[PHOTO] The pink neon of Glad Day is still aglow on Yonge Street

I was walking down Yonge Street yesterday evening when I saw the pink neon sign of Glad Day still in place, on the wall by the stairs leading up to the bookshop's former location.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO notes that the CN Tower will appear on the new loonie.


• The Dragon's Gaze reports on the circumstellar disk of unusual star 48 Librae.


• The Dragon's Tales notes evidence that bonobos and chimpanzees have interbred a quarter=million years ago, like humans and Neanderthals.


• Language Log remembers a Chinese man imprisoned for wearing a shirt insulting Xi Jinping.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money is correct in arguing for an end to feral cat populations, on ecological grounds.


• The LRB Blog looks at efforts to memorialize D.H. Lawrence in his home town in the north of England.


• Marginal Revolution reports on a high-profile debate in China between two economists.


• The Map Room Blog maps mortality in Switzerland and finds large differences between Latin and Germanic areas.


• Strange Maps notes one British proposal in the 1780s with the United States that would have given all of inhabitable Canada to that country.


• Window on Eurasia looks at problems with Russia's new concept of a civic nation.

[URBAN NOTE] "What's So Great About the Return of Downtowns"

I agree almost entirely with Justin Fox's sentiments as expressed in this Bloomberg View op-ed.

I’m writing this on a warm Monday evening in downtown Montgomery, Alabama. It’s Halloween, and the city’s trick-or-treat action is elsewhere. Still, there’s a good number of people out and about -- with maybe 1 in 10 in costume -- eating in restaurants, drinking in bars, strolling along the Alabama River waterfront, listening to some dude play guitar in the outdoor bar at the Renaissance Hotel, listening to some other dude play guitar in the manicured alleyway known as “The Alley,” and so on. As for me, I’m sitting in my seventh-floor corner room at the Hampton Inn, built as the Greystone Hotel in 1927, after eating an excellent dinner of chicken gizzards, cornbread, sausage and pickled vegetables1 a few minutes walk away at Central, which appears to be the city’s nicest restaurant.

Twenty-five years ago, you couldn’t do any of those things in downtown Montgomery. I know because I lived here then. The Elite (pronounced “ee-light”) Cafe, the downtown institution where F. Scott Fitzgerald used to eat, closed a few weeks after I moved in, and with that disappeared pretty much the last reason (other than interactions with local government agencies) to go downtown. My office was only a few blocks away, on the slope of Goat Hill, atop which the Alabama Capitol stands, and my apartment was only 10 or 15 blocks from that.2 But my life happened on Goat Hill, in the neighborhood around my apartment -- Cloverdale -- and amid the burgeoning sprawl of the city’s east and south.

There had been efforts through the decades to bring activity back downtown, but things seem to have only really gotten going with the construction of the riverfront park and an adjacent minor league baseball stadium in 2004. The Renaissance and attached Montgomery Convention Center opened in 2008, as did the restored Hampton Inn. The Alley came in 2009. The city borrowed lots of money to make all this happen and, in a development somewhat unique to Alabama, the state’s pension funds chipped in, too. It seems to be paying off. Downtown Montgomery is back.

[URBAN NOTE] "Crombie questions Mississauga's ability to pay for LRT airport extension"

CBC News' Laura Howells reports on an epic absence of communication between Toronto and Mississauga municipal governments, as well as a worrisome incapacity on the part of the latter.

With Toronto set to vote this week on funding for Mayor John Tory's SmartTrack transit plan, Mississauga Mayor Bonnie Crombie said her city can't afford to kick in some $470 million to expand the Eglinton-Crosstown lightrail line into Misssissauga and Pearson Airport.

"If we were asked to contribute such and amount – half a billion dollars – it wouldn't allow us to build any of our own priorities for well into a couple of decades," Crombie said Monday on Metro Morning.

A report from Toronto's city manager surfaced last week that suggests Mississauga and the Greater Toronto Airport Authority pay 19 per cent of the cost of expanding the Eglinton line into Mississauga.

A problem for Crombie is that no one from the City of Toronto had talked to them about this payment idea before publicly releasing the report.

Crombie said she supports transit, but points out that her city isn't equipped to raise the money to cover such a project.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto’s grudge against apartments"

Density, as Sean Micallef argues in the Toronto Star, is a good thing for Toronto, indeed necessary if it is to be inhabitable by the many and not the few.

Toronto has a grudge against apartments, a sentiment expressed in various ways.

A few weeks ago, a group in Parkdale held a public meeting on development in their community and invited speakers from other neighbourhoods to share knowledge on how to influence good development. The byzantine planning process is difficult to negotiate, so sharing knowledge is critical to being effective. Good design, affordability, and community amenities are all part of what people want.

The problem is the way this well-meaning group and countless other local campaigns are positioned. This particular one focused on the “900 luxury units” coming to the area. That’s an incredible way to refer to the tiny units that are most condos built in Toronto today, hardly “luxury.” Making it even more remarkable is some of the invited speakers were single-family homeowners.

