NEWS
4 Obiter Dicta
The New Old City Hall Mall
Will an iconic piece of Toronto architecture turn into a
shopping centre?
nadia aboufariss › opinions editor
L
ast year in Professor Berger’s criminal
law class, a few friends and I went down to
Old City Hall for the afternoon to watch bail
court for an assignment. A few of us had
never entered the building before, so we were pretty
excited to see what it looked like, and since the facade
of the Old City Hall is pretty remarkable, we had high
hopes. Hopes that were dashed, as we sat in the basement of the building, in a waiting room of crumbling
plaster lined with scotch taped scraps of paper. Our
hopes were further dashed as we entered into the bail
courtroom, which had no ceiling beyond a network of
pipes and exposed wires running through the room.
There are parts of the once magnificent interior
that can still impress, such as the grand staircase, the
original mosaic floor, and the lavish use of marble.
This is a building that cost two and a