats to gawk at the Exhibition’s livestock competitions and machinery exhibits. In later years, visitors took buses and cars and gazed upon airplane shows and electrical exhibits.

The technologies changed, but the excitement remained the same.

To dazzle its visitors, the Exhibition looked to international fairs that were quickly setting the standard for fairgrounds. Exhibits from the 1851 Great Fair in London to the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris to the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago showcased buildings in the latest architectural styles and materials. These structures were usually temporary – they were built specially for the Exhibitions, used for a few months, and then demolished shortly after the fairs closed. Toronto’s Exhibition was different: established specially to be a permanent fair, held every year in the exact same place.

A black and white photograph of the Crystal Palace, showing the building's main entrance.

The Early Years

From its earliest years, the Exhibition’s architecture was the face of the fairgrounds. Its organizers worked hard to keep that face looking fresh and impressive.

Before 1878, Toronto had smaller fairgrounds on King Street, which would house travelling agricultural fairs. To compete with them, the CNE was established on larger grounds along Dufferin Street. The new location and massive fair allowed the Exhibition to build permanent, sturdy buildings that could be used annually.

In the beginning, the Exhibition was mainly a cluster of modest wooden structures, standing at one or two storeys tall. Built in 1878, they largely echoed popular styles seen around Victorian Toronto, with their eclectic mixtures of Gothic and Second Empire detailing.

The Exhibition’s biggest attraction in the 1800s was the Crystal Palace. The massive domed building was built in 1858 on the old King Street fairgrounds. In 1878, the CNE moved the building to the Dufferin grounds to be the centrepiece of the Exhibition.

The Crystal Palace was architecturally distinct from the rest of the CNE – it was larger and built of glass and steel instead of wood. It was built to mimic the original Crystal Palace, built for the Great Exhibition in England in 1851. Designed by Joseph Paxton, the original Palace was an engineering, architectural, and artistic marvel. Its design was wildly popular and was replicated at exhibitions worldwide for decades.

A black and white photograph of the Transportation Building, showing the building's south and east entrances.

Trends Change

By the 1900s, the Exhibition grounds were feeling stale and dull. Exhibition officials sought a new look, and began a construction frenzy that lasted decades.

In 1902, the Exhibition’s first major change was heralded with the opening of the Manufacturer’s Building. The Manufacturer’s Building was the first of many designed by the architect G.W. Gouinlock.

Like the Crystal Palace before him, Gouinlock’s designs followed international trends in Exhibition architecture. This time, instead of English greenhouse-like structures of iron and glass, Gouinlock looked south to the United States and adopted the Beaux-Arts architectural style. The 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago had a strong hand in popularizing the Beaux-Arts style. That year, the Exposition debuted its “White City,” a collection of stately white-domed fair buildings arranged around neat landscapes. Gouinlock himself attended the fair and, like many other visitors to the White City, brought the Beaux-Arts style back home with him.

Under Gouinlock’s watchful eye, building after building popped up at Exhibition Place, all in the Beaux-Arts style. Even after Gouinlock stopped designing Exhibition buildings in the 1910s, the style lingered, featuring in buildings like the 1922 Coliseum or the 1927 Princes’ Gates.

Eventually, the Beaux-Arts style started falling out of favour at Exhibition Place. It was eclipsed by the Art Deco look in the late 1920s, which was also popularized in part by World Fairs. The CNE again worked hard to keep up with the trend: the style defined the new Automotive Building in 1929 and the Horse Palace in 1931.

Construction at Exhibition Place in the early twentieth century was rapid and efficient, but in the 1930s, it slowed, stuttered, and came to a halt. With the impacts of both the Great Depression and the Second World War, Exhibition Place featured fewer and fewer ambitious architectural projects. In 1931, the Horse Palace opened to the public, but the next new project, the Bandshell, wasn’t completed until five years later. Another new building wouldn’t be built until 1946, and the next not until 1954.

A black and white photograph of the Transportation in 1938, showing the building's temporary facade.

The Transportation Building Gets a Facelift

What happens when a fairground can’t offer new buildings? In the 1930s, the CNE had one solution.

In 1938, the Exhibition celebrated its Diamond Jubilee, marking 60 years since the grounds were first opened. To celebrate, the CNE unveiled a new look for the Transportation Building. 

Built in 1901, the building originally featured all the hallmarks of Beaux-Arts architecture. By the 1930s, however, the building wasn’t as stylish anymore, and once again, the CNE looked internationally for ideas to freshen it up.

The CNE hired an architect from that year’s Glasgow Exhibition to give the Transportation Building a temporary façade. For a mere $75,000 – much cheaper than a new building – the structure was encased with an asbestos cement shell that covered the building’s outdated curves and arches. The new exterior was sleek and clean, with wide expanses of blank white surface that looked very unlike the detailed ornamental walls it was covering. Both the streamlined look and the asbestos cement technology had been used extensively at the Glasgow Exhibition. 

