![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I took a walk Friday evening down Yonge Street Friday evening, starting at a quarter to 7 at the Toronto Reference Library just above Bloor and finishing a couple dozen minutes later at Yonge-Dundas Square. The city was tense, but still alive.
- NOW Toronto notes that poor and racialized people in Toronto find it difficult to access healthy food.
- blogTO observes that the McDonald's at King and Dufferin has installed blue lights in washrooms to try to discourage the shooting up there of heroin.
- The TTC is set to offer cell phone service in some downtown tunnels. blogTO reports.
- Perry King at Spacing reports on how Toronto needs to expand its facilities for the growing number of players of cricket.
- Samantha Edwards at NOW Toronto reports that the owner of 795 College has been fined $C 135 000 for the renoviction of prior tenants.
- blogTO notes that grocery chain No Frills has come out with a side-scrolling video game.
- blogTO notes that Lakeshore Apparel is making shirts and other garments representing often-overlooked Toronto neighbourhoods.
- Famed Little Italy nightclub The Matador has been sold to condo developers. The Toronto Star reports.
- The East Side Motel, a Scarborough motel once used by the City of Toronto to house homeless people, has been demolished. The Toronto Star U>reports.
- Front-line housing workers are finding themselves faced with problems impossible to solve thanks to the housing crisis. The Toronto Star reports.
- Anne Kingston at MacLean's notes that estate documents belonging to Barry and Honey Sherman will be unsealed in a couple of months, attracting interest from people interested in the billionaire couple's murder.
- This PressProgress report on the many well-off businesspeople in Toronto who supported the Faith Goldy run for mayor of Toronto is eye-opening.
- This blogTO ranking of the best and the worst McDonald's restaurants in Toronto makes sense to me.
- I look forward to what an audit of the campaign finances of alt-right poster child Faith Goldy's mayoral campaign will reveal. The Toronto Star reports.
- This article at TVO notes that cuts in school lunches for needy children in Toronto should not necessarily be blamed on the Ford government.
- Urban Toronto looks back at Yonge and College before yet another of the intersection's transformations.
- This initiative by a Scarborough church to rebuild itself in such a way as to create affordable housing for its neighbourhood is certainly innovative. The Toronto Star reports.
[PHOTO] Stardust Convenience, 9 pm
Mar. 25th, 2019 11:03 amThe evocatively-named Stardust Convenience has been on the northwestern corner of Dufferin and College for as long as I've been in Toronto, but I only noticed the mural painted on the building to its west last night.
- Jamie Bradburn took a look back at one weekend in 1908, as revealed in the pages of the Toronto World.
- blogTO looks at the surprising controversy surrounding the creation of the first apartment towers in Toronto, on College Street near the University of Toronto.
- blogTO shares a collection of photos examining the dynamic, suffering Toronto of the 1930s.
- Vice shares an amusing feature listing just some of the passenger stereotypes the average TTC user might encounter on the subway.
- Aparita Bhandani at The Discourse takes a look at how residents of Scarborough feel about the often unflattering stereotypes directed at their part of Toronto.
Tuesday afternoon, in a gloriously warm late afternoon full of brilliant sunshine, I took a nice walk west on College Street, dipping in and out of Kensington Market.
- The Toronto Star pays respect to the late June Rowlands, Toronto's first female mayor.
- Google's Sidewalk Labs project, intended to remake Quayside, is already resulting in jobs--in New York City? MacLean's reports.
- The flooding at the L Tower downtown sounds terrible. The Toronto Star reports.
- Race, unsurprisingly, remains a significant divide in Toronto schools. NOW Toronto reports.
- The TTC is increasing bus service on the Dundas and Carlton routes to compensate for Bombardier's failure to deliver. CBC reports.
Toronto's Lillian H. Smith Library, located on 239 College Street just east of Spadina Avenue is one of my favourite libraries. Housed in a handsome building faced with yellow brick, the Lillian H. Smith branch--named after a pioneering early 20th century children's librarian--stands out as the home to two special collections, the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation & Fantasy on the third floor and the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books on the fourth.
Today, when I was looking down from the fourth floor, it struck me that the interior of the Lillian H. Smith Library is quite similar to that of the Toronto Reference Library, the different floors wrapped around an atrium stretching almost to the ceiling. Both are all heights, but the Lillian H. Smith features a classy pairing of polished concrete with wood and warm carpets. My compliments to the architect, clearly!
