Graphic Arts Building

History of Graphic Arts Building

The Graphic Arts Building was started in 1911 and finished in 1913, a limestone-based building with Ionic columns and a carved cornice that looks more like a temple than an office block. Its architect, Francis S. Baker, also designed the Traders Bank at Yonge and Colborne, banks across Ontario and houses in Rosedale and Forest Hill.

For many years it was the headquarters of Saturday Night, founded in 1887 by Edmund E. Sheppard and for more than a century one of Canada's best-known magazines. B.K. Sandwell, its editor from 1932 to 1951, is remembered with a plaque on the building. Its pages carried E. Pauline Johnson, Stephen Leacock, John McCrae and Margaret Atwood's early stories; Robertson Davies worked there in the 1940s and Robert Fulford edited it from 1968 to 1987. The magazine stopped publishing in 2005.

Around 2002 the building was converted by The Sheppard Group with Harry Stinson into 65 live/work lofts, most of them studios, some first sold for under $200,000. Ceilings are 11½ to 13½ feet, the penthouses have terraces, and the lobby looks much as it did in the magazine's day. There is no parking; it is surrounded by the towers of the Financial District.