Obiter Dicta Issue 4 - October 13, 2015 | Page 4

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