A Bit More Detail

• blogTO tries to pit the west side of Toronto against the east side.


• Centauri Dreams describes an inventive plan to launch a probe to rendezvous with Proxima Centauri.


• Crooked Timber looks at the idea of civil society in the age of Trump.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper that aims to explore why Neptune-class exoplanets are so common.


• Marginal Revolution notes an interesting history of Singapore.


• The New APPS Blog links to a report suggesting that big data may have created President Trump.


• The Planetary Society Blog reports on the latest plans for exploring Ceres.


• Towleroad notes a rumoured plan to legalize anti-LGBT discrimination under Trump.


• The Volokh Conspiracy has one take on Supreme Court obstructionism.


• Window on Eurasia suggests Russians may accept pension reforms which will place the minimum age for qualifying for a pension for men above the average male life expectancy, and reports from St. Petersburg about a dispute over the ownership of a church.

It’s hard to keep track of the number of Toronto churches that have been converted into living quarters in the past decade and it looks like another adaptation is coming to The Junction very soon. The former High Park-Alhambra United Church, located at 260 High Park Avenue at Annette, is on the market for $8,950,000.

This west end intersection is home to more than a few steeples and spires. The United Church property is part of a collection of vast, century-old churches: the former Victoria-Royce Presbyterian Church at 152 Annette St., built in 1885 and converted more recently into Victoria Lofts; the former Czechoslovakian Baptist Church at 200 Annette St., constructed in 1888 and converted into the Park Lofts; and St. Cecilia Catholic Church built in 1911 and still operating as a church.

Originally built in 1908 as a Methodist Church, the High Park-Alhambra United Church closed in 1996. The Methodists played a significant role in the Junction’s alcohol ban which kept the neighbourhood dry from 1904 to 1998.

Today, the site is roughly 1.05 acres in size while the church itself contains about 30,000-square feet of space. There’s a three-storey annex attached to the main structure, home to a gym, classroom and various meeting rooms.

For residents of Cathedraltown, the news was nothing short of a Christmas miracle.

After nearly a decade of seeing the towering Slovak Cathedral of Transfiguration in Markham closed to the public, local resident Mayrose Gregorios couldn’t believe it when she heard the news from two men doing cleanup work on the property one morning: the church would be open for weekend mass.

For as long as Gregorios had lived in Cathedraltown, a quiet subdivision near Major Mackenzie Dr., and Highway 404, whose name was inspired by the adjacent European-style cathedral, the empty building had cast a dark shadow on the community. The last service in the cathedral, which broke ground more than three decades ago, took place in 2006.

The reasons for the closure are believed to be twofold: The first, a decade-old dispute between the developer Helen Roman-Barber and the Eparchy for Catholic Slovaks of the Byzantine Rite in Canada, over the title to the land, left the cathedral without a congregation.

But in recent years, Roman-Barber, head of King David Inc., told residents the cathedral, with its magnificent 14-storey bell towers and cupolas plated in 22-karat gold, was closed so that the numerous detailed mosaics planned for the inside could be completed. An anticipated deadline of December 2015, set by Roman-Barber in a Markham staff report, came and passed. Residents stopped hoping for good news.

So two weeks ago, Gregorios woke up early and waited for the 18-tonne bronze church bells, built at the prestigious Paccard Foundry in France, to ring and announce the momentous occasion. When she didn’t hear them toll that day, she walked over to the cathedral, saw people streaming in and joined them.

“They said it was a private mass, but couldn’t stop anyone who wanted to worship,” she said, adding there were about 200 people in attendance. “It was a beautiful moment: the mass, the singing, the spirit of it all,” said Gregorios, who said the mass was in Arabic and English.

Growing up in the 1960s in Chinatown in a flat above her parents’ silk shop, Jennie Norman had no idea about the buried history beneath the Toronto Chinese United Church (TCUC), on Chestnut Street south of Dundas, where she and her friends spent their free time at youth groups and fundraising bazaars.

The TCUC congregation, which served older Cantonese-speaking immigrants as well as second- or third-generation Chinese Canadians such as Ms. Norman, operated out of the church between 1955 and 1988, when the building was sold and demolished to make way for a parking lot.

Last year, however, the TCUC’s well-preserved foundations resurfaced during a massive archeological dig on the site, which is slated to become a $500-million provincial courthouse developed by Infrastructure Ontario (IO).

As archeologists have since revealed, the church traces its origins to a tiny wood-frame chapel founded on the site in the 1840s by five African-American men, some refugees from slavery. Named the British Methodist Episcopal Church in 1856 and rebuilt twice, it became the leading place of worship for Toronto’s black community. When the BME’s membership dwindled in the 1950s, the property was sold to the United Church to establish the city’s first Chinese congregation.

The TCUC, recalls Ms. Norman, a 66-year-old retired IT consultant, “certainly was a very important cultural centre for the Chinese population.” But, she adds, “I doubt if anyone in the congregation knew enough about the history.”

Fr. Michael Busch, rector of St. Michael’s Cathedral in Toronto, was only making a little joke, about how people are always asking how much work it must be, renovating a huge downtown church all by yourself.

It was hardly an applause line, especially from a priest in a pulpit. But this was a midday Mass to thank the workers who spent five years shoring up the foundation of the 168-year-old centre of Upper Canadian Catholicism, bolstering the stone and brick with hidden steel, installing tiled floors and new statues, and painting the ceiling by hand.

Even after all the singing, backed by a brass band and a new Quebec-made organ, something about that reno joke sparked a contagious enthusiasm. It was the first chance for people to give thanks personally, rather than just hear Archbishop of Toronto Thomas Collins say it.

It started with one man in a worker’s jacket in the front row, rising to his feet and clapping.

Supportive applause rose gingerly from the pews. Some people around him stood up, too, but tentatively. Then the workers joined in together, and churchly decorum stood no chance.