St Lawrence Hall - Survivors Building Toronto Ontario

 St. Lawrence Hall was built in 1850 as a meeting place for public gatherings, concerts and exhibitions. Restored to its original grandeur in 1967, the Hall with its three major rooms continues to serve as a breathtaking venue to inspired special occasions certain to make a lasting impression.

St. Lawrence Hall is a meeting hall in Toronto, Ontario, located at the corner of King Street East and Jarvis Street. It was created to be Toronto's public meeting hall home to public gatherings, concerts, and exhibitions. Its main feature was a thousand-seat amphitheater. For decades the hall was the centre of Toronto's social life, before larger venues took over much of this business. Today the hall continues as a venue for events including weddings, conferences, and art shows.

The location was previously part of the Market Square area, and had been the site of the first permanent market buildings. A fire in 1841 caused the northern portions of this building to be pulled down, leading to the building of the current St. Lawrence Market in 1850 a block south at what was then Palace Street, and today known as Front Street. The vacated area at the corner of King and Jarvis was in the heart of the growing community. The Renaissance Revival style building was designed by William Thomas.

It was here that prominent politicians such as John A. Macdonald and George Brown, Fathers of Confederation, addressed the people of Toronto. It was the main venue for musicians and other performers who came to the city. The lower levels were integrated into the market and were home to stores and businesses.

A third storey section of the building was known as St. Patrick Hall, an important meeting place for the Irish Catholic Benevolent Union.

William Thomas (c.1799-26 December 1860) was an architect of both England and Canada. He immigrated to Toronto with his wife and 10 children from Leamington Spa, England due to the economic crisis in 1837. After his emigration to Toronto, his career as a city engineer and architect prospered. One of his well-recognized successful works in architecture after his settlement is St. Lawrence Hall.
Thomas’ work was undoubtedly influenced by 16th-century Italian Renaissance architecture, the central Roman temple that consists of the pediment, four engaged Corinthian columns, and the three arches underneath very closely resemble the work of an Italian Classist architect, Andrea Palladio.

A public hall flanked by shops was built in 1831 as part of a rectangle of buildings making up York's market square. When York was incorporated as Toronto in 1834, the hall became the City Hall for a decade until its successor was built nearby. After the great fire of 7 April 1849 burned down much of the town centre, the area was revitalized by the construction of St. Lawrence Hall.

In 1967 it was designated a national historic site and restored as part of a centennial project in the City of Toronto.

In 1971 a planning board report and consultant recommended to the city that the South Market be demolished. But adamant citizen groups fought back and persuaded the city to renovate.

One wall of the original jail remains in the basement, says historian Bell, who is thankful the South Market and St. Lawrence Hall didn’t become prey to the “urban knockdown in the 1950s and 1960s” when “25,000 historical buildings” in the city were torn down.

Around 1900, the ground floor was home to a branch of the Dominion Bank and a stove and furnce store. The arched entrance at the centre led to a small shopping arcade. Image: Toronto Public Library, E 10-79.

As planned by architect Thomas, the ground floor was leased to retailers. There were stores on either side of the indoor shopping arcade and also facing the surrounding streets. 

Early photos show gigantic signs for businesses such as the Toronto Tea Company and Graham’s Temple of Fashions crowding the fine, if eccentric, architectural detailing.

Much of the space on the east side of the building was leased to the Irish Catholic Benevolent Union, which advertised its presence with a sign for “St. Patrick’s Hall.”

 

Among the notable features of the exterior are columns that are a close copies of those used on the ancient Temple of Jupiter Stator in Rome. ( Survivor Style)

 Closer to the ground, on King Street, a number of carved men’s faces peer out from the sides of the building, representing fictional deities of Lake Ontario, the Niagara, and St. Lawrence rivers.

Near the roof, also facing King Street, the figure of Britannia, an Indigenous man with bow and quiver, and the crest of the Royal Arms of England form the City of Toronto coat of arms. The city’s motto at the time, “Industry, Intelligence, Integrity,” is carved below.

The building was topped with a public clock connected to a 966-kilo bell that chimed the hour. In the 1850s, this timekeeping device was a critically important piece of infrastructure.

Before affordable watches, the clocks at St. Lawrence Hall and Union Station were among the few ways of knowing the time of day on the street with any degree of accuracy. 

