![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Dupont and Lansdowne is an intersection at the heart of an emerging cluster of high-rises, some of which are at least eye-catching.
My heart was warmed yesterday evening when I walked home along Lansdowne Avenue and saw the flowers in the front yards of the different homes. The tulips and daffodils were lovely, but the sheer heft of the flowering trees impressed me. Were those five-petal white flowers in the second photos product of a tilia or linden tree, as my later googling suggested?
- Urban Toronto notes that 1 Yorkville is nearing completion.
- Urban Toronto notes the plans for the massive redevelopment of Davenport Village, north and west of Dupont and Lansdowne.
- The Sony Centre is now going to be called Meridian Hall, thanks to the Ontario credit union of the same name buying the name rights. blogTO reports.
- This story of a tenant who was deprived heating by her landlords' neglect is appalling. I hope things get fixed quickly for her. Global News reports.
- Declan Keogh reports in NOW Toronto that the funding problems of Pride Toronto are linked to the police ban enacted in 2016.
- This Nicholas Hune-Brown feature at Toronto Life about the crisis of homelessness in Toronto is terribly compelling in sharing these stories.
- This Toronto Life feature on the installations on the seventh floor of the Hudson's Bay makes this place very visit-worthy.
I was on Bloor Street West, in Bloordale, on the 21st of July, when the BIG on Bloor Festival shut down the street between Dufferin and Lansdowne to make way for a pedestrian mall. The sky was cloudy and the light patchy, but the street was packed. The small vendors and and booths advertising plans for massive redevelopments of Bloor and Dufferin and the Galleria Mall were fun, as were established stores like antiquarian bookstore The Monkey's Paw and the local outpost of Dead Dog Records. The RAGGA NYC exhibit currently playing at the Mercer Union capped things off nicely, on this venture into this familiar, gentrifying but entertaining, neighbourhood.
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.)
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.)
- Metro Toronto reports on the efforts of Daniel Rotsztain to explore Toronto through overnight Airbnb stays in different neighbourhoods.
- blogTO reports that the famous (infamous?) Coffee Time at Dupont and Lansdowne has closed down! More tomorrow, I think.
- The Museum of Contemporary Art on Sterling Road, in the Junction, is scheduled for a May 26 opening. NOW Toronto reports.
- Apparently some people are protesting the King Street transit project by playing street hockey in front of the streetcars. blogTO reports.
- Global News notes that Medieval Times, the Toronto theme restaurant, is going to have a ruling queen this year instead of a king.
The new Food Basics store at 805 Lansdowne Avenue, on the corner with Dupont Street, is a perfectly serviceable grocery store, with neat displays and floors of polished concrete and even an escalator connecting the store to the adjacent Fuse Condos.
This blue-and-white statue of the Virgin Mary standing in the front garden of a home on Lansdowne Avenue, in the heavily Portuguese-Canadian (and even more heavily Roman Catholic) west-end neighbourhood of Wallace Emerson, caught my eye when I was walking down the street on the Saturday before my flight.
I stopped off at the Coffee Time on the northeast corner of Dupont and Lansdowne this afternoon en route to Big on Bloor Festival, picking up a jumbo coffee and a beef samosa before I veered south onto Lansdowne towards Bloordale. I blogged about this restaurant and its (to my mind) unfairly grim reputation. (My Flickr link is here.) This time, as I approached the restaurant from the east, I saw the Food Basics grocery store lying just to the west, I thought about the controversy around this store and its neighbourhood.
This Food Basics is an 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.
Still: how long will this neighbourhood, this cluster of west-end neighbourhoods, remain what it has been? I wonder.
[PHOTO] Coffee Time, Dupont and Lansdowne
Jul. 19th, 2017 11:57 pmThe Coffee Time restaurant located at 1005 Lansdowne Avenue, on the northeastern corner of Lansdowne and Dupont, has long had a bit of a scary reputation. The restaurant's lone reviewer at Yelp rates it only one star, noting that the crowd hanging out here, in a traditionally poor neighbourhood close to apartment towers once linked to crime including drugs and prositution, is "interesting."
