[The North One]

Originally Posted by memph

Not exactly but kind of.

It's the Cathedral of the Configuration, which is some sort of Slovak Byzantine rite Catholic Church. One of their adherents, Stephen B. Roman immigrated to Canada in 1937 and became an uranium mining magnate in the 1950s. He lived in Markham and donated some land to build the church and helped fund its construction which began in 1984 and finished around 1990, a couple years after his death.

However, most of the church's Toronto area adherents lived elsewhere with relatively few living in Markham, so it was not a very convenient location for them. Roman's daughter then decided to turn the remaining lands into a European style "Cathedral town" and hired the guy in charge for the historic preservation of Westminster Abbey to do it.

This is what the area surrounding the Cathedral was supposed to be developed into.


Although the church has been praised for its mosaic, acoustics and other features, so far this particular neighbourhood is about 75% Chinese, so their attempts to create some sort of Eastern Catholic religious community are rather unsuccessful. The church organization itself moved its seat from this cathedral to a church in Old Toronto in 2006, and so the cathedral has been vacant until 2016. Since 2016, it's been used for Sunday service by a different Greek Catholic church, but otherwise is still largely unused.

It seems like the occupancy rates for the retail units on the Main Street are still pretty good though (compared to Bur Oak Dr in the Cornell neighbourhood). I agree that the homogeneous design is rather stark... I can only hope that the business owners customize their storefronts and the street trees mature to break that homogeneity...

It's even weirder than I thought, thanks for the explanation.