Scientists at the observatory at University College send a signal to the town’s fire halls when the sun approached its peak at 11:55 am.

In September 1964, the Ontario Municipal Board approved the city’s $1.2-million plan to purchase land around the Hall with $750,000 of that amount earmarked for the restoration of old building.

The St. Lawrence Hall was constructed over the period 1850-1851 on a site at the southwest corner of King and Jarvis Sts. that at the time was in the very heart of the young city.

The Field of Gold - 5500 Daffodil Garden in Aurora

   

 

The Arboretum follows a green space from Wellington Street to St. John side road. It has pave and unpaved trails, lovely bridges and a large variety of flowers, trees and shrubs, and native species. It is home to butterflies, song birds and small mammals.

 Daffodil Garden is apparently 3 years old (2017) a beautiful initiative of volunteers from Aurora belonging to Aurora Community Arboretum

A large memorial daffodil garden .

October 29th 2017 an enthusiastic group of volunteers planted 1,000 daffodil bulbs in the Arboretum. This will bring a grand total of 5,500 daffodils in the Field of Gold.

   

The trail continues north and eventually joins the Tom Taylor trail in Newmarket. You can follow the Tom Taylor trail north beyond Green Lane to the Rogers Reservoir. 

 

The 100 acre park has other facilities such as playground for children and baseball diamonds and soccer fields. There is also a community center that has a gym, a pool and a hockey rink open all year round.

 

Like much of the land in York Region, this was forested land before the settlers came and actively farmed the area. The Aurora Community Arboretum aims to help restore some of that former forest grandeur.

 

The idea for the Aurora Arboretum began about 1995 and it was established in 1996. The primary focus of the individuals working on the project at that time was to plant caliper trees as memorials. These first plantings are located in the valley of the East Holland River, just west of the Aurora Town Hall. The planting of the memorial trees (as of 2007 called Commemorative Trees) is done under Adopt-a-Park Agreements with the Town of Aurora.

 

 A 200 years old healthy tree was cut April 2017. here is the result. These old trees should be protected even tough the carved sculpture is beautiful. That was a tree older that the town itself.

 

 

Links

 

http://www.auroraarboretum.ca/get-involved/commemorate

 

Ontario’s Housing Cooling Intentions in April 2017 means More Taxes and More Government Control and Targeting Real Estate Industry

The Ontario government on Thursday announced a series of measures, including a tax on foreign buyers and expanded rent control, aimed at curbing the city’s soaring real estate prices. Home prices in the Toronto region rose 6.2 percent in March, the biggest one-month gain on record, according to a benchmark price index by the Canadian Real Estate Association, and jumped almost 30 percent in the past 12 months.

The Ontario government on Thursday announced a series of measures, including a tax on foreign buyers and expanded rent control, aimed at curbing the city’s soaring real estate prices. Home prices in the Toronto region rose 6.2 percent in March, the biggest one-month gain on record, according to a benchmark price index by the Canadian Real Estate Association, and jumped almost 30 percent in the past 12 months.

Non-resident speculation tax

The center piece of Ontario’s new housing strategy is a 15-per-cent tax on home purchases by foreign buyers in the Greater Golden Horseshoe, from the Niagara region to Peterborough.

The measure, which resembles Vancouver’s foreign-buyers tax, will apply to most buyers who aren’t citizens or permanent residents, as well as foreign companies. It will take effect as of April 21, 2017.

About 8 per cent of home buyers in Greater Toronto are non-residents, according to the province.

Under the tax, non-residents will need to prove that they have a legitimate reason for buying property in Ontario that goes beyond investing. The tax is not aimed at new Canadians, according to Premier Kathleen Wynne. It will be reimbursed to buyers who become permanent residents within four years of a sale, and won’t apply to international students enrolled full-time for at least two years or someone who has been legally working in Ontario for at least one year. To qualify for a rebate, the property must also be considered someone’s principal residence.

“Most banks can’t survive a 50 percent drop in real estate values, It’s going to come down, and a lot of people are going to get hurt.”

Expanding rent control

Among the most controversial moves announced Thursday is a plan to bring all private rental apartments under the province’s rent-control regime, which currently only covers buildings completed before November, 1991. Rent hikes across the board will be held to around inflation, and capped at 2.5 per cent a year, although landlords can still apply for special increases if they do renovations or upgrades. Rents can be raised when a tenant moves out.

