Category: Toronto

"[I]t's become a destination for over-drinking."

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Last year I commented on a Dooney’s Cafe article about the decline of a great Toronto neighbourhood: The Annex. The article was focused on the strip of Bloor between Spadina and Bathurst, and about how banal it had become.

Really, what’s happened to that piece of Bloor is studentification (admittedly, that’s not a word, but it’s as valid as “un-gentrification”) which had been fairly constrained to the Madison in years past. Like it or not, U of T is getting a retail ghetto, and Bloor Street from the JCC to Honest Ed’s is it. I don’t have a particular problem with this — neighbourhoods change all the time, and every time the people lived there before turn up their noses at the interlopers — except that blandness should never be something for a neighbourhood to aspire to.

It seems, though, that the strip of Bloor is becoming somewhat more violent, with a recent shooting outside the Brunswick House and a stabbing in one of the omnipresent sushi joints.  This past weekend the Globe and Mail collected opinions from some prominent residents on the spate of violence. A sample:

“I walked up to Bloor and Brunswick and saw a guy lying in a pool of blood in a café doorway. All the people eating and drinking on the patio of Future Bakery just carried on like this was entirely normal. It used to be the most violence you’d see around here was when two professors would argue over which NDP candidate to support, but there was a rape and a murder in the alley near my house last year.”

The Brunny seems to be the target of most of the anger, even if only city councilor Adam Vaughan calls it out by name. Deservedly so: it’s a little piece of clubland transported up to a neighbourhood which should have more character.

It’s a little sad for me. This used to be our neighbourhood, more or less, and we’d visit it often. By the sound of things it’s gone from being bland (which is a shame) to bring rather dangerous (which is tragic). I haven’t been up on that strip since Hot Docs in May, but I’ll be able to check it out up close this weekend. We’re seeing the Rural Alberta Advantage at Lee’s Palace Friday.

So here’s the question: just how badly stabbed would I have to be not to walk down to Spadina and get a scoop of roasted marshmallow from Greg’s?

Things I learned this weekend

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  • Nellie’s vacations are always bittersweet for me. As an introvert I love the alone time, but I always miss her too.
  • Two years after I saw Once for the first time, I watched it again. Still just as amazing. The scene in the music store where he teaches her “Falling Slowly” gave me chills, just like it did the first time.
  • The city of Toronto is holding a design contest for a revamped north building at St. Lawrence Market. Good. I love the farmer’s market on Saturdays, but that building is both hideous and a logistical nightmare.
  • Eighteen pound cats do not enjoy falling into bathtubs full of water. They enjoy it even less when their owner takes too long drying them off because he’s nearly strained a rib muscle from laughing.
  • The Santa Claus parade seems ridiculously out of place when it’s foggy and 14 degrees. Oh, and fucking November.
  • That said, I’m excited that Swiss Chalet has the festive special up and running already.
  • There are few three-word sentences in moviedom as cool as “Gregor fucked us.”
  • If I ever own a house I’m going to make my living room into a replica of Cumbrae’s, complete with butchers and bags — bags, people — of pulled pork.
  • My team was teh suck last night (except for Carey Price) and hasn’t been very good at all this year.

But…but…they're so shiny!!

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The Blue Angels

There are times when I can recognize my own hypocrisies. As someone who abhors war and nationalistic pageantry, you’d think I would hate air shows. I do not. I like the fancy jets. Ever since childhood, when my uncle made models of CF-18 Hornets and F-4 Phantoms for me to hang from my ceiling, I was fascinated by them. So while I’ve never attended the Canadian International Air Show at the Exhibition, I can see a great deal of it taking place from my balcony. Occasionally some of the formations swing near my building…or over it, as you can see above. When they get close, or when they put the throttle up to speed past the crowds down at Exhibition Place, I love hearing the roar from the engines. The raw power exhibited by a fighter jet just freaks me out, especially since I know they’re nowhere close to top speed.