Today, when I was looking down from the fourth floor, it struck me that the interior of the Lillian H. Smith Library is quite similar to that of the Toronto Reference Library, the different floors wrapped around an atrium stretching almost to the ceiling. Both are all heights, but the Lillian H. Smith features a classy pairing of polished concrete with wood and warm carpets. My compliments to the architect, clearly!
- The National Post's Victor Ferreira notes that CAMH will be driven from its College Street home by its landlord to make room for condos.
- blogTO notes the site of a former heritage building at Yonge and Eglinton will become--surprise!--a condo site.
- The Toronto Star's Ben Spurr notes the deputy mayor wants to encourage the TTC to buy future streetcars not from Bombardier.
- Steve Munro looks in detail at the amended plan to give priority on King Street to mass transit.
- Tricia Wood at Torontoist talks about ways the TTC can improve bus service, starting with better scheduling.
Tags:
The mesh of streetcar wires overhead is particularly dense at Spadina and College, on the border between Chinatown and Kensington Market and the University of Toronto.
Thursday, when I was walking west along College, I passed by TOT Cat Café (298 College Street, Toronto's only cat café. I had long been curious about the place, following the different fundraising efforts aiming to set up a cat café in Toronto starting a couple of years ago and then hearing last spring about the scandal when the Toronto Humane Society stopped supplying this cafe with cats for adoption (CBC, Toronto Star, Reddit). The sign outside showed that the cafe was still in operation, and promised. I needed some coffee and could enjoy something sweet, so why not go inside?
The cafe is organized as a sort of double enclosure, the cafe space surrounding the inner double-doored chamber open to the street where the cats reside.
After I finished my enjoyable coffee and cheesecake, and being briefed on the rules, I passed inside. There were thirteen cats, I was told, most hiding in the carpeted cubby holes at the far end, but some spilling into bowls and on top of ladders in plain view. The cats--apparently sourced by Scarborough Bluffs Cat Relief, part of the effort to retrieve cats and other pets dumped at the Scarborough Bluffs--were available for adoption at a cost of $C 150 per cat. Posters listing the cats' names, ages, and availability were on the west wall, but the other people there were not paying close attention to those. They were looking at the cats.
As far as I could tell, the cats seemed to be in good shape. The staff was clear in laying out the rules--no feeding, no poking, and so on--and the people in the cat enclosure with me obeyed these. The cats, for their parts, seemed both healthy and relaxed, comfortable enough with their environment to sleep and contented with being gazed at from afar. I left not feeling as if I had exploited the cats in an situation unsuited for them--the whole institution seemed to be working out.
The cafe is organized as a sort of double enclosure, the cafe space surrounding the inner double-doored chamber open to the street where the cats reside.
After I finished my enjoyable coffee and cheesecake, and being briefed on the rules, I passed inside. There were thirteen cats, I was told, most hiding in the carpeted cubby holes at the far end, but some spilling into bowls and on top of ladders in plain view. The cats--apparently sourced by Scarborough Bluffs Cat Relief, part of the effort to retrieve cats and other pets dumped at the Scarborough Bluffs--were available for adoption at a cost of $C 150 per cat. Posters listing the cats' names, ages, and availability were on the west wall, but the other people there were not paying close attention to those. They were looking at the cats.
As far as I could tell, the cats seemed to be in good shape. The staff was clear in laying out the rules--no feeding, no poking, and so on--and the people in the cat enclosure with me obeyed these. The cats, for their parts, seemed both healthy and relaxed, comfortable enough with their environment to sleep and contented with being gazed at from afar. I left not feeling as if I had exploited the cats in an situation unsuited for them--the whole institution seemed to be working out.
The Toronto Star's Ben Rayner describes how city regulations and neighbourhood opposition may end plans to reopen the Matador Club, a renowned old Toronto music venue. I'm not surprised, sadly: College and Dovercourt is a perfect neighbourhood for condos.
The fabled Matador Club at the corner of College St. and Dovercourt Rd. has stood empty for 10 years now, seven of those in the hands of new owners who’ve long hoped to restore the 101-year-old space to its original glory as a revamped, remodelled live venue and community event space dubbed the Matador Ballroom.