Expanded rent control could affect the condominium market. Many people buy condos with the thought of renting them out, hoping to sell or move in later. If what they can get from rent falls, they are less likely to buy in the first place and developers are less likely to build. So the result of expanding rent controls could be to reduce the supply of new housing. That is the very opposite of what a city in the grip of an affordability crunch needs.

New York brought in “temporary” rent control during the Second World War. It has stayed in place in various forms ever since, with a predictable outcome. As Mr. Tal puts it in his report, “Roughly half of the apartments in the city are under rent control, the other half is constantly under-supplied with a clear impact on prices.”

The result is a two-class housing system. Tenants hang on for decades to cheap, often crumbling rent-controlled apartments while everyone else scrambles to find a decent place.

Development charge rebate

In Toronto, development charges for new apartments can run up to $24,638 a unit. A $125-million, five-year program to rebate a portion of development charges aims to spur the construction of new apartment buildings. The government says it will work with municipalities to target projects where the need is greatest.

While developers welcome the rebate, some question its efficacy. Mr. Chalmers says any rebate helps, but he thinks the funding might be spread too thin. “It doesn’t seem like a ton of money to me over a province the size of Ontario.”

Vacant homes tax

The threat of dark condos downtown, or million-dollar-plus homes lying empty in the suburbs, has prompted widespread concern. The province is giving Toronto and certain other municipalities the required taxing power to target vacant homes.

Vancouver just brought in a similar tax, but it remains unclear what effect it will have.

Toronto officials are now studying utility data to come up with a more accurate number than a rough estimate of 65,000 of empty houses from census data.

Tax fairness for new apartment buildings

Tenant groups and landlords agree on few things, but one of them is that apartment buildings are taxed unfairly.

In Toronto, they pay a property tax rate around 2.7 times what a taxpayer with a comparable single-family home pays. Landlords pass those costs onto tenants.

Toronto’s tax ratio has come down slowly, but is not scheduled to achieve balance for several years. In some other municipalities, multi-residential buildings are taxed even more steeply. This year, the province froze tax rates on apartment buildings, mandating a zero-per-cent increase.

Provincial land for affordable housing

Sitting to the east of Toronto’s downtown core is a chunk of empty provincially owned land in the West Don Lands, near the Don River.

Mayor John Tory has been demanding Queen’s Park make the land, and other surplus government real estate like it, available for affordable housing.

Aurora Ontario History

The Aurora Site, also known as the "Old Fort," "Old Indian Fort," "Murphy Farm" or "Hill Fort" site, is a sixteenth-century Huron-Wendat ancestral village located on one of the headwater tributaries of the East Holland River on the north side of the Oak Ridges Moraine in present-day Whitchurch–Stouffville, approximately 30 kilometres north of Toronto.

This Huron ancestral village was located on 3.4 hectares (8.4 acres) of land and the settlement was fortified with multiple rows of palisades. The community arrived ca. 1550, likely moving en masse from the so-called Mantle Site located nine kilometres to the south-east in what is today urban Stouffville.

The Aurora/Old Fort site is located at the south-east corner of Kennedy Road and Vandorf Side Road, east of the hamlet of Vandorf in the town of Whitchurch–Stouffville. The Aurora site was occupied at the same time as the nearby Ratcliff site.

The Rouge River trail, used by the Huron and then later by the French to travel between Lake Ontario and Lake Simcoe / Georgian Bay, ran through the Aurora site.

"Perhaps the busiest and best documented of these routes was that which followed the Humber River valley northward ... although another trail of equal importance and antiquity and used earlier than the former by the French, extended from the mouth of the Rouge River northward to the headwaters of the Little Rouge and over the drainage divide to the East Branch of the Holland River at Holland Landing."

The Aurora/Old Fort site was indiscriminately looted by collectors throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. An 1885 report on Whitchurch Township notes that two thousand interments took place on the site, and that another smaller burial site was found two hundred yards from the site beside a large pond.

The self-trained archaeologist William Brodie wrote two archaeological reports on his findings at the Old Fort site (1888; 1901) dating back to his first visit in 1846. In reference to the Old Fort site, Brodie wrote in 1901:

"To say that a ton of archaeological material was collected from the County of York sites, is a moderate estimate. Some of it is in European museums, some in the States, and some of it in Laval University, some of it is still in the hands of amateur collectors, and a little of it has been secured for the Provincial Museum, but the greater part of it, once in the keeping of private collectors, is gone, being collected and lost, as private collections often are."

