I was driving down St Clair West yesterday and I noticed that Urbancorp had erected a marketing sign on their site at 836 St Clair Ave West (former Hungarian House) and was in the midst of constructing a sales office.
The project is called The Homes of St. Clair West and it looks like it’ll be a promising set of semi detached houses. However, if you look at the City of Toronto’s Development Application website, the site shows a mixed use project with almost 100,000 square feet of residential space and roughly 12,000 square feet of retail space.
I’m not sure how to reconcile what’s planned for site, but I have two things to say:
First, I think it’s a damn shame that the Hungarian House was even torn down in the first place. I’m not exactly sure when it was built, but I thought it was an interesting building with lots of potential to be incorporated into a new mixed use project. We really need to get better at preserving the history that we do have in this city.