Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
That said, Chicago and Toronto, two eminently fine great lakes cities, have the two largest skylines in NA, after NYC of course, and that will forever be a point of interest to me.
Why?
Why two great lakes cities?
No one has ever come anywhere even remotely close to explaining that.
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It may be a coincidence that they’re both Great Lakes cities. I don’t know about Chicago, but the story of high rises in Toronto is really a story of residential high rises, and Toronto only really started to build apartment buildings taller than 10 stories in the mid 1950s.
Aside from the racial differences, Toronto’s first crop of residential high rises were aimed at middle class professionals and were placed in the more desirable Yonge street north corridor, along the newly built subway line.
Ironically, Toronto being highly resistant to apartment buildings in the prewar era might have made high rise apartments desirable, since these purpose-built apartments in solid concrete buildings responded to a dire need for a form of housing that would have, up until then, only been available by carving up old wood frame housing into multiple units.
So, the high rise has always just been more desirable in Toronto than in other North American cities, and given Toronto’s growth, it was only a matter of time before really talk residential high rises aimed at the middle classes became acceptable. For example, the Manulife centre, built in 1974, was probably the only 50+ storey all-residential building outside of NYC and Chicago when it was built.