I think, though, that I would love the sound a little less if I were a villager in Afghanistan or Iraq. There the sound doesn’t represent a feat of engineering. It represents danger. It’s the sound of death from above, just as it has been for decades in troubled parts of the world.

I see these jets flying overhead and think of all the bravery, ingenuity and resources that went into building and perfecting them. I just wish we could bring the same kind of  bravery, ingenuity and resources to bear when trying to solve a problem, instead of just dropping a bomb on it.

The fiberglass pink mile

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If you live in Toronto and have recently been near the corner of Yonge & Bloor — arguably the core intersection of the city — you would have seen the empty lot, razed many months ago in preparation for the 80-story condo that generated lineups hundreds-deep for early sales. Looking across that nice flat lot, it would have also been very easy to remind yourself how sad the corner is. A squat, dull little men’s (old men’s) clothing store and two nondescript office towers, one which is fronted by an ugly-ass concrete bunker. The city is trying to help things by expanding and greening up the sidewalks along Bloor, but even such help can’t mask the missed opportunity of Yonge & Bloor.

There were hopes that the right condo design would help the corner, but construction ground to a halt last year as the economy hiccuped and banks grew nervous about their borrowers. Last month the Kazakh-backed developer, who had defaulted on loan payments, sold the property. Onward and upward, right?

Probably. But Toronto’s army of public space advocates has been wondering aloud why we shouldn’t make that corner into a square. Politicians have weighed in, including the mayor who thinks “[i]t would be a remarkable place for a square.” Spacing Magazine, Toronto’s unofficial public space and urban affairs manual, has looked on the newly-pedestrianized Times Square in New York, and seen in it similarities to the last major downtown public square built in Toronto: Yonge & Dundas Square. YDS has completely transformed the corner of Yonge & Dundas which, when I moved to this city, was nothing more than a spigot draining the Eaton Centre. The corner is now a vital part of the city — for example, the film festival is staging a number of free movies and events at YDS this year.

Spacing doesn’t explicitly come out for a Yonge & Bloor square in that article, but do mention other possibilities like Front Street near St. Lawrence Market or Queen West. Personally, I love the Front Street idea. It already feels like a pedestrian mall, and on Saturdays it’s practically impossible to drive down Front anyway, for all the pedestrians zipping back and forth to the north market. But none of those would have the impact of a square at Yonge & Bloor.

Yesterday The Star’s Christopher Hume wrote another article about the site, saying the Toronto Public Space Committee is now on board. Hume does point out that it’s unlikely condo development would stop on the site, but perhaps there’s room for a building and a square. I think that’s the best possible/probable outcome. Dense residential, retail space and a public square wrapped in something architecturally compelling would serve as a proper gateway to Bloor between Yonge & Avenue, the so-called Mink Mile.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of faith that this is what will happen. Yonge/Bloor Home Depot, anyone?

Après le deluge, le rose

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Since CityNews, BlogTO, Torontoist and everybody else are posting dozens of amazing pictures of the storm that slammed Toronto earlier today (and spawned tornadoes around the GTA), I decided to post one from the minutes following the storm.

Make no mistake, the storm was amazing. I got video of it rolling in (and this storm did roll…you could see it twisting in over the core) and envelop my building. At one point I was looking south and saw a huge bolt of lightning hit two blocks south of me. The flash and sound knocked me backward, and I saw whatever it hit — I’m guessing a streetlight — glow white and then red for nearly a minute afterward.

Anyway, as soon as the blanket-thick rain and clouds moved off the sunset made an appearance, lighting up the sky. When the Moss Park lights came on I couldn’t resist.

It's a freaking mall, people.

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BlogTO yesterday raised an interesting topic: the differences in travel styles. Emphasis is mine.

Yesterday, the New York Times published yet another one of their great travel articles on a Toronto neighbourhood that doesn’t get much play from the powers that be who promote our city. Titled Skid Row to Hip in Toronto, the article isn’t a comprehensive look at the area, missing favourite spots like Crema Coffee, Smash and The Beet to name a few. Here are the ones they did mention:

…

Which is to say that it’s a good start and exactly the sort of story the city should be trying to get out instead of the crap about Ontario Place and Casa Loma.

