A Demolition Saga

I awoke on the morning of Saturday, August 28, 2021 to find dozens of unread emails on my iPhone.  Apparently major demolition activity was happening on Camden Street.  So I wrote to our Councillor’s office:

Are any of you in the know about activity this morning on Camden Street?  3 buildings (#8-18?) on the north side of the street and 2 buildings (#39-47?) on the south side are being demolished.
Nothing online about development applications.
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Please tell us these properties are destined to become parkettes

8-18 Camden

39-47 Camden

I received this response from Brent even though it was a Saturday:

I do see old demolition permits. This web tool can show where building permits and demolition permits have been applied for, but I find it is not very helpful on the details:
https://secure.toronto.ca/ApplicationStatus/setup.do?action=init.

A landowner can demolish a non-residential building as-of-right in Toronto, which means the demolition permits are practically automatically issued by staff as long as basic requirements are met. There is no circulation of the information to the local councillor or any opportunity to weigh in on it. But there are exceptions, including heritage protection. The HCD is supposed to stop any "Contributing" heritage buildings from being lost in this way.

From the web tool, it looks like the demolition application was submitted in 2016, before the HCD came into effect, and generally Provincial legislation doesn’t allow for heritage and planning protections to be applied retroactively.

The noise attracted attention from blogTO leading to THIS POSTING which identified the properties as belonging to Brad Lamb. 
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There were also lots of pictures submitted by contributors to Urban Toronto:​

8-18 Camden

39-47 Camden

Because the permits were legitimate, demolitions proceeded and the sites are now flat vacant land. 
 
Plans for the 8-18 Camden sites are not available at this time.