On Tuesday, Sept. 30, 1873, readers of The Globe (not yet merged with The Mail) who turned over the paper’s front page and scanned to the bottom of the second might have noticed a small memo: The Bank of British North America had moved to its new premises at the corner of Yonge and Wellington streets in Toronto.
The new building at 49 Yonge St. housed a grand marble banking hall on the bottom floor and comfortable living space for the bank manager on top. Its three-storey facade of gold-coloured sandstone would have stood out against the city’s ubiquitous red brick.
The bank building still stands, a vestige of Toronto’s early banking era and an architectural landmark near the base of Yonge Street. Now, for the first time in 1½ centuries, the banking hall could once again have residents living over it.
The City of Toronto is currently considering a proposal to perch a 60-storey tower on top of the former bank, adding 256 residential units in an area where density is in high demand.
If accepted, the building’s renovation will fit into a long tradition of repurposing surviving bank buildings, a trend that is intensifying as architects consider the pressing need for housing, the environmental benefits of reusing building materials, and heritage preservation requirements.
The current proposal involves conserving most of the bank exterior and salvaging parts of the original banking hall, though the details of the zoning changes will be debated before the Ontario Land Tribunal in the spring of 2024.
With their ornamental designs, double-height banking halls and attractive corner-lot placements, historic bank buildings have remained popular locations for adaptive reuse projects, said David Pontarini, architect and co-founder of Hariri Pontarini Architects. “As Toronto has matured and become a global, high-rise-focused city, we’ve had to deal with the pressure of inserting new densities into these complex sites,” Mr. Pontarini said.
His firm was part of the team behind Massey Tower, a residential skyscraper on Yonge Street completed in 2019 that used part of a 1905 Canadian Bank of Commerce branch as its lobby. A similar condo project has been proposed to sit atop the 1958 Bank of Canada building at Queen Street and University Avenue.
The entrance to the Massey Tower skyscraper uses the front part of the old Canadian Bank of Commerce building.
Across the city, dozens of other former bank branches are living second lives as hotels, cafés, retail space and modern offices. The 1917 Bank of Montreal building at 302 Bay St. is being redeveloped as a co-working space, and the 1930 Dominion Bank branch at Yonge and Gerrard streets, recognized for its art-deco ornamentation, is awaiting a new retail tenant, having most recently held a cannabis store.
These remaining historic bank buildings provide a peek into the history of Canada’s financial industry, and illuminate Toronto’s evolution into Canada’s largest urban centre.
This building at 252 Adelaide St. W is the oldest building in Canada to have been built as a bank.
The oldest remaining purpose-built bank building in Canada is nestled behind a pair of trees a few blocks east of a busy stretch of Yonge Street, at the northeast corner of Adelaide and George streets.
When it was built in 1827, the resemblance of the Bank of Upper Canada to the houses of Toronto’s wealthy elite who made up the bank’s board of directors would have been clear to the local business community.
Today, the building holds offices for Orium, a software company. In its basement, the bank’s vault, with three-foot-thick brick walls, still forms part of the building’s foundation.
As Toronto evolved during the 1840s and 50s, the city’s architects began to explore Italian-inspired styles derived from British models. Banks that resembled private members’ clubs in England became particularly popular, and the new Renaissance architecture reflected the city’s growing mercantile and industrial success in the lead-up to the U.S. Civil War.
But for some Torontonians, the deviation from the staid Georgian style was too much. On Oct. 28, 1861, The Globe ran an unsigned letter to the editor opining on the design of a now-demolished Ontario Bank in the city’s financial district. The two Venetian-inspired carved faces, placed on either side of the front door, constituted a “criminal eyesore,” the reader said. “If not too late, something ought to be done in alteration.”
The Bank of British North America building at 49 Yonge St. was constructed at the start of a wave of Second Empire design craze in Toronto. Imported from France and the United States, the architectural style was a modern reflection of the entrepreneurial ambition sweeping the city after Confederation.
Toronto’s population swelled in the second half of the 19th century, as did the administrative and white-collar ranks. The sudden demand for office space in the core made real estate prices jump, and banks held on to prime locations and supplemented their income by offering space to rent in their upper storeys.
This is the case with the 1908 Birkbeck Savings and Investment Co. building at 10 Adelaide St. E., which offered several storeys of office space above its banking hall. Some of that space is still rented out today, while the rear administrative offices are now used by the Ontario Heritage Trust, a non-profit government agency.
But economic trouble was sweeping the Canadian financial system. During the 1910s and 20s, the banking industry underwent a period of intense consolidation, with dozens of mergers taking place and leaving just a handful of dominant large institutions, including BMO, Bank of Nova Scotia, Canadian Bank of Commerce and Royal Bank of Canada.
The early 20th century therefore became a period of rebuilding of bank headquarters, as they strove to keep up with the rapid growth of their staff and a long list of new administrative functions. This coincided with the period of early skyscrapers, which began to rise on both sides of Yonge Street.
Perhaps the most celebrated at the time was the Dominion Bank’s 12-storey headquarters at the southwest corner of Yonge and King streets, at that point the most prestigious intersection in the city’s financial core. The new bank, completed in 1914, took up a whole city block, then unprecedented for a single bank building.
The centrepiece was the bank’s double-height banking hall and sweeping entry space. Today, the bank is part hotel and part residence, with its banking hall and vault – at the time the largest in Canada – used for events and weddings.
Reactions to the new tall buildings were mixed. Canadian bankers enjoyed the comparisons to New York that the buildings elicited, but health professionals worried about the office density and shadows they cast. The skyscraper “freaks,” Toronto’s Dr. Charles Hodgetts said in a 1912 edition of the early 20th-century journal Construction, would “damn most fair Canadian cities.”
Banks also offered services through local branches, most often built in a style known as Edwardian Classicism. Between 1900 and 1920, the number of branches across the country leapt from 1,000 to 5,000, according to a feature on banking in the 1948 edition of The Canadian Encyclopedia.
Most of these branches were used for banking until the 1960s and 70s, when they came to be seen as at odds with the idea of a modern Toronto, said David Winterton, a bank building history expert and senior associate at ERA Architects.
“A lot of them got torn down and turned into modern branches, or were sold off,” he said. “But there was also a countermovement of people saying, ‘We can occupy these buildings. We don’t need to tear everything down.’”
As a result, many of these banks, often local landmarks, have been transformed into pubs, cafés and stores – a transformation that continues to this day.
The Chase Architecture offices at 2973 Lakeshore Blvd. E were once a BMO branch.
When Ava Janikowski, the owner of design firm Chase Architecture, was looking for a new office, a former BMO branch in suburban Etobicoke caught her eye. The building’s historic brick, symmetrical façade and lofty proportions drew her in, and the firm quickly began reinstating a historic-styled portico and removing the drop ceiling.
As bank buildings in Canadian financial districts are increasingly being demolished and replaced with modern offices, and as Canadians turn to online services instead of branches to carry out business, the bank buildings that remain offer a glimpse of the city’s financial and architectural past, she said.
“It’s definitely more expensive to maintain because of the high ceilings, so more volume of air to cool or heat. But the rewards are phenomenal,” Ms. Janikowski said. “People don’t perceive why, but when they enter an old bank, they just feel good.”
Urban design: More from The Globe and Mail
In cities across Canada, the pandemic exposed serious shortcomings in the design and use of public spaces such as parks. On this episode of the City Space podcast, Adrian Lee asks the experts what can be done differently.
Kelly Cryderman: Calgary office space is slowly bouncing back