I’m of the same opinion as BlogTO on this: for Toronto, or any tourist destination, the real soul of a place isn’t in the big tourist attractions, it’s between the lines of the Fodor’s guide. For many cities, and especially for Toronto, it’s in the neighbourhoods.  That you could wander from Chinatown to Kensington Market to Little Italy to the Annex to U of T (to take just one example) in less than an hour is fantastic because they’re all such different neighbourhoods. That’s what I want from a city, to get a real feel for it.

Obviously lots of people want to see the big attractions. When I lived at Dupont and Spadina I had tourists ask me every other summer day how to get to Casa Loma (which was always fun ’cause I could just point to the giant castle on top of the hill) and now that I live downtown I’m often asked where the Eaton Centre is. It always horrifies me that this is what tourists want to see, but that’s what’s in the guide books and, as BlogTO points out, the tourism promotions.

Should there maybe be two sets of promotion materials and guidebooks? Or is this the kind of thing that guidebooks just can’t keep up with, due to the rapid emergence and decline of neighbourhoods? Is this the role of the internet now? Until now a guidebook has just been an easier thing to carry around a city, but GPS-enabled devices could change that. I’m sure there’s already an iPhone app that points out cool insider tips about the neighbourhood you’re wandering through. If not, there should be. Damn, I wish I knew how to write those things…

"'We were living beyond our means,' he says, 'and it’s all crashing down.'"

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A little over a week ago I blogged about the most recent Toronto Life cover story:

“I’m angry at myself for throwing out my paper copy since TL won’t post most of their magazine content online (Dear editors: the 21st century. Please hear of it.) and I can’t remember the very best quotes, but suffice it to say I was barking with laughter after the Rosedale matron whined about the hardship of having to hide her full Holt Renfrew shopping bags for fear of showing up her friends and neighbours. Not to mention the lady who fretted about irritating her personal shopper when she asked for a discount on a dress that cost thousands of dollars.”

Fortunately Toronto Life has now opened up the article online so you can read the ridiculousness for yourself. To wit:

“It’s kind of becoming cool to be thrifty. It’s almost a point of pride,” said a woman who routinely makes Toronto’s best-dressed lists. She recently found herself haggling for the first time for a 10 per cent discount on a $3,000 designer dress at Holts. (Her personal shopper was not impressed.)

Also:

One young family decided to rein in their March break plans. Instead of going to the Four Seasons Mexico after skiing in Vail, they just skied Vail.

Heavens…how do these people survive?

More than one wealthy woman told me she’s economizing by getting her hair blown out twice instead of three times a week. For some, the biggest sacrifice is switching from a $400 to a $250 facial or letting go of the gardener who cost them more per month than their property taxes.

WOE BETIDE US!!!!

Some appreciated the gestures. “I walked through Yorkville the other day with my arms full of designer bags, and I got dirty looks, which really stung,” said one woman who recently moved to Rosedale.

Stop. Please stop. I can’t take it any more. I’m having sympathy pains.  I can actually feel the pain that woman must have felt at being ostracized for being so wealthy.

OK, so I’m being cheeky. But this one might just take the cake (emphasis mine):

The day [a former Bay Street worker] was laid off, he and his wife hunkered down at their kitchen table to calculate how they could scale back. Pulling their kids out of private school would save more than $50,000 a year. Trading in their luxury cars could lower their $40,000 annual lease payments. Cancelling their planned March break holiday to the Caribbean was an easy way to save 10 grand. But could they afford to keep their cottage? Should they fire the nanny? Obviously they wouldn’t be giving to charity this year.

Well, obviously! I mean, if you’re at the point where you’re actually considering taking the kids out of the private schools or trading in the luxury cars or canceling the trip to the Caribbean or selling the cottage, then you’ve reached desperate times. Food banks and homeless shelters and hospitals may be desperate for money, but goddammit, the leather seats in those cars feel like motherfucking butter. Ahem…but there I go being sarcastic again.

