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News release issued by the City of Toronto to mark the
20th Anniversary of Toronto City Hall

September 9, 1985

At the end of the week-long extravaganza of ceremonies, banquets, dances and parties that marked the opening of Toronto's present City Hall in September, 1965, an exhausted Mayor Phil Givens was heard by a reporter to exclaim: "Toronto will never be the same again."

Nothing the Mayor could have said on the occasion would prove to be as prophetic. Rising majestically between two icons of the City's nineteenth century architecture - Osgoode Hall to the west and Old City Hall to the east - the new City Hall defined modern Toronto, in its anticipated role as the ideal metropolis of the 1960s, '70s and '80s. It showed the world that the City was ready to abandon its "Hogtown" image forever.

Controversy surrounded the project from its beginning. The City recognized the need for a new civic administration building as early as the 1940s. The old City Hall, opened in 1899, inadequately housed the ever-growing numbers of municipal employees required for the operation of a City as large as Toronto. That inadequacy intensified with the establishment of the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto in 1953.

City Council approved funds for the acquisition of land for the new building and for an adjacent civic square in 1946. The chosen site generated the first wave of opposition to the building. The proposal required the demolition of two of the City's best-known landmarks - Shea's Hippodrome, a former vaudeville house on Bay Street, and the provincial government's handsome Beaux Arts Registry Office at the Albert and Chestnut Street intersection.

A newspaper reporter interviewed architecture students, who articulated the feelings of many Torontonians during the debate over the site. One denounced the neo-Classical Registry as "a 50-year old copy of a 2000-year old building"; another demanded to know why "a building valued at $200,000 should interfere with the plans for a $7 million-odd project." As a result, discussion of City Hall plans foreshadowed the great municipal political issues of the decades that followed: the conflict between factions supporting new development regardless of cost and those wishing to preserve the City's architectural past.

In a 1955 referendum, voters rejected the City's own design proposal for its new headquarters. Led by Mayor Nathan Phillips, an undaunted City Council decided to conduct an international architectural competition to determine the best concept for the building. This method had already found success in public building design in Toronto - the Old City hall resulted from a similar selection process.

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