So warped are perceptions in Toronto that even progressive folks consider tiny condo apartments, the first rung of the property ladder that people claw their way into, as “luxury,” but homes in the million dollar range or more are somehow not. There’s also a perception that those homeowners “contribute” to the neighbourhood and, in this case, the 900 apartment dwellers somehow wouldn’t.

To be sure, owning a house in Toronto is also a feat of economic gymnastics for many people. “The bank owns my house” is a frequently heard phrase, and the state of being “house poor” is common. It isn’t easy. But this damaging way of looking at how we live, when the single family home is valourized so passionately, ultimately means much of the city is nearly impossible to get into unless you can afford a house.

[URBAN NOTE] "When hidden poverty penetrates Toronto’s suburbs"

This, a Toronto Star article by Jessica Wynne Lockhart, is part of a series on suburban Torotno's woes. I confess that I know so little about these areas. I should know more.

With its brown brick exterior and tidy garden, the 1970s bungalow on Mississauga’s Dixie Road appears unremarkable.

The home of Our Place Peel, a United Way-funded emergency shelter for youth in crisis, is a safe haven for 16- to 21-year-olds who have nowhere else to go.

It is also the only emergency youth shelter in the entire Peel region.

“We have to turn away a lot of kids on a nightly basis because we’re usually full,” says executive director Christy Upshall. Last year, Our Place Peel, which houses 14 short-term and six transitional beds, had to send away more than 450 youth who were in need of a safe place to stay.

Much like the non-descript building, the need for emergency shelters and housing in Toronto’s suburbs is one that could easily go unnoticed. However, it’s a widespread problem — in 2015, 14,000 people in the Peel region accessed a shelter, 4,000 of which were children or youths (up to age 21).

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto is good at sports — get used to it"

I have to admit that I like the optimism of CBC News' Benjamin Blum, purely for reasons of municipal patriotism. Is this liking well-founded, sports fans?

Yes, you read the headline correctly.

This goes beyond the city's reputation for unearned bravado and the usual bandwagon jumping that comes with success. There's tangible support for this claim now.

Toronto FC's 5-0 thrashing of New York City FC to reach the East final in the MLS playoffs, coupled with back-to-back ALCS trips for the Blue Jays and the Raptors' run to the conference final in May have Toronto actually feeling good about its pro sports teams. Hell, even the Maple Leafs are fun to watch!

The last time Toronto's sports teams collectively were this successful was in the early 1990s when the Jays won back-to-back World Series titles, the Argonauts won a Grey Cup with nickname hall-of-famers Rocket Ismail and Pinball Clemons and the Maple Leafs... well, only Wayne Gretzky and Kerry Fraser know for sure what happened in the 1993 Campbell conference final.

So how did we get here?

[URBAN NOTE] "Battling myth of the green monster in Thorncliffe Park"

Patty Winsa's Toronto Star article makes me think of my own experience living in a Toronto I've deeply inscribed with my routines. Breaking out of these routines can take effort.

The stream of parents and children moving through R.V. Burgess Park on this Friday afternoon is like a kaleidoscope of shifting colour and scenes. It’s one of few public spaces in the Thorncliffe Park neighbourhood.

Mothers in gem-coloured saris set against others in dark veils push children in strollers towards the highrises that ring the park and the library, an end-of-day migration to apartments that have more than 30,000 residents, double the capacity they were built for.

Some go against the flow, heading back towards R.V. Burgess to set up for the last of the seasonal Friday markets on an unseasonably warm fall day.

Just beyond the towers lies one of the city’s most beautiful public spaces and it’s so quiet you can hear a leaf drop. The E.T. Seton Park, part of the Don Valley ravine, is little used by the predominantly South Asian immigrant community that lives above it.

Part of the problem may be separation from the ravine, which has one main entrance from Thorncliffe Park Dr. and is otherwise cut off from the apartments that ring it. Entrances from the grounds of a couple of buildings were closed off.

Another may be trust.

[URBAN NOTE] "Restaurateurs are taking the leap of faith – they’re going vegan"

As someone who enjoyed a very good lunch at Yonge and Eglinton's Fresh this afternoon, Corey Mintz' article in The Globe and Mail makes sense. If something can be done and done well, why not?

Vegans becoming restaurateurs is an old story, often told as a joke. As in, did you hear about the Marxist who tried capitalism?

What’s new is restaurateurs going vegan, and their faith that the market will bear it.

Scrolling through the adventurous menu for Planta, Toronto’s newest vegan restaurant, you’ll find a few cheeky acknowledgments of the authors’ inspirations.

“Habibi” (Arabic for “beloved”) is a nod to the chef’s mother, who helped create the dish, a mix of finely chopped cauliflower, split pea fritters, parsley and mint. “The Italian Job” pizza, enriched with cashew mozzarella and fennel sausage, pays tribute to the 1969 Michael Caine film. And the “18 Carrot Dog” is of course a reference to the solid-gold balls that executive chef David Lee and owner Steven Salm must have in order to charge $17 for a carrot in a hot dog bun.

That veggie dog, a carrot smoked before being fried on a plancha grill, served with mustard, sauerkraut and pickles on a house-baked bun, is a signpost of change, evidenced by the unambiguous strategy spelled out on Planta’s website – “to fill a void in the market of upscale, full service, plant-based dining options” – based on an assumption that guests are willing to pay good money for non-animal food.

