Toronto restaurant might be demolished for new condo

A Toronto Vietnamese restaurant is among the businesses that could be displaced by a planned condominium development that would rise next to a busy neighbourhood mall.

A December application filed with the City could spell the beginning of the end for the small retail plaza at 1012 Gerrard Street East, situated just east of the Gerrard Square Shopping Centre.

The retail plaza on the north side of Gerrard, between Carlaw and Jones, is home to Vietnamese restaurant and neighbourhood staple Pho Com Tam 168 and is proposed to be demolished to make way for a mid-rise condominium development.

City of Toronto

Developer Pymbo Investments has proposed to tear down the current plaza and replace it with a 12-storey building containing 93 condominium units and new retail space at street level.

Architects RAW Design have come up with a plan for the site that draws influence from the red brick residential homes of the surrounding neighbourhood, with a massing that is broken up into multiple volumes to minimize the heft of the proposal.

Though current businesses in the plaza would be displaced or lost in the redevelopment, a planned 320 square metres of retail would foster continued pedestrian animation along this stretch of Gerrard.

Even with visual mitigation and new street-level animation, the building's proposed height of just over 44 metres may prove a sore spot for area residents when the project reaches its public consultation phase.

Like it or not, locals will probably have to get themselves accustomed to higher residential densities thanks to the nearby Gerrard Station under construction as part of the new Ontario Line subway.

The site's location just a few hundred metres east of the new subway station puts it and other potential development sites in the area on prime footing for intensification.

In fact, the adjacent mall itself is set to be completely redeveloped into a vast transit-oriented community in the coming years as part of the push to add more housing along existing and forthcoming transit lines.

blogTO reached out to Pho Com Tam 168 for comment on the restaurant's future but did not receive a response.