Tag: Toronto

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…

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.”

"I have just met you, and I love you."

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Well, I’ve had an enjoyable forty-ish hours. It started Friday night when we walked down to Front Street to see this year’s criterium. I have no real interest in cycling, but it’s fun to watch racing on a downtown street. Plus, it gave me a chance to test out our new camera: a Canon SX10 IS. We used to have an S3 but sold it when Nellie got her Nikon SLR. I still have a little Canon S230, which is fine for carrying around in my pocket if we’re out with friends, but it turns out there was too big a gap between that and the D40. This SX10 feels familiar (it’s basically just the update of the S3 we had before), is a pretty good mix of convenience and quality, and the 20x zoom will come in handy. For example:

These guys were way down Front Street when I took that. Anyway, we couldn’t stay long as we had dinner reservations at Canoe with Nellie’s mom, so home we went to get all gussied up. Canoe was magnificent, as one would expect, and lives so comfortably in their place atop the Toronto restaurant pile (according to Toronto Life, anyway). Nellie and her mom started with the chevre with rosemary brioche, I had the prawn & asparagus chowder with tarragon butter, and we shared a bottle of 2007 Fielding viognier. For our mains I had the caribou (which was amazing), Nellie and her mom had the prime ribeye and we took a 2006 a bottle of Domaine Gardies Mas Les Cabes. No dessert, just dessert wine for Nellie and I and a glass of white for her mom. Oh, and at some point the afore-mentioned mom took off her shoes and went for a stroll through the restaurant. Don’t ask.

The next day, after dropping Nellie’s mom off at the airport we went to see Up (imdb | rotten tomatoes) at Yonge & Dundas. I’m not a big animation fan, and while I did like the last two Pixar releases (Ratatouille and wall-e) I didn’t bother to see them in the theatre. However, a screaming 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and a lot of advance critical praise made this one my top movie theatre priority this weekend. And it was good. Really, really good. It was sweet, funny, entertaining and (of course) spectacularly animated. Fun story, too, like Raiders Of The Lost Ark if Indy were an octagenarian. In the end I think it might have actually been a mistake to see it in the theatre, since the kid and mother behind me who talked often — and loudly — occasionally “pulled me” out of the film. But I’m still glad I saw it yesterday.

The movies weren’t done there. We freed up a little more room on the PVR by watching Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park (imdb | rotten tomatoes), which I kind of liked (bizarre mismatched music notwithstanding) but I felt it would have made a better short film than feature. There were so many repeated scenes and long tracking shots that nine minutes likely would’ve done it.

We also finally got around to watching the pilot of Glee (fox | onion a.v. club), which I found fairly funny, but if the singing keeps up like this I may struggle to keep watching. I can only take so much Amy Winehouse and Journey. While we watched that a killer rainstorm passed over Toronto, followed quickly by a brilliant rainbow (and another faint cousin):

Also, at some point this weekend I finished reading The Blind Side (amazon) by Michael Lewis. Only about a quarter of the book was what I expected it to be — an historic and financial look at the left tackle position in football. Instead it focused on a kid named Michael Oher, and told a very engaging story about his life. There is, in fact, a movie being adapted from it but with Sandra Bullock cast as one of the leads I don’t hold out much hope for it not sucking.

With that book done I’ve taken the advice given to me over the years by several friends, including those who’d just finished with my copy, and begun reading The Long Walk To Freedom.

Unfortunately it’s a bit too chilly out today to enjoy the sun the way we’d like, but that gives us a good excuse to tackle yet another chunk of the PVR’s hard drive.

For example: "Just another part of the master plan to drive the middle class out of the city."

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Today Toronto Hydro announced that they’ll soon charge variable rates for electricity, depending on the time of day.

Toronto Hydro announced Thursday that it will begin charging its customers new higher rates to use electricity when demand peaks, such as summer afternoons, and lower rates in the middle of the night, in an effort to encourage conservation and avoid blackouts.

This isn’t groundbreaking. The policy has been around for ages in Europe. It’s a simple financial disincentive to curb behaviour that can lead to power problems like blackouts (something Torontonians should be more than a little familiar with) and generally reduce power consumption. Given what’s happened in recent summers here in the city, it seems reasonable to dissuade people of the notion that electricity is an unlimited commodity.

Alas, the comment section of the Globe’s website has predictably degenerated into the usual whining about this being 1) a tax, 2) a nefarious plot by David Miller to strip away the rights and freedoms of Canadians, or 3) hippie treehugger goofiness. Or all of the above. Some even blamed the Tamil protestors. Some of that noise will be the knee-jerk response from political cranks who type first & think later, but I wonder how much comes from people who just don’t understand the use of price incentives as a social lever.

I remember Scott Adams writing once that the world seemed to make a little more sense to him once he knew something about economics. Of course economics is massively complex so understanding a little doesn’t give you the whole picture, but it forces you to see see, or at least acknowledge, that money is an enormous system, and this change is just turning one dial to affect the system a tiny bit. Until that point you’d see everything — like a tax increase or variable rate electricity — through the lens of “why are they doing this to me?” and start accusing politicians of robbing you, as if they had you and your buddies in mind.

