GLIMPSES of how Canada worked: a writer's memoir.

46. Lessons from an unforgettable building

THE CORNER APARTMENT WE CHOSE ON THE 14th FLOOR was between two empty ones on the 12th and 15th. (Ours was in fact on the 13th, but Canadians avoid "unlucky 13" in buildings.) In bed on the first night we heard very loud snoring. During daylight hours we often heard the squeaks of a metal ladder -- the kind that hooks over the edge of a swimming pool -- scraping tiles while someone climbed in or out. Once in a while there was a sound as though something had struck a metal front panel of our balcony, but nothing had.

The architect and or contractors apparently didn't know that metal conducts sound. In our corner stack of apartments, a steel I-beam was used between living rooms and master bedrooms to create space for a swimming pool at ground level. In all units in the other three corners, that dividing wall was made of cement blocks, like the walls separating apartments from each other.

The Bournemouth's other tenants ranged from single school teachers to a surgeon with a stay-at-home wife, three teenagers and five cars, a sailboat and a seaplane. In those days there weren't huge differences between salaries. People lived where the community suited them. Money was not the measure of all things.

Everyone with a balcony heard "the panel noise" transmitted by end panels touching exposed rebars in poorly finished concrete walls. Everyone had figured out the sources of many sounds. Although they regretted the total lack of sound-proofing, most chose to put up with it because of the quiet location, unique views, and familiar neighbours. As the building slowly filled up, new residents were welcomed with broad hints about avoiding impacts on the structure.

(We never did figure out whose snoring we heard that first night. It stopped after a few nights.)

I became curious about sound-proofing. Frankly, it bothered me that a superb residential location was insulted by a structure obviously thrown up on the cheap, with shoddy workmanship. In books in the Toronto Public Library and the University I studied sound transmission and prevention, especially building codes in different countries.

I'd always known that in English Canada tenants were considered second-class citizens: 'They can't afford houses so they must be poor.' Apartments were seen as either temporary homes for people who were "on their way up", or permanent homes for people without ambition.

Such thinking was categorically opposite to the European attitude I'd heard about growing up, and sampled in Switzerland and Poland.

Montreal had much colder winters, hence better construction, and an unique history of wealthy families living within "the Golden Square Mile" between the St. Lawrence River and Mount Royal. It also had strong Continental roots and felt kinship with another ocean port, New York City.

During the boom years after World War I, Montrealers built amazing, colossal first-class apartment blocks -- The Chateau, Trafalgar, Marlborough -- in the style of ones built overlooking New York's Central Park in the 19th Century. Either rentals of co-operatives, units were family-sized and passed from one generation to the next.

Sound-proofing seemed to deserve an article, but I couldn't interest editors. Was Toronto's construction industry, like department stores and natural gas, not to be criticized? Was Ottawa's out-dated federal building code being protected?

One magazine rejection came by phone. The editor regretted that I didn't have the credentials to write about "a very interesting topic". (His was a general-interest  news magazine!  Really?) Would I mind if he asked a sound specialist to write an article?

Not at all. I just wanted people to know that tenants deserved to sleep as soundly as home-owners, and that buildings could be sound-proofed for 4% or 5% of total construction cost. I didn't mention I'd done research because I couldn't find an "apartment sound specialist" to interview.

I gave up watching his magazine for an article to appear.

Over time, even more interesting defects in our building came to light. It had the usual central core of reinforced concrete containing elevators and corridors, with attached concrete slabs ending out where walls would be. The slabs were the floors, like slices of sandwich bread, with the almost-white brick walls as the filling. 

After a couple of years, a fantastic October storm occurred:  A few hours of thunder and lightning, heavy rain, hail the size of quail eggs.

The next day we learned that apartments across the hall were soaked inside! Winds racing unobstructed along almost 100 miles of Lake Ontario shoreline drove the rain across balconies into living rooms, and right through the mortar of brickwork into plaster bedroom walls. It flowed on the concrete "bread slices" towards the core, soaking broadloom and displacing parquetry tiles.

That was the second or third such experience for tenants who moved in when the building opened. Several gave notice and left, but others -- and their insurers -- insisted the owner prevent a recurrence. East walls of the building were covered with vertical tongue-in-groove aluminum cladding.

But the next storm again pushed water across balconies into living rooms...which led to several apartments' balconies being enclosed. Bedroom walls were safe from rain, but black mold had been found inside some of them.

The Bournemouth's "east side story" continued for years!

Pipes began bursting when the place was about five years old. Copper ones were visible in bathroom vanities and kitchen cupboards, but those inside the walls were of a cheaper metal. The architect/builder didn't know that corrosion is inevitable when lead solder joins those two metals. It wasn't hard for me to find that information in a book. Some metals can be soldered together but others can't.

It took more than six months to re-pipe the 180 units. At that time, Ontario had rent control and a formula allowing only small annual increases. We often chatted with Ken, our truly super superintendent, about how interesting the building was, and how much extra work its problems meant for him.

He told us the construction across the street would result in 150 townhouses. The architect was the same man who designed our building. Ken had seen the plans. Six townhouses near us would have lake views. The rest would face each other in rows perpendicular to the bluffs' edge*.

Work continued there from 7 a.m., Mondays through Saturdays. Charlie and I, supervising from on high for a while after breakfast almost every day, became fans of the stranger operating the bulldozer we first saw on Labour Day. He eventually had lots of other machines for company as parts of the woodland were razed and the site widened westward, but he remained at our end.

The day after "our first storm" soaked neighbours, we watched his 'dozer assemble a pile of brush, move it to the bluffs' edge and nudge it over. As he chugged off to fetch more brush, a strip of the muddy edge he had just left -- a strip at least 10 feet wide and 50 feet long -- began sliding away and down, out of our sight. If it made a sound we couldn't hear it. (We went down for a look that evening and saw it had become a ledge, about 20 feet below the top. Over time it slid the rest of the way to the lake.)

The 'dozer driver returned, stopped the machine, leaned out of his cab for a minute or two, obviously looking at the altered scene. Then he turned off the engine, hurried away to find his boss, and they stood talking until Charlie and I had other things to do. After that, brush and trees accumulated near the edge, were pushed over rarely, and only when the soil was dry.

I began reading about the bluffs, and everything we learned made us much wiser house-hunters when we began looking along the lake seriously the following Spring.

CHAPTER 46 of GLIMPSES -- 30

*The Scarborough Bluffs rise and then fall along eight miles (almost 13km) of Lake Ontario shoreline from eastern Toronto to Oshawa. Some 12,000 years ago they were the bottom of a lake named Iroquois. At our location in 1969 they were 185 feet high (56m). Their highest point, west of us and rising 350 feet (106m) above the lake, prevented us from seeing downtown Toronto. A combination of sand and clay results in their having a rock-hard structure when totally dry, but a consistency like mud when they're saturated.