A Bit More Detail

The location of the Toronto Reference Library north and east of Yonge and Bloor, directly east of Yorkville and directly south of Rosedale, means that well-positioned photographers can take advantage of some excellent views. The first two photos are of Rosedale, green with trees and dense with houses, while the third is a photo of a Yorkville well into its condoization.

I was quickly walking through Bloor-Yonge station Sunday evening, heading towards the southbound platform, when I looked over and saw that the control room's window, normally set to an opaque mirror, was transparent. Why would I not pause to take a quick shot of the revealed interior?

CHAZ on Charles, at 45 Charles Street East, has one of the more architecturally interesting façades I've seen built onto a condo tower.

Jennifer Pagliaro's article in the Toronto Star explores the political mechanics behind the impending construction of a super-high condo tower at Yonge and Bloor. The City of Toronto lacks much control over the process, it seems.

An unprecedented development — an 80-storey Toronto condo tower that will be second in height only to the CN Tower — sets a new standard for density at a crucial downtown intersection. Those extremes have created schisms at city hall over more than a year, during a planning process that has left key questions lingering: How much is too much? And who decides?

What occurred with this tower, which Yorkville developer Sam Mizrahi has dubbed “The One,” does not reflect how all building applications are dealt with in this city. But it is an example of how, some councillors say, the city is being built higher and higher, under duress.

As real estate wars see developers buying smaller and smaller parcels of land at rising prices, they are increasingly building skyward to cover their costs.

That’s been noticed at city hall. City councillors and staff say developers are applying more frequently to build well above the prescribed height and density for a neighbourhood. Councillors say there is little recourse to accommodating exceptions, with a provincially legislated appeals body capable of overturning council’s planning choices.

With the province in the midst of a review of that powerful body, the Ontario Municipal Board, city advocates say it’s finally time to get serious about removing Toronto from its grasp.

In the absence of reform, this is how one very tall, very dense building got the green light at council.

I've blogged in the past about Stollery's, a men's clothing store on the southwest corner of Yonge and Bloor that was hastily demolished in January 2015 ahead of a heritage designation. There was discussion that an eighty-story mixed-use tower was intended for that site. As of June 2016, the whole lot remains empty, and level.

I've blogged before about the Cumberland Terrace shopping mall complex in Yorkville, north and west of Yonge and Bloor. In November 2014, I noted a public art project inside the mall--called a dying mall, unrenovated since 1974 and thus retaining a certain curiosity factor, by Shawn Micallef--aimed at reconnecting it to its Yorkville roots. In January 2015, I shared a photo of the curiously empty mall's lower level by Bay Station, at a mere quarter to nine in the evening.

I've recently had the opportunity to walk along Cumberland Street, past the glass-faced north wall of Cumberland Terrace, past the same passage with the same potted tree. The second photo was made by the camera on my new phone, a Nexus 4, the first with the older Huawei.

The Toronto Star's Christopher Hume mourns, perhaps prematurely, for the end of Yonge and Bloor as a happening cultural destination.

The richer Toronto grows, the poorer it feels. The most recent reminder came with the death of Avrom Isaacs, long one of the two or three most important art dealers in Canada.

For several decades his gallery on Yonge St. just north of Bloor was Ground Zero for anyone interested in contemporary Canadian art. Just doors away was Carmen Lamanna, the other legendary Toronto gallerist, not so much Isaacs’ rival as a fellow traveller. A few blocks west in Yorkville, Walter Moos opened his gallery in 1962, a year after Isaacs moved to Yonge

Eventually, the Village, as it was then called, was enshrined as Toronto’s designated art district. At its height, there must have been more than a dozen art galleries in Yorkville, not all of them worthy, but part of the scene nevertheless.

Today, little remains. A few dealers have hung on, but even before Lamanna and Isaacs died, both had been forced to relocate, victims of rising rents and land values that they did as much as anyone to increase.

[. . .]

By the turn of the century, however, this stretch of the city’s main street had become a series of restaurants and after the demise of the Fiesta, none of them particularly noteworthy. Lamanna’s old place even did time as a massage parlour.

Pretty soon the three-storey mid-19th century buildings that comprise the streetscape will be part of a 58-floor condo tower that has also displaced the venerable Cookbook Store that stood at the corner of Yonge and Cumberland for 31 years.