Toronto becoming a hollow city of lost histories

In Toronto, we often pride our selves on being a city that cherishes its past while embracing the future.

- ERIC RODRIGUES

But take a stroll through many of our neighbourhoods, and you might wonder if our reverence for history is merely skin-deep - quite literally. Façadism, the practice of preserving only the front of a historic building while gutting or demolishing the rest, has become the go-to move for developers eager to pay lip service to heritage conservation. The result? A cityscape that feels more like a movie set than a living, breathing urban environment.

Over the past decade, the trend has grown from a peculiar exception to a disheartening norm. Façadism, we're told, is a compromise between preserving the past and making way for the future. But when we strip away the rhetoric, what are we left with? A hollow shell that serves as a nostalgic backdrop for gleaming glass towers, with little to no regard for the soul of the buildings we're supposedly conserving.