A Bit More Detail

• blogTO reports that Toronto has been testing Eglinton Crosstown trains, here.


• What TTC routes might be changed by the Eglinton Crosstown? A map illustrates, over at blogTO.


• The new tower proposed for 888 Dupont, at Ossington, will even include a vertical farm. blogTO reports.


• Venerable Agincourt Mall is going to be a new condo development. blogTO reports.


• Is co-ownership actually the only way most people in Toronto will end up owning a home? blogTO considers.


• Residential tenants in a Leslieville building who complained about their landlord may end up getting evicted from a building never zoned for residents. CBC reports.


• The City of Toronto has taken over the deserted shopping arcade at Queen Street West and John. CBC reports.


• Katrina Onstad at Toronto Life tells the story of Katharine Mulherin, the Queen Street West gallery owner who changed her neighbourhood but was broken by gentrification.


• The bar Tequila Bookworm is closing, displaced by rising rents. NOW Toronto reports.


• NOW Toronto interviews night mayor Michael Thompson, here.


• Steve Munro considers the TTC's express bus services, here.


• Terra Lumina, the nighttime cultural event at the Toronto Zoo, looks fantastic in these photos over at Toronto Life.


• Oh, what the map of Toronto subways could have been if only we planned! blogTO shares one.


• Steve Munro examines the TTC's plan for 2020-2024, here.


• The TTC may not act to decrease overcrowding on some routes. blogTO reports on why.

• That the owners of 650 Parliament Street are charging displaced tenants rent, while they are away from their homes, is unconscionable. The Toronto Star reports.


• This CBC Toronto story about light pollution leaking over from a commercial building in Leslieville to nearby condos highlights a new problem for mixed-use districts.


• Urban Toronto takes a look at the latest version of a proposal for a mixed-used property at Lake Shore and Bathurst.


• blogTO notes that at least some politicians want to extend the underused Sheppard line of the TTC east to Kennedy station.


• Aparita Bhandavi at The Discourse notes how the recent elections confirmed the underrepresentation of non-white males in politics in Scarborough.

• blogTO argues East Chinatown, at Broadview and Gerrard, is an up-and-coming neighbourhood.


• East-end Toronto, from Leslieville to points east, definitely is up-and-coming. The Globe and Mail reports.


• It looks like the Kirby GO Station was approved for political reasons, not because of actual local need. The Toronto Star reports.


• Steve Munro notes that, on the 23rd, the TTC Overhead Shop will have an open house explaining the streetcars' pantograph.


• In July, Torontoist looked at Toronto architect Eden Smith, connected to the Arts and Crafts Movement in Canada.

You’ll never have to spend 20 minutes trying to find your friend in Trinity-Bellwoods Park again.

New York-based cartographer (and former Toronto Star employee) William Davis loves Toronto, and so he knows this is one of the city’s great summer frustrations. It’s because of the geographically complicated, but very popular park, that he and Tom Weatherburn made an interactive map for Torontonians to share their location.

All users need to do is drag and drop a “here” pin on a map of the park. It can be accessed for free at the MapTO website, a personal project with Weatherburn that features quirky and interesting maps on a variety of city subjects.

The Trinity-Bellwoods map is overlaid with easy-to-read icons, including a dog at the dog bowl, a baseball at the baseball diamond, and beer mugs where people like to hang out.

Half of Toronto Community Housing developments will be in “critical” condition in the next five years without additional funding for repairs, according to an internal database provided to the Star.

Already, the data shows more than 30 social-housing properties are in serious disrepair. Of 364 developments — which include houses and groupings of low-rise buildings and towers — 222 developments are ranked in “poor” condition, with dozens edging on critical condition, based on a standard ranking used by the housing corporation.

Those critical sites are homes for more than 3,000 individuals and families.

The data shows a pervasive problem at a time when the city is grappling with how to keep thousands of units open with a $1.73-billion funding gap.

Of the 364 developments, more than 100 were offloaded onto the city by the province more than a decade and a half ago without money needed to cover the repairs. Of the buildings in the critical and poor categories, more than a third were downloaded by the province.