The transformation of the neighbourhood into one populated by tall condos and relatively affordable rentals is ongoing. Will this Coffee Time survive, or will its legacy be reduced to passing mentions in archived discussion threads about a neigbourhood transformed beyond recognition, like here and here? And what will become of the crowd?
Anti-nuclear activist Zach Ruiter writes about the latest campaign against the nuclear processing plant on Lansdowne just north of Dupont, just west of me.
I've blogged at length about my support for the plant. I see nothing in the article to justify a change of opinion.
Toronto's west end has a new nuclear neighbour. General Electric Hitachi announced August 19 that it plans to sell its Canadian nuclear operations, including its uranium pellet plant on Lansdowne, to BWXT Canada Ltd., a subsidiary of Lynchburg, Virginia's BWX Technologies, which operates one of only two facilities in the U.S. licensed to process highly enriched uranium.
BWX Technologies is the prime contractor in charge of the U.S. Department of Energy's 13,000-hectare nuclear weapons testing laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Among the "recent accomplishments" listed on the company's website: the manufacturing of the grapefruit-size plutonium cores used in the W88 thermonuclear warhead designed for the Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
If BWXT acquires the necessary licence and regulatory approval from the federal government, it will take over GE Hitachi's operations and 350 employees at three plants in Toronto, Peterborough and Arnprior. BWXT's Cambridge plant was recently awarded a $103 million contract to supply the first eight of 32 steam generators for the refurbishment of the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station in Tiverton.
The GE Hitachi plant at 1025 Lansdowne, north of Dupont, processes 53 per cent of all the nuclear fuel used in Canada's nuclear reactors. Drums of yellowcake uranium dioxide powder are trucked into Toronto and transformed into ceramic pellets for use in fuel rods at the Pickering and Darlington reactors.
I've blogged at length about my support for the plant. I see nothing in the article to justify a change of opinion.
Walking the railway bridge on Dundas West between Sorauren (to the west) and Lansdowne (to the east), right about here, can provide viewers with long uninterupted vistas. The first two were taken looking south, the third looking north.
The Toronto Star's Aaron Harris notes an apparent local furor in Bloordale over local strip joint House of Lancaster. The House of Lancaster has been present in this neighbourhood for 27 years, and its owner Spiro Koumoudouros has played a major role in promoting this now up-and-coming neighbourhood. It's now unwelcome.
At one time, Bloordale was a hot spot for cheap drugs, street prostitution and arrests. Vestiges remain, but major changes have been underway for years on the stretch of Bloor St. W. between Dufferin St. and Lansdowne Ave.
The old Dale’s, a diner of ill repute, is now a trendy brunch spot. There’s no Starbucks yet, but among the psychic dens, cash-for-gold joints, laundromats and the token Coffee Time, you’ll find a gourmet sandwich counter, hip bars and a bakery that ominously proclaimed “the vegans are coming!” in its window before opening.
Property values have gone up 35 per cent, according to realtor Tasi Farquhar, with one detached house fetching $1,070,000 recently. Where it used to be littered with needles, a playground was installed at the Susan Tibaldi Parkette to accommodate families.
The old butts up against the new in Bloordale. And the long-standing House of Lancaster strip club is right in the middle.
Owner Spiro Koumoudouros has been a member of the BIA for 27 years and at the helm for as long as anyone can remember. He takes credit for cleaning up Bloordale and making it more inviting for newcomers. But now some say it’s time for him to go. Koumoudouros says without him, the BIA would collapse.
“(Spiro) was one of the only people who would chair the BIA so we have to give him kudos for that. But it doesn’t mean he has to continue,” said Liza Lukashevsky, who formally joined the BIA this year but has owned the Nuthouse health food store since 2010.
“This seems like a natural time for change to happen to reflect what’s happening already organically in the neighbourhood,” she said.
Iain Marlow's article in The Globe and Mail takes a look at Bloordale, a neighbourhood just a subway stop to the rest of mine that, like mine, is also on the upswing.
