HTML clipboard  College Park, a historical Art-Deco downtown Toronto landmark, offers rental apartments, commercial office space and a vibrant retail shopping mall, with renowned vendors, such as, “DeBoers” and “Winners”, restaurants and a premiere entertainment venue “The Carlu”.
GWL Realty Advisors has built a reputation as a premiere property manager dedicated to serving the distinct needs of its tenants.
ONESERVE TENANT SERVICES
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Building Features:
Central Toronto location.
Direct subway access.
Variety of shops, services and restaurants.
Underground and surface parking.
24-hour on-site security staff.
Live, work and shop at one convenient location.
Leading edge communication capabilities.
College Park is a shopping mall, residential and office complex located on the southwest corner of Yonge Street and College Street in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. An Art Deco landmark, the building was built between 1928 and 1930 by the Eaton's department store, and was designed by Ross and Macdonald (in association with Henry Sproatt), the Montreal architectural firm that also designed the Royal York Hotel and Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, the Château Laurier Hotel in Ottawa, and the Montreal Eaton's store.
Eaton's began secretly assembling land at Yonge and College Streets in 1910 for a new store. The First World War put the plans on hold, but Eaton's retained the land. During the 1920s, plans were made to shift all Eaton's operations from their existing location at Yonge Street and Queen Street West to the College Street site. Eaton's even offered to sell part of its landholdings to its main competitor, Simpson's, in an effort to shift the heart of Toronto retailing northward and to preserve the synergy created by having two retail giants next to one another. The effort was unsuccessful, and Simpson's chose instead to expand its Queen Street store.
In 1928, Eaton's announced plans for the largest retail and office complex in the world to be constructed on the site, featuring 5,000,000 square feet (465,000 square metres) of retail space and a 38-storey New York-style skyscraper. Just as the war had intervened a decade earlier, however, the Great Depression curtailed the grandiose plans for the site. The first phase of the project, a department store of 600,000 square feet (56,000 square metres), was the only part of the complex that was ever built. On October 30, 1930, the new store was opened by Lady Flora McCrea Eaton, the matriarch of the Eaton Family, and her son John David Eaton, the future president of the company.
Even though the rest of the complex was never constructed, the new store was nonetheless a true retail palace, the likes of which had never been seen in Toronto, and was a testament to the retail dominance of the Eaton's chain at that time. Tyndall limestone and granite were used for the imposing exterior, and marble was imported from Europe for the interior columns and colonnade. Lady Eaton arranged for two entire rooms to be removed from two manor houses in England and reassembled in the furniture department of the College Street store. The French architect Jacques Carlu (who later designed the Rainbow Room in New York City and the Eaton's Ninth Floor (or the "9ième") in Montreal), was retained to design the interior of the Eaton's Seventh Floor, including the 1300-seat Eaton Auditorium and the elegant Round Room restaurant. Itself an Art Moderne masterpiece, the Eaton's Seventh Floor was at the heart of Toronto's cultural life for many years. The Auditorium played host to the major performers of its day, including Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, and the National Ballet of Canada. Canada's own Glenn Gould, fond of the Auditorium's excellent acoustics, used the hall for a number of his recordings.
The focus of Eaton's College Street, as the store was known, was on furnishings and housewares, although the latter were very broadly defined. In fact, Eaton's boasted that the store was "the largest furniture and house furnishings store in the British Empire". The larger Eaton's Main Store, only a few blocks south on Yonge Street, was never closed, as had been originally intended in the 1920s, and Eaton's ran a shuttle bus between the two stores for two decades until the Toronto subway opened in 1954.
Contact:
444 Yonge Street
Mezzanine
Toronto, Ontario
M5B 2H4
Tenant Services
t. 416.260.2144
f. 416.260.9824
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