On February 20, a six-alarm fire consumed four buildings on Queen West in spectacular fashion. One hundred and thirty-four firefighters spent 24 hours trying to tame it, slipping on the ice that formed in the sub-zero temperatures. In the days that followed, there was a public outpouring of grief for what had been lost—for the businesses, for the homes and livelihoods and, especially, for the buildings themselves. “We will not see their like again,” one headline read, and another, more sentimentally, “What will become of the street now that the sentinels of its story have been silenced by fire?”

From an architectural standpoint, the response was surprising. The buildings that were lost in the fire, 19th-century Italianate structures, were hardly the prettiest examples of our past. Two that were adjoined weren’t quite the same height, the windows didn’t match and the quoins at the joining seam were different. These are picayune architectural disagreements compared to the visual war seen elsewhere along Queen: the varying heights (the handsome six-storey Burroughes Building next to the squat orange one-storey that houses Abraham’s Antiques) and styles (Victorian, Romanesque Revival, Second Empire, early vernacular, and dozens of perfunctory infill buildings that defy categorization), and the visual jumble at ground level (the conflicting signage, graffiti, the gaps in maintenance, layers of paint, the differences in usage, hipness and retail élan). This, the local saw goes, is the charm of Queen Street. But what has been lost is less an architectural legacy than a historical one. Most of Queen Street didn’t have brilliant architecture in the 19th century, and it is much less brilliant now. Physically, many of the buildings evoke John Huston’s observation in Chinatown: “Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” The street’s energy comes from its scale, its mix of retail, residential and entertainment, and the fresh waves of immigrants who arrive there. Queen Street West is the best physical evidence (along with Kensington Market) of the urban immigrant experience in Toronto. The street has always possessed a vitality that is essential to the city’s culture and, almost as important, provides proof of Toronto’s tolerance, hipness and diversity—qualities that are absent or suspect in some other neighbourhoods. The fire underlined the fact that the city’s heritage is fragile, and that the spirit of the street is linked to those structures.