[PHOTO] Last of Honest Ed's, 6 February 2018

It's the end of an era. Had I not gone last evening, there would have been nothing at all left of the sign, not even the stub.

Fall of the sign's fall was captured for Instagram by jackiiiee. Sean Galbraith took photos of the aftermath, here and here.

[PHOTO] Last of Honest Ed's, 6 February 2018

It's the end of an era. Had I not gone last evening, there would have been nothing at all left of the sign, not even the stub.

Fall of the sign's fall was captured for Instagram by jackiiiee. Sean Galbraith took photos of the aftermath, here and here.



Galbraith also assembled a video of this icon's demolition, from drone footage.

Watch on YouTube

[PHOTO] Allosaurus, American Museum of Natural History

The website of the American Museum of Natural History describes the scene in the Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda.

At its center, the Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda features an iconic dinosaur exhibit: a dramatic representation of an imagined prehistoric encounter: a Barosaurus rearing up to protect its young from an attacking Allosaurus. The Barosaurus skeleton, which is the tallest freestanding dinosaur mount in the world, is composed of replica bones cast from actual fossils, which would be too heavy to support in this fashion. As part of the restoration of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial, this display mount was divided in two, allowing visitors to walk between the famous combatants for the first time.

[URBAN NOTE] Seven Toronto links: CN Tower, land transfer tax, mass transit, Tool Library, Pickering

• Toronto Life shares twelve photos of the CN Tower taken at different points during its 1970s construction.


• blogTO also shares some CN Tower construction photos.


• Torontoist notes the warning of real estate agents that continuing to rely on the land transfer tax, without other revenue sources, is a problem for the budget of the city.


• Jennifer Pagliaro notes at the Toronto Star that updated projections for the cost of the Scarborough subway extension won't be released until after the election. (I bet they will be leaked beforehand.)


• blogTO shares a series of maps imagining what the map of Toronto could have looked like had the city followed through on the many plans for transit expansion that it has since dropped.


• The Toronto Tool Library, due to unforeseen circumstances, is at risk of closing unless its crowdfunding efforts succeed. blogTO reports.


• Michelle Adelman notes at NOW Toronto that plans of evacuations in the event of a catastrophe at a nuclear plant in the GTA, particularly Pickering just east of Scarborough, need updating.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Charlie Stross at Antipope writes about why he reads so little science fiction these days. (Too little plausible world-building and exploration of our world, he argues.)


• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait enthuses about the Falcon Heavy launch yesterday, while Lawyers, Guns and Money is much less impressed with the Falcon Heavy launch, calling it representative of the new global plutocracy.


• The Buzz shares some of the favourite books of 2017 of staff members at the Toronto Public Library.


• Centauri Dreams examines the recent study providing tantalizing data hinting at the potential environments of the TRAPPIST-1 planets.


• Cody Delistraty links to an essay of his analyzing the grand strategy of Macron for France, and for Europe.


• Dangerous Minds reports on how one man's nostalgia for the 1990s led him to create a video rental store.


• Gizmodo reports on how scientists made, under conditions of exceptional heat and pressure, a new kind of ice that may exist in the cores of Uranus and Neptune.


• Hornet Stories takes pointed issue with an astonishingly tone-deaf essay that demonstrates the existence of racism in the leather community.


• JSTOR Daily links to papers suggesting that referenda are not necessarily good for democracy.


• Language Hat looks at the surprisingly profound roots of singing in nonsense, in different cultures and over the age of the individual.


• The LRB Blog reports from a visit paid by one of its writers to the US embassy in London so disdained by Trump.


• Marginal Revolution links to a paper suggesting that there has been a consistent slowing of gains to life expectancy in rich countries since 1950, hinting perhaps at a maximum lifespan (for now?).


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes that the ozone hole has stopped repairing itself, quite possibly because of global warming.


• Towleroad reports on a sort of brunch-based passing of the torch from the old five castmembers of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy to the new five.


• Window on Eurasia shares what seems to be a fair take on the history of Jews in Siberia.

[NEWS] Four LGBTQ links: Project Houston, marginalization, coming out, sex panics

• Fatima Syed and Victoria Gibson ask what happened to Project Houston, the Toronto police enquiry that ended before the disappearace of more victims of the Church and Wellesley serial killer, over at the Toronto Star.


• Arshy Mann at Daily Xtra argues that all the mechanisms that marginalize people, not just police neglect, have to be taken into account.


• Vice interviews out 20-somethings on the subject of what they think about coming out. Is it still something that has to be done?


• AV Flox at Medium notes how Internet sex panics already tend to focus their hurt on LGBTQ communities.

