Vol. 51, No. 2 - Spring/Summer 2021

The Well, a luxury condominium Tridel is building on Front Street where the Globe and Mail dwelt for years, will have the deepest swimming pool in Canada.

The basement pool will be six storeys deep – but there’ll be no swimming. Its 2 million gallons of water will be used instead to cool and heat a dozen other buildings in the neighbourhood.

The Tridel condo is one segment of what may be the largest construction project in Ontario. Four large developers are creating the mixed-use complex with at least 3 million square feet. It’ll have seven different tall towers for rental apartments, ownership suites, office towers, interior park space and a mall with retail space and entertainment facilities.

And Enwave Energy Corp. has gouged out a six-storey reservoir below The Well’s six-storey-deep parking garage and truck delivery ramps to hold 2 million gallons of cold water from deep in Lake Ontario. The
reservoir is lined with concrete. The lake water will cool and heat the floor space in the complex, plus it will do the same for future buildings, plus existing buildings in the city’s King/Spadina quadrant.

Enwave’s lake water already cools heats and supplies drinking water to 700 customers in 95 large buildings in the city core, said company president Carlyle Coutinho. “There is going to be a lot of new development
in the King/Spadina district and the entertainment district so we are adding new technology and resources with our reservoir at The Well to service those potential new clientele,” said Coutinho.

Enwave first put three pipes five kilometres out into Lake Ontario in 1980 to a depth of 43 metres (271 feet) to draw in cold water to cool Toronto’s principal hospitals stretched along University Ave. The firm has since
expanded to service most major buildings in the city’s core. The system has reduced the electrical bills of those buildings by up to 80 per cent and eliminated massive tonnage of
CO2 pollution from the atmosphere.

As well as Tridel creating two residential towers 33 and 38 storeys tall at The Well complex, RioCan REIT is putting up two rental buildings including the tallest in the entire project at 46 storeys, Allied also has a rental tower. There’ll be more than 1,700 residences in the finished project as well as a large retail mall with restaurants and entertainment facilities.

The Well gets its name partially from the project’s north side fronting onto Wellington Street and the developers contending you’ll live well in the community they’ve planned at 440 Front Street from where the Globe and Mail was published for years.

The Globe and Mail took over the property and its presses with the demise of the Toronto Telegram in 1971. Telegram owner John Bassett had built new headquarters for his 95-year-old newspaper in 1963 at 440 Front Street. Today the Globe and Mail operates out of 351 King Street East.

Currently the south side of The Well faces onto Front Street and beyond that onto the expansive rail corridor feeding into Union Station. The city proposes to cover the wide railway corridor with a magnificent 20-
acre park running from Bathurst Street east to Blue Jays Way just before the trains enter
Union Station.

And on the north side of Rogers Place where the Blue Jays will eventually again play baseball, Oxford Properties proposes to create a $3.5 billion mixed-use development called Union Park.

Included in the Oxford design is yet another rail deck park. The 3-acre park covering the rail yard in front of the Oxford site would actually be a contiguous addition to a 20-acre park starting at Bathurst.

The 4-acre Union Park site is proposed to have four towers 58 and 48-storey office buildings connected by a central atrium — and two residential rental buildings with about 800 units in 54 and 44-storey towers.