It will be the end of an era in more ways than one when the former Avro Canada plant, now home to Magellan Aerospace, is demolished near Toronto’s Pearson airport in the next year.
Not only will a link to a promising period in Canada’s aerospace industry disappear, but as Magellan moves into a modern plant on the same Derry Road site, and the property owner/developer Crestpoint Real Estate Investments Inc. prepares to tear down the old plant and redevelop the remaining 33 acres, it will signal another step in the imminent overhaul of the airport region landscape.
Once remediation of the contaminated site in Mississauga, Ont. is complete, Crestpoint will be in a position to custom build for other enterprises.
One thing that’s certain, said Crestpoint director of acquisitions and asset management Lara Di Gregorio, is there is little place for extensive warehousing, storage or low-level manufacturing in the airport district in the future.
“The land is too valuable,” said Di Gregorio as she gave an overview of the new Magellan build and perceived future opportunities for the rest of the Crestpoint airport lands. “It is on transit. The site needs to be intensified.”
At the same time as Crestpoint formulates its plans, the Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA) and Metrolinx will be developing their own billion-dollar blueprint for a new Toronto Pearson regional transit and passenger centre on 168 acres of GTAA land and across Airport Road from Terminals 1 and 3 — just down the block from the Crestpoint property.
The GTAA master plan could include mixed-use development as well as connections for existing and future transit systems such as the TTC, Brampton public transit, the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, Mississauga Bus Rapid Transit, the Finch West LRT, GO Regional Express Rail, including a line from Kitchener, the UP Express and even Ontario’s proposed high-speed rail network.
It was announced in February that HOK has been hired to undertake preliminary design and planning for the job, working with WSP Engineers and Weston Williamson + Partners.
The Crestpoint site is directly adjacent to the Malton GO station. Di Gregorio said the GTAA’s proposal for a “Union Station West,” as she called it, would definitely mesh with Crestpoint’s development plans.
I think there could be three to four other developments that should be built on the site
— Lara Di Gregorio
Crestpoint Real Estate Investments Inc.
“If you’re connecting regional rail, it’s got to go through Malton,” she said.
Di Gregorio knows the history of Magellan’s current 80-year-old plant and the adjacent property well. In an earlier heyday of Canadian aerospace, A.V. Roe built 692 CF-100s at its manufacturing facilities in Malton and began to develop the Avro Arrow, an aspirational government-supported program that was abruptly cancelled by the Diefenbaker government in 1959. Today, a vintage CF-100 sits on a pedestal on nearby land donated by Magellan in Paul Coffey Park.
A.V. Roe was dissolved in 1962, Hawker Siddeley Canada continued on and finally Magellan took ownership of the plant. What remains today is an obsolete, contaminated structure that Magellan is eager to vacate.
Crestpoint bought the site a few years ago and has engaged in some demolition of old storage and unused facilities.
The new 220,000-square-foot Magellan facility will include 40,000 square feet of office space and be situated on 11 acres. Leeswood Construction is the contractor and Edev had the design/build function. Verus Partners is also involved.
Magellan does jet engine repairs and fine tooling at the plant, with customers including the Canadian and Australian governments and the U.S. Navy, said Di Gregorio. The build will include such special features as accommodation for cranes that would move sensitive technology around, deep pits for machinery and 70-foot-candles lighting.
Construction on the $20-million build started in February and is expected to be wrapped up by the end of the year.
Site remediation will take place next year, she said, once Magellan has moved to its new headquarters. No contractor has been hired yet for that job.
The remaining 33 acres is fully serviced. Crestpoint would prefer to retain ownership of the whole property and build and lease out buildings, she added.
Possible uses could be office, manufacturing, industrial and retail, and possibly even residential, said Di Gregorio.
“I think there could be three to four other developments that should be built on the site,” she said. “If we exclude residential, I think we could build two industrial and some flex buildings, or some flex buildings and maybe a smaller industrial building.”
If an office building is developed, it could have amenity retail on the ground floor — restaurants, banks and other such uses, Di Gregorio said.
“The market will determine what we build in a couple of years,” she said.
when are you guys demolishing the old Orenda plant?