[thistleclub]

Their Town expands on the Century 21’s backstory :

“As early as 1959, developer Alf Frisina purchased property on the corner of Main and Catharine Streets, across from the site of what was to become Terminal Towers. Frisina had come to Canada from Italy in 1950 with virtually no assets and for several years had worked as a contractor. Eventually, he accumulated enough capital to purchase the land and start the planning of a twenty-storey office building (which would have been the city’s tallest building at the time), but he could not arrange financing. Over the years he added to his property and his dreams grew bigger. In 1969 it seemed as if the financing was all arranged and a large billboard was put up, announcing that the project would be completed in August 1971. Again the deal fell through when Frisina could not find enough tenants to go ahead.

Members of city council favoured this project, believing that it would help stimulate development of the downtown, and a group of council members began negotiating with Frisina. Finally in January 1972 council agreed to rent 15,000 square feet of office space at $8.33 a square foot, or $125,000 a year, an amount well above rental rates at the time. On the basis of this incentive Frisina was able to get the rest of the mortgage money for the project. However, as Century 21 began construction it was announced that it had again grown in size. Now the building was to be a forty-five storey, $10 million project with ten floors of office space and thirty-five floors of apartments which were to rent from $200 to $1,000 a month. On the ground floor and basement there were to be stores and a recreation centre, and on the forty-fifth floor a restaurant-nightclub.

By 1974, in the midst of construction, problems were multiplying for the Frisina project. The city’s decision to rent space in the building was overturned by the Ontario Municipal Board. Vic Copps tried to come to the developer’s aid. In April 1974 he met with then Ontario Attorney General Robert Welch to discuss a proposal to expand the provincial court into the Century 21 tower. In his usual frank manner Copps said at the time that he “wanted to give the developer a hand to find tenants for his building,” but his efforts failed.

A month later, in May 1974, both Frisina and the developers of Civic Square, Yale, were engaged in an attempt to attract the new regional government offices. Finally, with the help of his political friends, Frisina was able to win the contract at $6.31 a square foot, a considerable drop from the $8.33 a square foot once offered by the city.

Despite all of these subsidies the Frisina project went bankrupt in the summer of 1977. By that time the financial affairs of Century 21 were in a hopeless state. There were still 100 apartment units that had never been rented, most of the retail space was still unoccupied, much of the office section of the building had never been completed, and a tenant was never found for the restaurant-nightclub.”