Now, when Toronto’s music scene is agonizing over a spate of recent venue closures — last week, Bloor West café the Holy Oak announced it will be shuttering by March, joining a list that already includes the beloved Silver Dollar, the Hoxton, Hugh’s Room, Tattoo, the Hideout, and the Central — the Matador risks becoming the next casualty. Again.
When it finally got its liquor licence at this time last year despite staunch opposition from some very vocal and well-organized objectors in the surrounding neighbourhood who remember the room as the city’s most infamous after-hours boozecan, many observers assumed that it would reopen eventually. This is, after all, a historic venue in a self-professed “music city,” a space where the signatures of storied past performers such as Leonard Cohen and Stompin’ Tom Connors adorn a dressing-room wall that was almost bulldozed into a city parking lot.
Not so. The Matador remains ensnared in a nightmare of neighbourhood opposition and zoning and permit issues, and its would-be rescuer, Paul McCaughey — who purchased the building with his brother in 2010 — is growing weary.
“When you say the Matador will eventually get opened . . . there is no ‘eventually’ any longer,” he says, frankly. “The Matador will be the next headline if we do not get serious movement within the next two months.
“I will sell it to a condo developer and they will have a Shoppers Drug Mart in the bottom of it, OK?”
The Globe and Mail's Mark Medley describes how Toronto comic store The Beguiling is managing its move from the soon-to-be-defunct Mirvish Village to a new College Street location.
For nearly two decades, visitors to the Beguiling, the charmingly overstocked comic-book emporium in the heart of Toronto’s Mirvish Village, would often be greeted by the sight of long-time owner Peter Birkemoe sitting in his “office” – perched behind his computer, at the first-floor cash register, surrounded by the ever-encroaching comics, artworks, ‘zines and other ephemera that have made it the most important comic-book store in Canada, and one of the greatest in the world.
“I’ve spent more of my life, hour-wise, awake, in this room, than I’ve spent in any [other] building,” Birkemoe said one morning earlier this month, as he took a break from preparing for the store’s last day, on Tuesday. He laughed, quietly, as if realizing this for the first time. “That will be sad.”
Countless obituaries were written about Honest Ed’s, the discount department store that anchored Mirvish Village, an eclectic block of art studios, restaurants and other small businesses, in the days before the brightly lit retailer shut its doors on Dec. 31, the result of a redevelopment that will significantly alter the southwest corner of Bathurst and Bloor in the coming years. The Beguiling, at least to its customers, is as vital an institution.
Since the store moved into its current home more than 20 years ago, it has served as a sort of clubhouse for many in the city’s comics community. It will survive, in name and in spirit, in a different form – a new location, on College Street, on the edge of Kensington Market, opened last month – but at the same time one can’t help but feel a sense of an ending, that a chapter is coming to a close.
“It will definitely be hard to have that feeling of something just so densely packed with history,” said the comics artist Michael DeForge. “I’m sure the new location will eventually get as lived in, and accumulate that history as it goes on, but that’s going to be a hard thing to get back again.”
Torontoist's David Hains looks at the impending move of The Beguiling from Mirvish Village to College Street near Kensington Market.
Longtime Mirvish Village institution The Beguiling will close its Markham Street digs on January 28.
The venerable comic book store has been at its current location since 1992, after it moved from its original Harbord Street location where it was founded in 1987.
The store, which specializes in independent comics as well as original art, will relocate to College and Spadina at 319 College Street, just north of Kensington Market. The College Street location might have a casual opening sometime in December, but will be open for regular business on January 3.
[. . .]
The Beguiling isn’t the only comic book store affected by the Honest Ed’s development. Its children’s comics store, Little Island Comics, located on Bathurst Street, will close. In a Facebook post announcing the changes, The Beguiling says that much of Little Island’s selections will be available at Page and Panel, its store located in the Reference Library. In a phone call with Torontoist, store owner Peter Birkemoe says that the Little Island brand will live on in some form in the future, but that there are no current plans for it to have a physical location.
The 319 College Street location will have about 20 per cent less square footage than the existing store, but Birkemoe says the store layout will be better, which will make for easier browsing. The store will be on one floor, and it will mark the first time The Beguiling is fully accessible.
