Toronto building known for mysterious millionaire murder to be torn down for towers

A Toronto office building that was the centre of an almost two-year murder investigation is set to be torn down for an enormous residential complex that would dramatically alter the midtown skyline.

Plans filed with the City could bring about the end of the current low-rise commercial building at 245 Eglinton Avenue East, located at the northeast corner of Mount Pleasant and Eglinton just opposite a forthcoming station on the soon-to-open Eglinton Crosstown LRT.

Developer Crestview Investment Corporation seeks to have the current four-storey office building at the address torn down and replaced with a sky-scraping residential complex. Among the businesses that currently call the building home, Granite Brewery has remained a neighbourhood fixture for decades.

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The current building would be replaced with an enormous development consisting of a pair of residential towers rising 60 and 65 storeys, featuring designs from architects Superkül.

With proposed heights of almost 200 and 215 metres, the buildings would add a significant new height peak to the midtown Toronto skyline — one that has been thoroughly transformed by new development in the years of construction and anticipation leading up to the still-unannounced Eglinton Crosstown LRT opening date.

Even as the city continues to wait for the LRT's opening, the delay-plagued transit line is still managing to act as a catalyst for vertical growth along its route.

The towers would combine to house a whopping 1,278 residential units, though the tenure of these residences has not yet been decided at this early stage of planning. Whether the project is pursued as a rental or condominium development will be determined at a later date and dictated by market demand.

Plans include a publicly-owned private space in the form of a plaza measuring 542 square metres and fronting onto the Mount Pleasant and Eglinton intersection.

Thanks to easy transit access via the nearby Mount Pleasant station on the future TTC Line 5, a minimal parking component of just 127 spaces will be housed in a three-level underground garage, along with 1,445 bicycle parking spaces.

The enormous towers would rise from a site with a grim past.

Almost two decades before it became the subject of a redevelopment scheme, the building was the site of a homicide that shocked the surrounding midtown Toronto neighbourhood. A wealthy philanthropist was shot and killed in the parking garage of 245 Eglinton East in a violent crime that made headlines across the country.

The killing of 66-year-old Glen Davis marked Toronto's 24th homicide of 2007, and Davis' own godson, then-41-year-old Marshall Ross, would later plead guilty to the murder and receive a life sentence.

Davis was one of four conspirators charged in a drawn-out 21-month-long investigation that captured media attention nationwide.