Economics: the cause of, and answer to, all of life’s problems.

"[A] Herculean task"

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Once again, Star columnist Christopher Hume has gone and gotten my hopes up about Toronto’s waterfront. Today’s column, Breathing life into Don River, is about redeveloping the foot of the river where it meets Lake Ontario, and contains the lovely little representation seen above. Sigh.

Hume ends the article by saying it’ll take twenty-five years to finish this particular section of waterfront and start moving people into the residential portions. Given the lack of progress I’ve seen since I moved here twelve years ago, I fear he’s being overly optimistic.

"It's important that you feel through this."

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What a great weekend. Not because we did anything particularly dramatic or new, but because it was just so damn enjoyable. With work being the way it has lately (though it’s let up a bit for me in recent weeks, Nellie’s still hard at it) we’re usually happy just to relax and not feel guilty/worried about not working on the weekend.

Yesterday — easily the nicest day of the year so far — was a day to get out, stroll around, do some shopping at the market and visit friends. On the way over to see CBGB we spotted this little guy hanging out in a tree.

CBGB just got a new back patio and we helped them celebrate by taking advantage of their hospitality. They grilled burgers, served amazing cheeses (note to self: cranberry raincoast crisps + creamy applewood smoked cheddar = amazing), threw some beer in ice and welcomed us under the shade of the umbrella. The weather was perfect for sitting, drinking, laughing, eating and even hanging out with little LB, who was determined to get himself some beer. The oncoming rain forced us to wrap up, but not before we’d finished eating anyway. Inside we had more drinks and some delicious gelato — spiced chili chocolate mixed with blood orange, the latter being more of a sorbeto, really — before retiring once LB got his crank on a little bit. Awesome, awesome Saturday afternoon. I’ve been waiting for a day like that since, oh, October give or take.

Today wasn’t nearly as nice — cold, windy, grey — and started out a bit odd. The old gent next to us at breakfast seemed to be having his own one-man coot-off, yelling to his wife about how young people can’t do simple math anymore, and so on. No matter, it’s been more than satisfactory since then. We caught up on some TV. We got groceries and did laundry. We talked to our parents. We watched Snow Angels (imdb | rotten tomatoes) which, as with most David Gordon Green movies, was an excellent and textured slow burn leading to a few moments of raw violence. We lazed about and read. Nellie made pizza. Good, good day to cap off an excellent weekend.

Should work let up for both of us at once it’ll be nice to actually do something outside the city, or even explore something within it, but for now we’ll take these kinds of weekends no questions asked.

Even I adore ya, my Victoria-aaa-a-a-a

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

According to Richard Florida’s latest in the Globe, I’m living in the wrong city.

MID-CAREER PROFESSIONALS (Age 29-44)
1. Ottawa-Gatineau
2. Calgary
3. Whitehorse
4. Yellowknife
5. Iqaluit
6. Edmonton
7. Guelph
8. Victoria
9. Toronto
10. Montreal

Hmmm…#9, and behind some cities that I really have no desire in which to live. Also, the older you get, the better an option Toronto is for you, according to Florida: It’s #2 for families with children, #1 for empty-nesters and #2 for retirees. It doesn’t even show up in the top ten for single people. Not that I am, but that ranking says something about the city, or at least Florida’s perception of it.

I suppose I’d have to buy Who’s Your City to know exactly what criteria Florida uses. I suspect growth potential of the economy plays a large part (otherwise I can’t imagine Whitehorse-Yellowknife-Iqaluit going 3-4-5), but there are likely specific industries centered around Toronto and Montreal that would skew the scores for some people.

Anyway, having just gotten a taste of Ottawa winter (and having lived there for an entire humid-ass summer), I don’t think that #1 rating’s gonna sway me.

That apt description

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Ever since it last October we’ve enjoyed the restaurant at the corner of Front & Jarvis called That Corner Spot. After our first visit I blogged about the good beer (all local: Amsterdam & Mill Street), good food (good breakfast, excellent veggie burger), good produce (all procured from St. Lawrence Market across the screet) and good music. In the last month or so, though, it’s really taken a turn. Granted, it’s probably a turn for the more profitable — there are far more people in there now than before — but it’s also a turn for the generic. Gone is the small, local-focused menu; there’s now page after page of food available. The local beers, though still available, are now relegated to a small, mis-printed subsection of the menu. The simple tables, arty decor and interesting music have been replaced with generic tablecloths, Audrey Hepburn prints and light jazz. It hasn’t become a bad place; it’s just become every other place and lost what made it interesting. Like I said, it probably means they’ll survive a little longer, but I won’t be going back.

I always thought the generic name seemed out of place for a cool spot like that. Now I guess it fits perfectly.