FROZEN IN TIME

Can Billy Bishop passenger terminal - a national historic site-be saved?

- PATTY WINSA

Terminal A now sits in a section of the airfield with restricted access. It would have to be moved as part of any restoration project.

Alexander Younger was only 15, and learning to fly, when he first walked in to the island airport’s Terminal A, now one of the few historic buildings of its kind still standing in the world.

With its painted clapboard exterior and third-storey control tower, the squat building is a visual reminder of aviation’s roots in Toronto.

Its completion in 1939 coincided with the first commercial flight to land that year at what is now called the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, a chartered plane carrying Tommy Dorsey and his band, in town to perform at the Canadian National Exhibition.

So when a new terminal opened at the airport, and Terminal A was decommissioned, Younger’s instinct was to preserve a piece of the city’s past.

“I thought ‘Wouldn’t that be a great opportunity to save that building?’ ” said Younger, now a Toronto businessman who has restored historic residences with his wife, Sarah Richardson, an interior designer and TV host. “We love to save old historic buildings because Toronto has a bit of a habit of tearing them all down.”

A similar terminal, erected in 1939 at Malton Airport — now known as Toronto Pearson International Airport — was torn down in the ’60s.

Younger drew on a “dream team” of well-known Torontonians, and private investors, coming up with a plan to preserve the terminal, envisioning an event space and restaurant that would have commanding views of the city. The plan was to run a business that could sustain the upkeep of the building, but not at a profit.

But a decade later, despite the plan’s backing in principal by PortsToronto, which owns the airport, the 85-year-old building sits rotting at the south end of the airport.