The Transportation Building’s new look wasn’t meant to be permanent, and the bright white shell was removed for later exhibitions. The use of inexpensive false facades to create novelty at the CNE, however, lingered on.

A black and white photograph of the Pure Food Building, showing the building's false facade.

The Pure Food Building Follows Suit

Across the grounds, construction workers pasted another sleek new façade onto an Exhibition building.

The Pure Food Building’s facelift coincided with the alterations to the Transportation Building in 1938. Built in 1922, the Beaux-Arts structure originally boasted a brick and stone exterior with decorative arches and columns.

The Pure Food Building was one of the Exhibition’s most popular buildings, drawing thousands of visitors to its crowded stalls for food samples. By the 1930s, the building had already received an addition to expand exhibition space, and it was once again clamoring for more room. During interior renovations to the building in 1938, a new façade was added.

The Pure Food Building only received a façade on its front entrance, which slid right over the old archways. It was a streamlined design with an illuminated sign that read “FOOD. Although permanent, the Pure Food Building’s new façade closely resembled that of the Transportation Building. It was an unusual addition – stark white against an ornate brick building – but it remained on the structure into the 1950s, with its Beaux-Arts entrance hiding underneath. The CNE was turning over a new leaf and moving in a new architectural direction, and it had a new way to do it.

An architectural drawing showing the proposed alterations to the Manufacturers' Building, dated August 1939.

The Manufacturers’ Building

Cheap, simple, and flashy: false facades promised to be a game-changing way to revitalize older buildings.

Following the momentum of the 1938 season, CNE officials considered giving its other older buildings a facelift. In the summer of 1939, the CNE turned its attention east to the Manufacturers’ Building.

The CNE intended to give the 1902 Manufacturers’ Building a complete makeover, both inside and out, to bring it up to modern-day aesthetic trends. In 1939, the City’s Department of Buildings unveiled new designs for the building’s exterior, which featured smooth streamlined features to cover the older ornate façade. Costs were estimated to be between $15,000 and $30,000; although much lower than the price a new building, the plans were never carried out.

Construction stopped during the Second World War, and by 1945, aesthetic trends had shifted again. Designs became simpler and boxier, and modernist architecture was gaining ground in Toronto. In 1945, modernist architect Gordon Duern prepared a new set of designs for a false façade on the Manufacturers’ Building. These new drawings were even simpler than the previous – boxy and sleek, they would have spanned the building’s exterior.

Once again, the project fizzled. Instead of a full-body makeover, the Manufacturers’ Building received a smooth, modern façade to cover its front entrance in the late 1940s, just like the Pure Food Building.

But the enthusiasm for false facades, so strong in 1938, was waning. Before long, the pace of construction picked up again. For a time, it seemed like false facades at Exhibition Place would fade into obscurity entirely – but the idea cropped back up again in the 1960s with the Coliseum.

Peeling Back History

The Coliseum endured its false facades for over 40 years.

The CNE slowly stopped attaching false facades onto its buildings in the twentieth century. By 1997, the Coliseum was still wearing its second false façade, added to the building in the 1960s. It was the only structure still boasting a false façade: the Transportation, Pure Food, and Manufacturers’ Buildings had long since been demolished.

In 1997, the new National Trade Centre was built and attached to the Coliseum, trapping its southern wall inside the new building. Yet this time, the renovations weren’t another example of the CNE’s false facades. Instead of covering the Coliseum in another new entrance, the building’s old bricks were uncovered and restored.

Workers chipped away at the grey 1960s metal cladding, removing it piece by piece. The old 1922 entrance, featured so often on CNE postcards, was fully restored and incorporated into the $180-million trade centre’s Heritage Court. Just as an earlier round of renovations slapped a new face onto the Coliseum, a new round tore it back down again.

By the 1990s, the outlook towards old buildings had shifted. Big conservation movements had swept across North America in the 1960s and 1970s, which helped to prevent demolitions or massive alterations to historic buildings. The pendulum had swung; the buildings of the early twentieth century weren’t considered drab or outdated anymore. They were now special: worth maintaining and uncovering.

At Exhibition Place, an appreciation of old architecture uncovered the Coliseum’s old entrance. Moreover, its historic buildings are now an attraction : the grounds’ eclectic and grand architecture make the area a unique and popular spot to visit within the city. The architectural history of Exhibition Place shows that, sometimes, you never know what historic treasures could be hiding under a modern façade.

Resources

The History of Exhibition Place“, Exhibition Place Official Website. Updated November 4, 2024.

“Canadian National Exhibition.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, February 22, 2012.

Lorimer, James. The Ex: A picture history of the Canadian National Exhibition. Toronto: J. Lewis & Samuel, 1973.