We are moving beyond the long-held and false perception that, because meat is expensive, vegetables should be cheap. That’s never been true. The current price of pecans is more than steak. Planta’s move into this market is the signal that customers are ready to value it.

[ISL] Bloomberg on New Zealand as a refuge from the world

Emma O'Brien's Bloomberg article notes that New Zealand has resumed its position as a place to hide from the world.

When Hong Kong-based financier Michael Nock wanted a place to escape in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, he looked beyond the traditional havens of the rich to a land at the edge of the world, where cows outnumber people two-to-one.

Nock, the founder of hedge fund firm Doric Capital Corp., bought a retreat 5,800 miles away in New Zealand’s picturesque Queenstown. In the seven years since, terror threats in Europe and political uncertainty from Britain to the U.S. have helped make the South Pacific nation -- a day by air away from New York or London -- a popular bolthole for the mega wealthy.

Isolation has long been considered New Zealand’s Achilles heel. That remoteness is turning into an advantage, however, with hedge-fund pioneer Julian Robertson to Russian steel titan Alexander Abramov and Hollywood director James Cameron establishing multi-million dollar hideaways in the New Zealand countryside.

“The thing that was always working against New Zealand -- the tyranny of distance -- is the very thing that becomes its strength as the world becomes more uncertain,” Nock, 60, said by phone from Los Angeles during a recent business trip.

Nock’s 2-hectare (5-acre) estate is named “Giverny” after artist Claude Monet’s iconic home and garden in northern France, and the “funny old farmhouse” is surrounded by ponds and mature plants, he said. Nock is converting a barn into an art studio on the property, which overlooks Queenstown’s Shotover River -- a fast-flowing, turquoise stretch of water that tourists speed down on jet boats and whitewater rafts.

[URBAN NOTE] "The main difference between Trump and Ford? Ford couldn’t start a war"

I cannot think of any reason to disagree with Edward Keenan's article in today's Toronto Star. Trump very much does evoke Rbo Ford to Canadians, especially Torontonians. Where Ford's election was a matter of embarrassment, Trump's election would be a catastrophe for the United States, and for the world.

There are significant differences between Trump and late Toronto mayor Rob Ford, obviously: Trump is far richer and prone to ostentatious displays of cartoonishly poor taste, while a black Cadillac SUV given to him by his brothers is as show-offy as Ford ever got. Ford had a common touch and genuine love for retail face-to-face constituent service that Trump shows no evidence of even pretending to. Ford suffered very sadly and famously from addiction problems of a kind that are apparently not among Trump’s long list of vices. And for all the displays of oblivious racism, sexism, and homophobia Ford forced Toronto to endure, he never whipped up open white nationalist racism quite so proudly and transparently as Trump has.

But oh, the similarities: the wealthy son of a wealthy man who somehow successfully presents himself as the avatar of the downtrodden; the war against the mainstream media and the burn-it-all-down flame-throwing at virtually everyone, left and right, in the established system; the apparently pathological habit of saying untrue things — even small, easily checked, seemingly irrelevant things — and of having those errors and lies fact-checked by the Star’s Daniel Dale.

And you have both men, despite their long, obvious records of dishonesty, wielding reputations among supporters as bold truth-tellers, for the apparently simple reason that they frequently say vulgar and offensive things, express out loud the usually verboten id of the electorate. It has been called “authenticity” in both men, but it is precisely their disregard for factual precision that is being labelled by the word: This is corruption and skullduggery! These Orientals are taking over! She should go to jail! We should ban refugees! Those immigrants are rapists! The constituency for this stuff does not give a crap to check the footnoted sources or parse its literal accuracy, they see truth in the wild howl of resentment, expressed plainly and forcefully.

With both Trump and Ford, there’s the belligerent indifference to the viability of proposals or any policy nuance or the potential consequences of ignorantly thinking out loud. The contempt for expertise. The hostility not just to stuffy protocol but to the basic institutions and practices that govern and protect the integrity of the democratic system. The pettiness, the seeming inability to resist impulsively lashing out, the insistent black-and-white dividing of society into us and them.

[. . .]

And here is where people in Toronto could be the voice of experience, having learned that such a thing would never cause public support to crumble. Certainly, prominent politicians and civic leaders would back away and condemn, but that only causes the diehard regular folks to dig in their heels, convinced all the more that their man is being persecuted by a rigged system. And eventually, the endurance of the grassroots fervour draws the politicos back toward the fold, like flies unable to resist the allure of a dung heap. And soon, the bad craziness seems normal — indeed it has become normal.

What happened in Toronto is that you had this figure who was so simultaneously compelling and unpredictable — so bizarrely dramatic a character — that you could not stop watching or talking about him, and yet also a man so fundamentally and uniquely unsuited to the job at hand, that all other political debate seemed to become of relatively low importance. His tendency to make everything a reflection of himself became a universally shared trait, and suddenly the only issue, in the eyes of supporters and opponents alike, became with-him-or-against-him.