75 Jonesville: from print shop to head office

Before it held desks and monitors, 75 Jonesville Crescent held presses. For years the building did the unglamorous, essential work of a print shop, the kind of low-slung industrial address that turns out the paper a city runs on and asks for no attention in return. Victoria Village was full of buildings like it: solid, plain, built to take a beating and keep running.

A print shop and an office want more of the same things than you might guess. Both need open floor area uninterrupted by columns, power that can carry a real load, and enough clear height to move around in. The machinery that once filled the space demanded structure, and structure is the hardest thing to add to a building after the fact. Strip out the presses and what remains is a shell already built for work.

That is roughly the story of the conversion. The 7,988 square foot building was taken back to its frame and rebuilt as a turnkey office, the sort a company can walk into and occupy without a year of drawings and permits. What had been a production floor became a place for a technology company to think, meet and build, the ink and paper traded for screens and quiet.

Geography did the rest of the arguing. 75 Jonesville sits in Victoria Village, in North York, a short walk from the Line 5 Eglinton Crosstown, which puts a transit spine within reach of a staff that no longer wants to commute by car alone. For the ones who still drive, the site keeps something a downtown tower cannot promise: ample parking on its own lot.

There is a reason a growing software or hardware team gravitates to a building like this rather than a floor in a tower. An owner-user building is yours to shape. You set the layout, you brand the entrance, and you stop paying rent into someone else's balance sheet. For a company whose value lives in its people, a building that recruits well and reads as its own is not a vanity. It is a tool.

This is the sort of quiet transformation Gitalis has worked at for fifty years: finding the industrial building that has outlived its first purpose and seeing the second one waiting in its bones. The print shop is gone. The building it lived in is better than it ever was, and finally doing work you can see from the street.