Those affected by the lack of rent controls left young professionals, like reporter Shannon Martin, with no option but to turn to more extreme alternatives, such as couch-surfing.

Young people seeking more reliable housing options are turning to co-op housing—at least, those lucky enough to get a unit.

Toronto renter Donald Robert moved into Cabbagetown’s Diane Frankling Co-operative Homes in September 2016 and speaks highly of his experience.

Robert pays $1,300 for a large two-bedroom unit with access to an underground parking and a small gym, almost $500 cheaper than the average one-bedroom unit in Toronto. Robert explains that, “the best part though has been the community here. Everybody says ‘hi.’”

If you try to imagine your way back into the early 20th century streets and laneways of The Ward — the dense immigrant enclave razed to make way for Toronto’s City Hall — you might pick up the sounds of newsies and peddlers hawking their wares, the clanging of the area’s junk and lumber yards, and shrieking children playing on the Elizabeth Street playground north of Dundas.

Those streets would also reverberate day and night with a jumble of languages — Italian, Yiddish, Chinese. The dialects and accents of these newcomers were considered to be not only “foreign,” but also proof (to the keepers of Toronto’s Anglo-Saxon morality) of the area’s worrisome social and physical failings.

But despite the fact that many mainstream Torontonians saw The Ward as an impoverished blight on the face of the city, the neighbourhood resonated with energy and culture and music — evidence of the resilience of the stigmatized newcomers who settled there in waves from the late 19th century onward.

Photographers recorded fiddle players and organ grinders with their hurdy gurdies, playing as mesmerized children listened. After their shifts ended, one 1914 account noted, labourers whiled away their free times playing mandolins or concertinas as they sang rags and the Neapolitan songs so popular at the time.

“When sleep in crowded rooms seems all but impossible,” journalist Emily Weaver observed in The Globe and Mail in 1910, “the people of ‘The Ward’ are astir till all hours, and the Italians amuse themselves by singing in their rich sweet voices the songs of their far-away homelands or dancing their native dances to the music of a mandolin or guitar in the open roadway beneath the stars.”

As the mother of a 16-month-old boy, Michelle Usprech is looking to leave the Financial District where it’s just “suits and suits and suits,” for a more family friendly vibe, and she’s got her eye on Leslieville.

But one of Toronto’s most family-friendly neighbourhoods may be a victim of its own success as signs from the Toronto District School Board have cropped up, warning parents in Leslieville their children may not be able to attend their local school because of possible overcrowding, school board spokesperson Ryan Bird confirmed.

Those signs warn that “due to residential growth, sufficient accommodation may not be available for all students,” despite the school board making “every effort to accommodate students at local schools.”

[. . .]

It’s a concern for some parents, including Kerry Sharpe, who lives in Leslieville and has a four-month-old daughter named Eisla.

“It’s still early days for me,” she said, but, “it is a concern. Even daycare, that’s hard to get into, so I don’t see it getting any better.”

At the corner of Morse St. and Queen St. E. in Leslieville, the signifiers of gentrification are on full display at Mercury Espresso Bar — a man with an artfully trimmed beard reads the paper while Kate Bush music plays cloyingly in the background, drowned out by the hiss and whistle of the espresso machine.

“I am the eye of the storm, I am the gentrification,” jokes barista Tyler Semrick-Palmateer as he makes a perfectly crafted Americano.

Semrick-Palmateer, the barista, is himself a bit of a hybrid gentrifier — he works in Leslieville and lives at Clinton and Harbord Sts., another bastion of Toronto’s affluent hipsterism. But the 30-something musician also grew up not far from the café, on Broadview Ave., and remembers the neighbourhood’s less shiny past.

A block away from the café in Leslieville, Jim’s Restaurant, a classic family restaurant famous for its Western sandwiches, is boarded up to make room for a six-storey condominium.

“It’s a vastly different place,” Semrick-Palmateer said. “I don’t know what it will be replaced with, probably not some old-school … diner. Probably some sort of specialty vapour shop.”