Look, I don’t begrudge anyone making money. Of course I don’t. But I don’t understand someone whose first thought, when trying to tighten the purse strings, is to make charity the first casualty when you have such egregious luxuries as an upcoming $10,000 vacation and cars that cost $40,000 in lease payments every year. It doesn’t occur to you that someone might need a bit of help more than you need to keep the best Maserati instead of the second-best Maserati.

I remember hearing years ago that low-income families tend to give more of their paycheque to charity. The results from the 2007 Canada Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating (warning: PDF) back that up: while 90% of families earning >$100,000 donated to charity vs. 71% of families making <$20,000, families making <20k donated $210 on average while families making at least five times more donated only three times as much. In fact, if you look at the table on page 19 you’ll see the average donation as a percentage of salary range midpoint moves down pretty steadily.

This suggests to me that the wealthier you are, the less of your disposable income goes to charity. I assume this is because those closer to the bottom can relate, and know that “There but for the grace of interest rates or labour woes go I.” Clearly the people cited in this TL article have no way to relate to actual financial hardship, and that disconnectedness from reality would back up my assumption.

Anyway, the article has a lovely little close: the afore-mentioned former Bay Streeter (who, by the way, had his entire savings in the stock market, which makes me question his credentials for working on Bay in the first place) says that “until the economy turns around…his wife may go back to work to tide them over, or they may hit up their parents for a loan.” I wish this gentleman a speedy economic recovery, as well as the best of luck in locating his balls.

"I don't dance with naked soldiers."

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Though Thursday and Friday were supposed to be a short vacation, we actually used them as get-shit-done days. Here’s what we’ve managed so far, the major points anyway:

  • Got my driver’s license and health card renewed in what must surely be the most efficient government-related service experience ever. Ten minutes after entering the Service Ontario office at Bay & College I’d completed both renewals and was on my way home. I was actually a little shocked, and left wondering if I’d done something wrong.
  • Watched all four Wimbledon semi-final matches, or at least parts of them.
  • Went to the distillery district with Nellie (who left work at noon) in search of a hopside down glass (since I broke one) but to no avail. We had a bite to eat and a couple of cold ones at the Mill Street brew pub, and managed to get home without being rained on.
  • Went for a run. Good one too.
  • Watched Passchendaele (imdb | rotten tomatoes), which I had really hoped would be good, but it wasn’t. At all. It could have been, but when a movie called Passchendaele spends the majority of its time in Calgary it wastes whatever potential it has.
  • Walked along the waterfront, checked out the new wave deck at the foot of Simcoe, despaired at the putrid wasteland that Queens Quay becomes east of Yonge.
  • Visited the LCBO to pick up some wine for tonight (simple, tasty Cab Sauv from J. Lohr) and a few bottles of the Innis & Gunn Canadian Cask, as recommended on the always-helpful Great Canadian Pubs & Beer blog.
  • Bought a new camera bag for the SX10 at Henry’s.
  • Finished off (more or less) some rearranging we started last weekend. Lots more room now, junk recycled, shelves put up. Time to finally hang that diploma I got last fall.
  • Picked up the new bench for our balcony at Andrew Richard Designs.

Now we’re getting ready to grill some Rowe Farms steaks, maybe watch a movie. It actually feels more like Sunday than Friday…I have to keep reminding myself that we have two more days off!

Ohmigod, no!! Not the Pusateri's account! For the love of all that's holy! NOT THE PUSATERI'S ACCOUNT!!!!1!

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Two and a half years ago I saw a documentary called Jesus Camp about kids raised by evangelicals and attending religious summer camps where they spoke in tongues and so on. I was impressed by how impartial the filmmakers remained throughout, always leaving the viewer free to interpret what they saw. The result was a film that I, and the entirety of the Toronto-based documentary-going crowd, found both hilarious and horrifying. Audiences in evangelical territories, like the American Midwest, didn’t have an adverse reaction to it…in fact, the filmmakers explained, audiences there loved it. It takes skill for an artist to tell the truth plainly enough that the subjects don’t realize the rest of the world will be aghast when it sees the light of day.

