[URBAN NOTE] "Spacing to open retail store in the fall!"

[rfmcdonald]

Yay! Torontoist urbanist magazine will be opening up a brick and mortar store.

Spacing is pleased to officially announce that the magazine will be opening a brick-and-mortar retail outlet in downtown Toronto in the fall of 2014 — Toronto’s first city store — offering all kinds of items celebrating Toronto and Canadian cities.

Spacing‘s new home will be at 401 Richmond, the massive arts and culture cluster near Queen Street West and Spadina that is home to over 140 amazing organizations, galleries, and arts/media-focused businesses.

We believe our new home will let us offer our readers something hardly any other Canadian magazine can: a real retail experience. Our new space will be a storefront, created just for us, with direct access right off of Richmond Street West, between Spadina and Peter. And housed within our store will be the office of our magazine staff.

Since our inception, we’ve touted the benefits of experiencing public life and breaking down private-space barriers in the public realm. We’ve been feeling guilty for some time about how a magazine that promotes the merits of public space remains holed up behind two security doors. We’re excited by the idea that our readers will be able to walk right in and have a word (good or bad) with our staff. And we love the idea that people will be able to buy the unique merchandise we currently offer at our e-store, and so much more.

Not only will this new space be unique in Canada’s magazine world (only one other Canadian-owned magazine, Down Home in St. John’s, Nfld., has a brick-and-mortar retail space), but it will also fill a niche that is lacking in Toronto: a true city store. There are a handful of outlets that sell really cheap and boring t-shirts with “Toronto” or “Canada” or a beaver printed on them, but no retail store collects all of the amazing things produced by local artists and craftspeople that celebrate neighbourhoods and urbanity. The products we’ll offer will focus on Toronto, Canadian cities, and urbanism. We’ll offer apparel, stationery, prints, vintage transit stuff, books, and an assortment of urban ephemera that use the city as its muse. Oh, and buttons. Thousands and thousands of buttons.