[ISL] Six islands links: Singapore, Amherst Island, Newfoundland, James Island, Sardinia, Shetlands

• For well-off Chinese, Singapore has overtaken Hong Kong as their preferred offshore destination. Bloomberg reports.


• Residents on Amherst Island, near Kingston, complain about the effects of windfarm construction. Global News reports.


• This depressing Vice opinion piece argues that Newfoundland is on the verge of complete economic collapse and radical depopulation.


• The private island of James Island, off Vancouver Island in British Columbia, is subject to a First Nations land claim. Global News reports.


• An Italian island community, desperate to avert depopulation, is offering houses for sale at ridiculously low prices. Will there be takers? (And will they stay?) The National Post reports.


• Towleroad reports</> on the plight of a young gay man in a Shetlands community who finds himself the only out person there.

[URBAN NOTE] On the end of Coffee Time at Dupont and Lansdowne and Toronto gentrification

I've lived five minutes' walk from the Coffee Time restaurant at 1005 Lansdowne Avenue, on the northeastern corner of Lansdowne and Dupont, for more than a decade, but I would be surprised if I went there as many as a half-dozen times. It never happened to be on any of my corridors, for TTC buses or for walking, and if I really wanted to go out for coffee locally then the McDonald's at Dupont and Dufferin would have been much closer.

The location's reputation may, perhaps, have entered my thinking. The restaurant's lone reviewer at Yelp back in July rated it only one star, noting that the crowd hanging out here, in a traditionally poor neighbourhood of Wallace Emerson close to apartment towers once linked to crime including drugs and prositution, is "interesting." See, also, the passing mentions in archived discussion threads here and here.



As I noted when I blogged about it back in July of 2017, this Coffee Time's location was limited. The transformation of the neighbourhood into one populated by tall condos and relatively affordable rentals is ongoing, and substantial: the towers at St. Clarens are no longer the only towers in the area. Approaching from the east, along Dupont from the direction of Dufferin, the Coffee Time stands right in front of a Food Basics grocery store that plays an outsized role in this transforming neighbourhood's mythology.



This Food Basics is location is anchor store for the Fuse Condos development, on the northwest of Dupont and Lansdowne. This new grocery store opening was welcome by some, who saw no reason this store could not co-exist with the FreshCo in the Galleria Mall just a few minutes east at Dupont and Dufferin. To some, this was a betrayal: Fuse Condos had produced a Metro grocery store, a higher-end grocery store with more selection, and some buyers were quite upset. There was even a petition calling for a Metro.

All this was satirized in The Beaverton, and aptly analyzed in the Toronto Star by Edward Keenan. Keenan pointed out that this behaviour was wildly out of place given the decidedly working-class nature of Wallace Emerson. Food Basics, obviously, got installed regardless.

The Coffee Time, though, is now closed. I learned of this from a post at blogTO on Thursday, a post that made use of the first photo I posted above. I walked by Saturday morning in the light of day, and I saw the doors closed, signs thanking customers for their patronage, chairs on tables ready for movers, and someone working at packing away the equipment behind the counter and below the emptied menu display.







Chelsea Lofts, on the southeast corner of Dupont and Lansdowne, is visible reflected in the Coffee Time window in the last photograph above.

This Coffee Time was far from being an undiscovered gem in the rough in west-end Toronto. It was utilitarian, catering competently to its working- and lower-class demographic in what had been until a bit more than a decade ago a consistently relatively poor area of Toronto. It's gone. What will happen to its clientele? It may never have been very busy, but there were consistently people there, making use of a relatively affordable restaurant in their community as a meeting space. Where will these people go now?
(The r/toronto thread considers the possibility of a migration down Lansdowne towards Bloor.) There was a public-access computer available for use, presumably for people who lacked home Internet. What will the people who used this computer do now?

I don't doubt, myself, that there is going to be condo construction on the emptied site on the northeast corner of Dupont and Lansdowne, just as there has been on every other corner there. Nothing has been filed yet, blogTO reported, but that's only a matter of time. Dupont and Lansdowne is the hub of a rising neighbourhood, blocks and towers reaching into the sky, and all the space that can be freed up for further density in this portion of midtown Toronto so close to downtown Toronto is desperately needed. Wallace Emerson will transition towards a new equilibrium, one where--among other things--the coffee shops will have a rather nicer ambiance.

I am fine with all of this. It's just that I think a place that has been a landmark in the area where I've lived, and that has been a reasonably prominent features for innumerable tens of thousands of people, deserves some commemoration. The Coffee Time at Dupont and Lansdowne was here, was open, was recognizable, and served its purpose. What better can be said of any public space than that? (I just gave it three stars on Yelp!. That seems fair.)