It was this same impressive brand of fine line-walking that graced the cover story of this month’s Toronto Life magazine, written by Sonia Verma. The abstract:

“The money’s running out and they must choose: pull the kids out of private school or fire the gardener; pawn the silver or close the Pusateri’s account; cancel the club memberships or default on the cottage. An inside report on the sacrifices of the nouveau poor”

I’m angry at myself for throwing out my paper copy since TL won’t post most of their magazine content online (Dear editors: the 21st century. Please hear of it.) and I can’t remember the very best quotes, but suffice it to say I was barking with laughter after the Rosedale matron whined about the hardship of having to hide her full Holt Renfrew shopping bags for fear of showing up her friends and neighbours. Not to mention the lady who fretted about irritating her personal shopper when she asked for a discount on a dress that cost thousands of dollars.

The beauty is that this little circle of wealthy, oblivious nimrods actually seem to expect sympathy — or at least empathy — and probably have no idea that 99% of those who read the magazine laughed themselves silly, giving thanks for once that they themselves aren’t rich enough to become this disconnected from reality.

Waging a war on knowing what a war actually is

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A few weeks ago the Toronto city council voted to reduce Jarvis Street, a north-south corridor running from midtown Bloor to the downtown core, from five lanes to four. Despite the facts that the city is woefully behind on its plan to implement bike lanes around the city and that Jarvis was a nightmare for cyclists, residents of affluent neighbourhoods like Moore Park and Rosedale (which feed into Jarvis) complained about the estimated two minutes this would add to their trip downtown. This action, following on the heels of a decision to increase the number of intersections at which drivers cannot turn right on a red light from 98 to 108, spurred drivers and mock newspapers to accuse the city of waging a war on cars.

While “war on the car” is a laughable notion — shame on the NAACP for waging war on white people! — Toronto isn’t the only large city sparking talk of war by trying to introduce more pedestrian-friendly measures. Something similar is happening in New York, where the transportation commissioner has closed off the Times Square portion of Broadway to car traffic and made it pedestrian space. In NYC it’s more clearly cast as a culture war (“To her opponents, she’s the latest in an extensive line of effete, out-of-touch liberals: the hipster bureaucrat.” and so on), though it takes little imagination to see that’s the underlying sentiment in Toronto as well. Class wars doesn’t play well here, so it gets dressed up as inconveniencing the poor drivers — for heaven’s sake, the Tamil protests last month drew far more attention from furious drivers than from the politically curious — but a quick read through the comments in any Globe, Post or Sun article about these changes reveals the target of drivers’ ire: hippy tree-huggers and socialist city councillors.

This nonsense seems to have faded now, but it lingers just enough that the architects of recent plans (albeit starry-eyed ones) to unfuck the drab and puke-stained entertainment district have felt compelled to reassure drivers that John Street will still allow cars. But a side proposal in the plan may actually be what causes drivers the most consternation, and holds the most interest for me personally: councillor Adam Vaughan would make Richmond and Adelaide streets — currently one-way streets running west and east respectively — into regular old two way streets. Star columnist Christopher Hume writes:

Because both Adelaide and Richmond are four-lane roads, conversion from one-way to two would be possible.

Right now neither street sustains the kind of vitality as King, Queen or College Streets. The one-ways are largely back streets west of Yonge, and expressways to the east.

The Bay doesn’t bother to dress the Richmond St. windows of its Queen St. flagship store.

Those descriptions are accurate. The stretch of Richmond between Yonge and University feels shockingly like a back alley except that cars blast through it at highway speeds. And therein lies the difficult decision: leave the only (and I do mean only) quick crosstown driving options as they are, or turn them into real streets again. Since I live smack in the middle of Richmond and Adelaide I’d love to see them become more like real streets instead of lifeless trunk highways, but I also understand the practical applications of keeping them one-way. I’m pretty certain that a compromise can be found to appease drivers and pedestrians, locals and commuters, without resorting to pouting, posturing accusations like “the war on cars.”