Victory Building - Toronto, Ontario - Art Deco - Art Nouveau on Waymarking.com

(Text taken from Torontoist.com)

Falk and Baldwin had “investigated the most recent advances in engineering and architectural design,” according to The Star, “with a view to making the Victory building the last word in beauty and efficiency.” Designed to rise twenty-six storeys with stepped-back floors near the apex, it was to be the tallest all-concrete structure in the Empire. With Art Deco’s emphasis on mass and contour, rather than distracting decoration, all its lines were meant to draw the eye upwards. The Victory Building would revel in its own strength and height and reflect the confidence and exuberance of the era. The skyscraper was to be, Falk said, “as much the triumph of the engineers as of the architects.”
The Victory Building became a symbol of its age, though not as Falk anticipated. After the stock market crash in the autumn of 1929, construction halted. For the next eight years, The Globe said, the ghost tower stood “on the city’s skyline as a none too pleasant reminder of boom days, depression and broken hopes.” Like Casa Loma and the Park Plaza Hotel at Avenue and Bloor, the Victory Building was “a scar on civic pride.”

Construction of the Victory Building progressed rapidly through the summer of 1929, with the superstructure completed to about the twentieth floor and the brickwork to the seventeenth, by late October. Then, with the crash, construction ground to a halt. And, leaving tools and building supplies where they fell, workers abandoned the site almost overnight. All the scaffolding, wooden forms and other woodwork were left in place. Rumours swirled through real-estate circles that the foundations were slipping or worse. Falk fervently denied the rumours, and claimed to be redesigning certain elements of the top six storeys. By the end of November, he admitted that there’d been financial difficulties—on the part of the underwriter, not him—but he remained optimistic that work would soon resume and the building would be complete on schedule.
Despite his bravado, the Victory Building eventually went into liquidation, with the Royal Trust Company acting as trustees.

Relief for the bondholders finally arrived in June 1936 when the sale of the Victory Building to ship-owner and financier Alfred R. Roberts for only $110,000—plus $5,000 for mechanics lien holders—was approved by Osgoode Hall. Construction resumed that September with a compromised design—scaled back to only twenty-one storeys, removing the set-back pinnacle, and with a much more modest decorative scheme.
Instead of Goodelman’s ornamentation, the lower portion of the building was faced in green bowacord granite with Briarhill sandstone trim. While Roberts didn’t rechristen the tower, he decided the name was better as a reference to Lord Nelson’s famous flagship than to the Great War. So instead of Goodelman’s imposing statue, the lobby had a nautical motif. A model of the H.M.S. Victory was cut into the marble floor; anchors, ship’s wheels, and compass points graced the ornamental ceilings; and ship-inspired radiator grilles adorned the main vestibule.
While Roberts altered Falk’s intended artistic theme, he certainly didn’t change his intentions for the skyscraper. A thoroughly modern office tower—purported to be the first such building in Canada to be air conditioned throughout—the Victory Building also featured open-concept floors, special acoustical treatment of the ceilings to reduce noise, and four high-speed, automatic elevators.
Surpassing all expectations in the middle of the Great Depression, nearly 80% of the office space had already been leased by the time the first tenants moved in on April 1, 1937. Locals were also attracted—motivated in part by curiosity to see inside the building that had stood vacant for so many years and by the novelty of air conditioning during that summer’s heat wave.

Style: Art Deco Structure Type: Other Architect: Baldwin and Greene Date Built: 1937 Supporting references: Not listed

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