The St. Lawrence Market Neighbourhood is one of TORONTO’s smartest. It has excellent transit, an award-winning indoor market, theatres, cafes, restaurants, many historic buildings, a cathedral and several hotels. It’s prime real estate, and that’s why Vancouver’s Concert Developments has chosen to build a 58-storey luxury tower at 88 Scott Street.

Concert is giving the city $3-million for Berczy Park upgrades; a further $1.3-million to widen sidewalks; and $200,000 for art in the park. There’ll be a gravel area for dogs, a water fountain that uses recycled rain water, tree canopies and sculpture.Best news of all, the Berczy Park project is underway. There are shovels in the ground as local politicians are fond of saying.

88 Scott Street is being constructed on the former site of the 1951 Royal Sun Alliance building. Its facade was dismantled and preserved, and will form 88 Scott’s podium of retail and commercial spaces.  Berczy Park is named after WILLIAM BERCZY (1744-1813), an Upper Canada pioneer and painter. Born in Germany, he sailed to Canada in 1792, opening a business in YORK (now TORONTO). Berczy was a surveyor, architect and painter. He cleared part of the TORONTO townsite, erected houses and a magazine, built 15 miles of Yonge Street and 30 miles of roads in MARKHAM township, and cleared 24 miles of the Rouge River waterway for navigation.  He was stranded in NEW YORK CITY during the WAR OF 1812, died there, and is buried in TRINITY CHURCH in the WALL STREET district.

  <ABOVE – ‘The Battle of Trafalgar’ by William Berczy/1806, Hudson Bay Company’s art collection; a re-imagined Berczy Park by Claude Cormier + Associates>