Credit: Alyssa Pankiw

If one were to slot Toronto’s most significant developers into cute categories, Eve Lewis would have to be the scholar.

Towards the end of a conversation, sitting in her relatively modest office in the relatively modest headquarters of Woodcliffe Corporation, I asked Eve Lewis, president, CEO and widow of founder Paul Oberman, what her favourite new building is.

It’s an unfair question. It’s like asking a chef what their favourite restaurant is, or a writer what their favourite book is. When you’re deeply sunk into a world, the very concept of “favourite” can evaporate on the face of too many contingencies, too much context. And yet, when a journalist asks, folks tend to feel obliged to come up with an answer, and though it’s a facile question, the responses generally tell you about what they consider important.

It was even more unfair of me to ask Lewis, since the company we’re talking about, Woodcliffe, is all about old buildings, having owned, developed, restored and managed such gems as the Gooderham building (also known as the flat iron, but which was built before the one in Manhattan), and the 34 acres that includes North Toronto Station (the Summerhill LCBO), as well as a retail strip on King at Church that’s made up of some of the oldest buildings in the city.

But I asked, and she answered, and I’m glad I did, because she said her favourite new building is the McKinsey on Charles Street. Designed by Hariri Pontarini, it’s modest, tucked away on some land leased from Victoria College at U of T. There’s nothing curvy or shiny or otherwise fabulous about it. It’s the sort of building that, unless you are the sort who walks around the city with an eye for design, you might not even notice. But it’s wonderful.

“I think that’s a magnificent example of both very modern design that takes a lot of material that we would have probably used 100 years ago,” she says.

There are many different sorts of people who go into the business of putting up the buildings that make our city. Some are primarily deal-makers, others are power-brokers. Many of them are born to it, daughters and sons of families who started building tract housing in Whitby and Stouffville who got into urban development because the province’s Green Belt legislation dried up the next crop of tracts. There are good ones, mediocre ones and bad ones, and since the developer is the one who buys the land and puts the deal together, the one that hires the architect and designers, they can be very good developers without knowing, or even especially caring, about things like aesthetics, materials or history, or knowing there’s such a thing as a McKinsey building on Charles Street.

“It’ll be interesting to see what that building will be doing 100 years from now,” she adds.

So though it may seem natural for someone in the building business to know about all the different facets of buildings, it’s actually not that common. And thinking about buildings in 100 years? I’ve spoken to many developers, and since selling out is the nature of the condo business — developers no longer own the buildings after they sell the units — most have little knowledge and less interest in what their buildings are doing five years from now, never mind a century. This is not an especially bad thing, caveat emptor is an essential part of the retail market, whether its condos or cloths, food or bicycles. Having someone viscerally interested in such things as Lewis is, however, strikes me as a particularly delightful bonus, one that bodes well now that she plans to take the company in a more condo-focused direction.

But it’s not just design she seems to get.

“You know, when I was at university I did an undergraduate degree in geography and economics, and I just found I got more and more drawn to urban centres and how they really worked and what the power of a building could do for a community and how a city was laid out.”

This has got to have been a tough year for Lewis. Her husband died suddenly in a plane crash last March, leaving her not only with this company to run in addition to the separate but related condominium-related companies — Urbanation and MarketVision Research — that she founded (the former while she was still a student) and was already running herself, but also her family of six children, all young adults.

But when she talks about buildings, whether it’s the McKinsey, or the North Toronto Station, or even just the proliferation of condos in the city that is creating the sort of density that makes a city a city, her enthusiasm overcomes her baseline low-key calmness that, given the circumstances, one could easily interpret as melancholy.

“It’s a lovely thing to notice in a developer, and it makes me think that the best of Woodcliffe may be yet to come.”

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Bert Archer writes for Toronto Standard. Follow him on Twitter: @bertarcher.

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