Vacancy at Old City Hall

Opened at the turn of the century, Old City Hall was a costly, slow, and contentious civic endeavour.

When Toronto’s “new” City Hall officially opened in September 1899 to a crowd of twenty thousand people, the City Hall complex was one of the largest municipal buildings in North America. Its soaring 104-metre tower made it the tallest building in Toronto.

But the decade-long project had generated a rash of controversy, as construction ran more than a million dollars over budget and significantly behind schedule. The delays drew the ire of city councillors, who publicly repudiated architect E.J. Lennox and refused to pay for what they saw as illegitimate cost overages.

Some in the city considered it a white elephant, while others defended the building’s palatial size as “fifty years in advance of our needs.” In time, it came to be a consequential space in the cityscape. In addition to its civic functions, it has been the site of countless mass public gatherings over the decades, from war commemorations to royal visits to protests.

Yet for six decades, the building’s original purpose—the one from which it derives its name—has been supplanted by the modernist New City Hall built to the northwest in 1965. Since the city moved out, the main tenant of the building has been the Ontario Infrastructure and Lands Corporation, with other space leased to provincial courts and city-operated provincial offenses courts. 

In Spring 2025, the courts completed their move from Old City Hall to the new St. Lawrence Market North building on Front Street.

Future plans for Old City Hall have been somewhat vague for the better part of the last decade. In 2018, councillors overwhelmingly approved a proposal to create a flagship museum for the city, with space in the building also devoted to offices, retail space, a café, an expanded public library, and even a wedding chamber. 

Despite the enthusiasm apparent in a 35-3 vote, predicted costs of bringing the 125-year-old building into a state of good repair totalled in the hundreds of millions of dollars and momentum stalled. The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated budget constraints in 2020 only added to the delays.

By the mid-twentieth century, tastes in municipal architecture had shifted towards straight lines, sharp angles, and sleek silhouettes.

Old City Hall now enjoys provincial and federal heritage status and is widely embraced as a jewel of the cityscape. But Torontonians had complex feelings about their civic buildings in the mid-twentieth century. Many embraced the modernist design of the New City Hall with enthusiasm. The construction of Toronto’s new City Hall had been approved by a plebiscite that succeeded on a second attempt. According to the Globe and Mail, the victory was secured “only after it was made clear that the old hall would be [retained] for public use.” 

The search for a new building worthy of the metropolis ranged far. In 1958, the city hosted an international design competition and dozens of world renowned architectural firms submitted proposals for what a city hall of the future would look like. Finnish architect Viljo Revell won the competition, designing both the building we know today as New City Hall and the large public square that would come to bear the name of the mayor who oversaw the design competition, Nathan Phillips.

Was a Victorian relic standing in the way of Toronto becoming a truly modern city?

In the fall of 1964, The Globe and Mail noted the uncertainty surrounding Old City Hall’s fate once the new one was built. The newspaper reported that the Corporation of Metropolitan Toronto (“Metro”), which represented the City of Toronto and surrounding areas, had the power to dispose of the building in any way it wished, including by private sale rather than the promised public use.

This prompted an incensed reply from Toronto Daily Star columnist Robert Fulford, who placed Old City Hall within a grand architectural tradition running from H.H. Richardson to Frank Lloyd Wright. “Whatever the philistines on the Globe and Mail editorial page may believe, the 1890 City Hall is a distinguished building,” he wrote. “It has style, charm and presence, and it deserves to be preserved for its own qualities and for the history it embodies.”

But, as the City moved next door, the building faced a moment of existential peril. Ironically, the threat didn’t come from a Toronto that no longer needed its former municipal quarters. Instead, Eaton’s, a titan of Canadian retail business, was the powerful interest with demolition in mind.

Reports emerged that Eaton’s would take over Old City Hall, demolishing it to make room for a state-of-the-art shopping, office, and hotel complex.

Eaton’s first official bid to Metro proposed the demolition of the majority of the Old City Hall building, keeping only the clock tower and the First World War Cenotaph that stands out front. The proposal came from Toronto-based architects Mathers and Haldenby, who had just been selected for the University of Toronto’s new brutalist library, later known as Robarts Library. Early sketches show the clocktower standing like an obelisk alongside the New City Hall. Eaton’s officials offered it as part of an overall vision for “a vast network of underground malls.”