[N]ext door to the Coffee Time nearby, there is a trendy restaurant called the Whippoorwill, with a line-up-worthy brunch and cocktails named after local businesses (such as “the Caribbean Queen”). There is a Nordic smokehouse café and a store called Zeebu that sells blankets made by former Brazilian prisoners. There is also a retro vintage store selling used clothing and other items quite ironically: One item for sale is a small piece of old looking wood that has two hand written labels on it; one, which reads “Early telephone ?!?”, offers a vague sense of a narrative, while the other simply says “Sexy block of wood. $15.”
“In this neighbourhood, people like stuff with a story behind it,” said Craig Williamson, co-owner of Zebuu.
Mr. Williamson, whose store also sells Gandhian blankets from India made from home-spun cotton, is referring to the new people coming by, the people who stroll by after brunch at the Whippoorwill, or after dinner or lunch at the Emerson or Keralia or Brock Sandwich. He is not referring to the people who gave the neighbourhood its previous reputation for addiction and crime, or the folks who swing by the House of Lancaster strip club.
The 2011 census lists the area’s main non-English, non-French mother tongues as Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Cantonese. The census of 2006 lists the area’s median income at just $22,582, but even though there is no comparable data for 2011, anecdotally, people who work in the area say that the makeup of the neighbourhood has changed markedly.
“You see more family people around,” says Georgia Hamilton, the chef, owner and “everything else” of a Bloordale roti shop, as she serves up some cashew brittle. “No hustling. No hustlers. No drug dealers. No more hustlers coming in. More shops. More bakeries.”
But not more factories. Todd Gariepy has worked for 25 years in a plant just north of Bloor Street near Lansdowne Avenue. He has watched the neighbourhood change: the women working the corner slowly move on, the syringes on the ground and the drug dealers disappear. But even though he can still eat at Pepper’s, a restaurant nearby that has survived all the changes, he has also watched as multiple factories close up and then be transformed into lofts or replaced by townhouses. Mr. Gariepy was almost forced out of the neighbourhood himself, when the Canada Packers factory he worked in shut down in 1990. His job was saved when the factory was quickly bought up by a Japanese firm, Nitta Gelatin NA Inc.
[NEWS] Some Sunday links
Jan. 5th, 2014 08:26 pm- The Globe and Mail profiles the growing political tensions within Thailand, increasingly polarized between populist rural areas and conservative urbanites.
- io9 suggests that Russia is continuing to prepare for a long-range mission to Jupiter's moon Ganymede, to be launched in a decade's time.
- Open Democracy's Jamie Mackay describes how, in Venice, racism--especially anti-Asian racism--distracts and is used to distract Venetians from their city's decline as an actual inhabited areas.
- The photos heavy metal cowboys of Botswana must be seen.
- The Atlantic Cities has noted Facebook's utility in tracking global migration trends.
- Shanghaist observes that the Shanghai metro system is offering announcements in Shanghainese as well as in standard Chinese.
- The conclusion of a National Post columnist that Thor bests Superman--perhaps, by extension, Marvel besting DC--by virtue of having fun relatable characters is difficult to escape.
- Also in The Globe and Mail, the evolution of a bar in Bloordale--Bloor West and Lansdowne, just to my west--from a neighbourhood joint to something ore hipsterish is interesting.
- Should the abundance of vintage cars in Cuba, a guest writer at The Guardian writes, be seen merely as cute or rather as symptom of corrosive totalitarianism? (I say yes.)
Tags:
- bloor street west,
- botswana,
- china,
- chinese language,
- cities,
- cuba,
- democracy,
- economics,
- facebook,
- ganymede,
- italy,
- jupiter,
- language conflict,
- lansdowne avenue,
- links,
- mass transit,
- migration,
- neighbourhoods,
- news,
- photos,
- politics,
- popular culture,
- racism,
- russia,
- shanghai,
- social networking,
- space science,
- space travel,
- thailand,
- toronto
