Trading Spaces

For a time, it was known simply as “the skyscraper.” At 180 feet, it was twice as tall as the stately King Edward Hotel around the corner, though still shorter than the clock tower at Toronto City Hall. Built with 1,700 tons of steel, millions of rivets, and 10,000 barrels of Canadian Portland cement, and with innovative heat-activated doors on each floor and its own standpipes, it was considered fireproof. Some celebrated its rise above Hogtown, while others lamented the scourge of monstrous structures it portended.

Edmund Burke, the president of the Ontario Society of Architects, “deplored the fact that Toronto has at last been invaded by its first skyscraper,” the Globe reported on January 17, 1906, one month after the Traders Bank of Canada moved into its new $750,000 headquarters at 67 Yonge Street. Burke and his colleagues were even more irritated by the firm tapped to design the building, Carrère and Hastings, which had previously overseen the New...