The Canary District: Construction Tour #2
By Lucas on Oct 19, 2012
“Infrastructure Ontario, the City, our own designs teams, Dundee Kilmer – everyone’s been tremendously cooperative to date on this project, or else we wouldn’t be where we are on our construction plan.” – Tim Dittmar
Yesterday, we were lucky enough to be invited back out to The Canary District for another construction tour, led by Tim Dittmar, the Construction Manager from EllisDon, and Jason Lester of Dundee Kilmer. This time, rather than focusing on what is planned for the site, Tim Dittmar covered the more technical side of the project, giving us the little details about how far they’ve come over the past month.
Our first stop was on what will soon be Front Street, just east of Cherry Street, right before the historical Canary building. Dittmar explained, “There is no intent of doing anything with the interior of the building. On the exterior, we’re replacing the windows and doing some repainting to the brickwork, and putting new surfaces into the building for future use.” As of now, there are no official plans for the beautiful building.
Dittmar continued, explaining the amount of work that has gone into the roads in the area: “In conjunction with the six buildings that we’re building right now, we have a tremendous amount of infrastructure here. We’re redoing Cherry Street completely. It’s all torn up here, and won’t be open until next summer because of the amount of work we need to do. We started this work in April of this year, and we’ve replaced the storm sewers, sanitary sewers, put in new waterlines, new gas lines, new power ducts have gone in — all of the deep work has been completed, and we’re on to the upper level of construction.”
At our second stop at Blocks 1 and 14, the atmosphere was alive with activity. Dittmar said, “We probably have a work force here of about 250. I expect we’ll get up to 700 or 750 when we max out, probably around this time next year, when the structures are up and we’re onto interior finishing.”
We then circled around and headed to Block 11, where the market condominiums will be. There aren’t any cranes here yet, but there will be soon. “Prior to doing the mass excavation, we were able to put in the foundation. The perimeter caissons – you can see them sticking up with the reinforcing rods with the protective tops on them right now,” Dittmar said.
Our last stop was at the far end of the Canary District site, where Front Street meets Bayview Avenue. This is all still a pile of dirt, but the construction crews are getting closer to the next step. According to Dittmar, “The next step is to get the caisson drilling rigs in here to start drilling the foundations. These caissons go down to rock, and depending where we are on the site, it can be as deep as 10 to 15 metres. Then we socket the caisson into the rock to stabilize it. Because of the nature of the soft soil, we have to stabilize the ground to get the equipment on top of it. So, they are putting filter cloth down; it lets the moisture come through and spreads the load as the equipment comes through. When we get rain it’s just a big mud hole, but it’s cleaning up very nice. We have a good construction team and very experienced superintendents on this job.”
In total, the construction crew is taking out 133,000 cubic metres of excavated material, pouring 77,000 cubic metres of concrete, and putting in 8,000 metric tons of reinforcing in the concrete.
We would like to thank Tim Dittmar and Jason Lester for the very informative tour. We can’t wait for the next one!
