I was privileged to work with Jerome Markson for over thirty years, first as an employee and later as a partner with Jerry and Ernie Hodgson. Over the years, I appreciated Jerry’s many qualities—not just as an architect and mentor, but as a kind, compassionate and generous colleague and friend. He was a consummate human being, a true prince among men. Others have written about Jerry’s work in much more authoritative ways than I can; I will focus on our years together in getting things built. Jerry would have like that: he disliked intellectualized discourse about architecture when simple words and ordinary language would suffice. He liked to quote some of Mies van der Rohe’s aphorisms: “Build, don’t talk”; “I don’t want to be interesting, I want to be good”; and “I don’t want to invent a new architecture every Monday morning.”
For Jerry, Architecture was not spelled with a capital A, but with the letter P, for the needs of the people, and C for the contextual opportunities and constraints of the site. His buildings were a reflection of the people who were going to live in and occupy them—whether it was his own whimsical “shack in the bush” (his cottage in the country) or the formal responsibilities of an infill building on an existing city street.
Jerry’s thinking was deeply affected by the work of his father, Charles Markson, a doctor who genuinely cared about his patients,
including families and seniors. As a result, Jerry’s portfolio included community health clinics, medical centres, doctors’ offices, childcare centres, retirement homes, senior citizens’ residences and long-term care facilities. Another strand in his work was the early modernist interest in housing—particularly housing for workers—which led to numerous multi-family residential projects, including for labour unions, housing co-operative groups, and other non-profit housing organizations at the municipal and provincial levels.
While Jerry’s early projects included many houses, sometimes with quixotic and amusing results, he later limited his house projects to one a year. As he remarked: An architect’s role in designing a house is like being a family psychiatrist to a couple, but at only architects’ rates. However, he did manage to keep his hand in designing houses by helping his friend and partner, Maurizio Trotta, develop infill houses in the city.
Jerry’s many larger buildings in the city of Toronto were also generally on infill sites. The buildings that evolved on these sites took on the urban responsibility to complete the street, repair the urban fabric and fit into the block and the neighbourhood.
Jerry’s David Archer Co-op, located in the historic St. Lawrence Neighbourhood, was conceived in two parts. The mid-rise, park-facing apartment building was more formal, and included touches such as a colonnade, and retail uses on the ground floor, like many main street buildings. The low-rise townhouse rows in the interior of the site had a more domestic quality, evoking typical residential streets in the city, with elements such as white window surrounds, balconies and trellises, and brick arches for front doors and stoops, reinterpreted in a contemporary manner. Underground parking allowed the townhouses to have ground floors with front doors and windows facing the street, instead of townhouse garage doors.
Three blocks away, Jerry’s Market Square was surrounded by many important heritage buildings. Our preliminary discussions were about questions of fit, scale, materiality, colour, texture, form and expression. Jerry said, “Let’s just squish it down and spread it out”—referring to the benefits of designing it as a midrise perimeter block building. The solution came out of those words, along with our close collaboration with Ken Greenberg, then the Director of Urban Design at the City of Toronto, who was instrumental in urging and supporting us to make many of the major moves that shaped the design. It was an example of the private and public sectors working in partnership towards positive city building, during a gentler era.
Our response was a block form that completed the surrounding streets, but was split into two by a view corridor from south Front Street to the spire of the St. James Cathedral to the north. A ground-floor colonnade contained shops, cafés and restaurants. The basement levels had several movie theatres, residential amenity rooms, and parking for over 750 cars.
We chose the same John Price bricks from the (now defunct) Don Valley Brickworks that were used for the nearby St. Lawrence Hall and St. James Cathedral in beige, and for the St. Lawrence Market and the Flatiron Building in red. A deep cornice just below the penthouse floors lined up with the eave of the Flatiron Building to the west. The treatment of the penthouse floors, clad in red brick, reflected the industrial heritage of the neighbourhood. This kind of design exploration led the late George Baird to remark that Jerry’s work exhibited “an intense tactile materiality.”
Every Sunday morning during those two projects, Zevi Klausner, Maurizio and I would meet at Fran’s on St. Clair for a big breakfast, then head into the office for a few hours of concentrated work, free from phone calls, memos, meetings and other distractions: it was the only way to stay ahead of the schedule. And after site visits, Jerry and I would walk over to the St. Lawrence Market to grab Canadian back bacon sandwiches from Carousel. The zeitgeist of that era was aptly captured by the Talking Heads album “More Songs About Buildings and Food.”
Even as we worked on these award-winning buildings, we never felt like staff working under Jerry. Jerry called his practice his “atelier,” and the feeling in the office was very informal—it felt like we were part of a big family. Jerry’s gentle and compassionate demeanour, and his wry sense of humour, put everyone at ease. We formed soccer teams and volleyball teams to play against teams from other architects’ offices, and enjoyed many meals and social occasions with Jerry and his wife, Mayta, including parties at their home.
Jerry met Mayta while the two of them were studying at Eliel Saarinen’s Cranbrook Academy near Detroit. Mayta was an accomplished artist—her pottery work included the commission to prepare bowls and dishes for Restaurant, the formal dining space of Three Small Rooms at the Windsor Arms Hotel—and was a founding partner of the renowned Five Potters studio. The group’s annual exhibition and sale was keenly anticipated by everyone for their beautiful designs, and as an annual occasion for many architects to catch up over coffee and ceramics.
Jerry and Mayta loved sailing and travelling around the world. They often used to sail the waters of Georgian Bay on their Nonsuch 30 with their friends. Since it wasn’t a classic wooden boat, Jerry described it as “The Romance of Fibreglass.” Their trips took them from France and Greece to the Galapagos and Guatemala, bringing back many interesting tales to entertain us.
Jerry and Mayta’s welcoming and generous natures were in full display at their annual summer picnic at their “shack,” a cottage situated on 20 acres of land near Uxbridge. Friends, along with office staff and their families, would arrive for the day to find Mayta busy preparing dishes in the kitchen, while Jerry would be at the outdoor pit, roasting a whole lamb on a spit, his eyes squinting through smoke redolent of rosemary and spices. After stuffing ourselves with food and drink, some of us would make desultory attempts to play games, or straggle down past Jerry’s vegetable patch to the pond for canoe rides and a swim. As we enjoyed their hospitality and their company, Jerry and Mayta made us feel like we were all part of the Markson clan.
Adieu, Jerry: Maestro, boss, mentor, partner, colleague and friend. It was our privilege to know you, work with you, learn from you, break bread with you, and laugh with you. May you shine on forever.
Architect and urban designer Ronji Borooah is City Architect with the City of Markham.