A complete map of the site was produced in 1930 by the amateur archaeologist Peter Pringle.

The Aurora/Old Fort site was completely excavated in 1947 and 1957 by the University of Toronto. The 1947 dig was the first student excavation by the university, and it was led by John Norman Emerson. Emerson's doctoral work was largely based on the excavations of the Aurora/Old Fort site.

This excavation contributed to the conclusions of archeologists and anthropologists that the Wendat coalesced as a people in this area, rather than further east in the St. Lawrence River valley, as was thought at one time. Findings in the late twentieth century at the Ratcliff Site and in 2005 at the Mantle Site have provided more evidence of sixteenth-century settlements by ancestral Wendat in this region.

 From Aurora excavation 6 pictures (items) are available on internet.

High Taxes in Aurora Ontario Canada

When visitors come to northern York Region, there isn’t a hotel or motel for them to stay at in Aurora.

Development charges, or DCs as they are commonly called, are the fees developers have to pay municipalities to fund growth-related costs such as roads, water and sewer pipes, transit and recreation facilities.

While DCs aren’t the only consideration when someone is looking to build a new hotel, York’s high fees are a significant reason why Aurora is having trouble attracting a new hotel.

Building a 90-unit hotel in Ajax would cost $831,000 in development charges, he said. In Toronto, it would cost $868,000, while in Milton, the fees would come to $1.2 million.

That same hotel in Aurora would costs $2.8 million in regional and town DCs.

Arguing the region does have a program that gives hotel developers small financial relief, regional chairperson Wayne Emmerson urged Councillors not to focus on one industry before the region reviews its entire development charges structure in June 2017.

The taxes for a commercial Property in Aurora of 1,975 Sq Ft are $6,250. This are outrageous high. This taxes are taken from MLS listings 2017

The taxes for land only 0.9 Acres in Aurora are Taxes:$6,624.58 This info is from a MLS listings 2017.

5.05 Acres in Aurora are taxed at $15,387.80 per year.

Isn't the government charging too much in your opinion? The services offer in exchange are not reflecting the high price of taxation. 

Type of Estates

As English society evolved, the "incidents of tenure" (i.e., obligations to the lord) became regularized, and decreased over time. By the time Canada inherited British property law, the only incident of tenure left was "Escheat", that is, when a tenancy ends, the land reverts back to the lord. Even today, when someone dies without an heir, their land becomes property of the Crown (i.e., the government).

With the passage of the Tenures Abolition Act in 1660, although all land was still technically owned by the Crown, peasants could buy and sell their rights to the land they were living on, as well as pass it on by will or by gift. This type of property right became known as an "estate in free and common soccage" or a "free estate". This is why property rights over land are known as "real estate".

An "estate", in English medieval legal parlance, was an amount of time over which one held property rights. There are three types of estate: Fee simple, fee tail and life estate.

Fee Simple

This is the most prevalent type of common law estate. It is what most people think of when they speak of "owning" land. Although the land is technically owned by the Crown, the holder of fee simple can use the land, exclude others from it, and dispose of it.

Under fee simple, the rights to land transfer automatically from the holder of the fee simple to his heir. The holder of the rights in fee simple can grant the land to someone other than his heir. In order to do this, he must use the phrase to [the new owner] and his heirs. Any other phraseology will not legally transfer fee simple by grant. It will instead be regarded as a "life estate" 

Life Estate

The other main type of estate is the life estate. Very simply, this means that someone holds the rights to the land for the duration of his life, after which it reverts back to the owner in fee simple or his heirs. For instance, an elderly landowner might remarry late in life. He may then wish to leave the estate to his new wife for the remainder of her life; when she dies, the land will revert to his heirs, rather than her heirs.

There is no particular phraseology required to grant a life estate. Something such as "to X for life" is usually sufficient. If the phrase "to X and his heirs" is not used, then the transfer is presumed to be a life estate.

Fee Tail

Fee tail is a rare estate, abolished in Canada everywhere except for Manitoba, in which only the lineal heir may inherit land. One can only transfer one's property rights in the land for as long as one lives; afterwards, the property rights revert to one's lineal descendents. This limits how land can be bought and sold, therefore reducing the value of the land.