Architects would be among the first to take up the call of saving Old City Hall. The Toronto chapter of the Ontario Association of Architects sent a letter to Mayor Philip Givens urging him to prevent the sale and demolition and instead envision an expansive re-use for the building. Robert Fulford also took to his Star column to urge skepticism, “The most famous argument for demolition is that it’s not old enough. The point, surely, is that we won’t have any 100-year-old or 200-year-old buildings if we tear them down at age 66. In this case, my guess is that if the old City Hall can be saved for another 40 years or so, no one will dare lay a finger on it. It will then be a civic treasure.”

Eaton’s plans for the site started to falter when the Metro executive committee decided they would not agree to a sale of Old City Hall without seeing a full proposal for the new Eaton Centre and overall downtown redevelopment. This gave the people wanting to preserve the grand Victorian building for continued public use a glimmer of hope – and a chance to organize.

Advocacy groups fought Eaton’s redevelopment plans in an effort to save Old City Hall.

In late February 1966, the newly formed Friends of the Old City Hall organized a public rally in the hall’s council chamber. More than 400 people, including current and former officials and even a bagpiper, gathered in an urgent effort to block whatever Eaton’s was about to offer to defend “one of the world’s great buildings.”

The Friends’ chances of saving the building seemed slim. When Eaton’s finally presented its plan for a dizzying 22.5-acre complex of high-rises that would tower over the New City Hall and house the largest retail complex in the world, The Globe and Mail reported that, “the outcome seems inevitable. The old City Hall will come down and the centre will go up.” But the Friends vowed to continue their fight through the public hearings process.

By summer, the demolition of Old City Hall looked like it would go ahead once more, after Metro Council voted 16-5 to lease rather than sell the land to Eaton’s. There were still some sticking points, including what would happen with the Cenotaph and whether Eaton’s should be required to pay an additional amount for the land around it; the Council voted 12-8 that it should.

E.J. Lennox’s own granddaughter attended the packed meeting, which involved some nine hours of debate during which Mayor Givens criticized Old City Hall as a “dingy, discolored structure,” but Controller William Dennison countered that the Friends had cleaned off a section of the façade and found it “beautiful … it would match up with new buildings if it were given a bath and spruced up.”

Stymied by lukewarm support and red tape, Eaton’s decided to wash its hands of its ambitions to redevelop Old City Hall.

By the end of 1966, in part fueled by the support he garnered in defending Old City Hall, Controller Dennison defeated Mayor Givens in his bid for re-election. Officials of the City, Metro, and Eaton Centre took their discussions behind closed doors until the following spring when Metro Council learned that “the architecture of the final design would be entirely different from the box-like skyscrapers proposed in the initial plan.”

But in May 1967, Eaton’s stunned the city by announcing its abrupt withdrawal from the project. City officials made a last-ditch effort to save the project, but Eaton’s officials wouldn’t even take the meeting. The Eaton Centre project managing director had resigned in April. The company blamed “financial demands, red tape and lack of solid community and municipal support” that had made the project “economically unfeasible.”

It wasn’t the end of the project. Eaton’s went on to redevelop most of the land bound by Yonge, Bay, Queen and Dundas Streets—everywhere apart from the Old City Hall site—into a modified Eaton Centre, which opened in 1977. Although the shopping centre remains a fixture in the heart of the city’s downtown core, Eaton’s department store itself moved out due to bankruptcy in 1999. Now, only the name remains of the once-titanic company that seemed big enough to demolish a city hall.

Today, Old City Hall once again looks ahead to a period of vacancy.

In early 2025, the city published a Future Uses Analysis on the subject of Old City Hall, recommending that officials re-examine potential interim and long-term uses. Focus will be on increasing public access and interest, conserving the site, fostering local economic development, and achieving financial sustainability

Because it is listed as an Ontario Heritage Property and National Historic Site, Old City Hall is currently protected from outright demolition, just as its champions in the 1960s foresaw. But, as Ontario’s Bill 23 of 2022 demonstrates, designated landmarks can be de-registered by subsequent legislative action. This political reality underscores that the fate of heritage properties is never guaranteed once and for all. Instead, it is the continuing responsibility of each successive generation of civic stewards and citizens.

For now, every Torontonian who passes Old City Hall can enjoy the whimsical experience of seeing the carved-stone grotesques said to be the faces of aggrieved City Councillors from the 1890s: E.J. Lennox’s cheeky rebuttal to their public rebuke and refusal to pay him. It is an experience something like time travel, the opportunity to laugh at a joke made 125 years ago. As other local architectural gems like the Ontario Science Centre are under threat from the same sort of commercial redevelopment interests that once threatened Old City Hall, the chance to interact with a building in this way is a rare treat.