A Bit More Detail

• A new project hopes to revitalize the Golden Mile of Scarborough, along Eglinton Avenue. The Toronto Star reports.


• blogTO looks at how IKEA is going to be opening a new smaller store in downtown Toronto in the next two years, here.


• blogTO looks at a plan to make 80 Bloor Street West, in Yorkville, into a golden skyscraper 79 stories tall.


• Sadly, Chick-Fil-A at Yonge and Bloor still has long lines. blogTO reports.


• Radheyan Simonpillai reviews the new Kevin Donovan book The Billionaire Murders, looking at the unsolved killings of the Shermans in 2017.

• There is a shortlist of likely marijuana store locations in Ontario that includes Yorkville in Toronto. Global News reports.


• Éric Grenier at CBC reports that the NDP in Québec risks falling to pre-Orange Wave levels of support.


• Former NDP leader Thomas Mulcair warns that the weakening of the NDP stance on environmental issues might led to mass defections to the Green Party. CTV has it.


• Given the lack of any legal obligation to expedite the return of ISIS fighters holding Canadian citizenship, the Canadian government seems inclined to let them remain in detention in former ISIS territories. Global News reports.


• Brexit is boosting the Canadian film industry, given our numerous advantages as described by the Hollywood Reporter.

• Urban Toronto shares a photo of the rising 1 Yorkville tower.


• Tanya Mok at blogTO takes a look at the fast-disappearing cluster of antique shops on westernmost Queen Street West in Parkdale, near Roncesvalles.


• Steve Munro takes a look at the effect of the King Street pilot project on 501 Queen transit times.


• Might the Toronto Zoo have its own maglev train? blogTO reports.


• A petition has been launched to save the York Pillars from demolition. I, for one, will sign it. Can you, too? Global News reports.

• blogTO shares, from r/Toronto, a fantastic map imagining a Toronto densely covered with all sorts of mass transit routes, from subways and streetcars down to ferries. Beautiful.


• This city ombudsman's inquiry as to why TTC fare inspectors seemingly assaulted a black teen is certainly needed. CBC reports.


• The recent death of Sonja Bata, among other things founder of the excellent Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, has been noted locally. Global News reports.


• Delayed by archeological work, the North Building at St. Lawrence Market is projected to cost in excess of 100 million dollars. The Toronto Star reports.


• A proposed new condo tower on Yorkville's Prince Arthur Avenue, projected to rise nearly two dozen stories in a definitely avant-garde style, is unpopular among future neighbours. CBC reports.


• At Toronto Storeys, Christopher Hume considers facadism. When does it work? Where has it worked in Toronto?


• At NOW Toronto, Samantha Edwards takes a look at six new housing developments along Bloor Street West, stretching from Jane through High Park North all the way to Dufferin.

• Torontoist introduces its readers to the now-vanished neighbourhood of The Ward.


• The heated discussion of condo development in Yorkville has been taken to the level of community mediation.


• Yorkville is an ever-changing neighbourhood, evolving far past its low-rent hippie days of the 1960s. The Globe and Mail explores.


• NOW Toronto notes how the York Square development in Yorkville is set to be leveled, past value notwithstanding.


• Global News reports on how in some booming neighbourhoods, like Leslieville, local parents cannot find places for kids in local schools.

Yorkville is in the midst of a paradigm shift, the scale of which hasn't been witnessed since it transformed from a hippie hub in the 1960s to a high end shopping destination in the decade that followed.

The Yorkville that's slipping away today can be traced back to the 1970s. While historic elements dating much further back can been seen in the converted Victorian houses that still house retail on Cumberland St., many of the neighbourhood's larger buildings date back to this decade.

Of these, the most significant is surely Cumberland Terrace, a multi-level mall that runs adjacent to the street from which it takes its name. Opened in 1974, when you pay a visit these days, it's like stepping into a time machine.

Picture the Galleria Mall, but nicer. There are payphones and brown tile everywhere, an eclectic mix of vendors you'd never find in a newer mall, and wayfinding signage that dates back to the first days of operation here.

The hardest-working Christmas tree in Toronto is in Cumberland Terrace at Yonge and Bloor Sts. It stands resolute in a back hallway of this near-forgotten 1970s mall, tucked in behind the shiny Bloor shops, a place slated for demolition and redevelopment.

Each year somebody pulls out the stubby artificial tree from storage and sets it up with care on the disco-era brown tiles, decorating it with white and gold ornaments. As holiday trees go it’s understated, without a star or angel, just an electric cord running out of the top. There’s a certain nobility to it among surroundings that are no longer in style (though for those of us who hold a candle for these sorts of accidentally retro places, the tree is an added bonus).

I like to think it’s a memorial tree for the Potter’s Field that used to be here, Yorkville’s non-sectarian cemetery for the poor. Though closed in 1855, after which the 6,685 bodies were moved to the Toronto Necropolis and Mount Pleasant Cemetery, this was their first resting spot and these unnamed, dispossessed early Torontonians deserve a nice tree of their own.

All over the city trees like this, sometimes humble, sometimes spectacularly grand, decorate the most everyday, ordinary, unremarkable and usually ignored places. All are gestures of joy and light, secular or sacred, depending on who’s doing the viewing. Building lobbies, corridors and concourses get the treatment too; the Scrooges won’t notice but the holiday decorations are the one time of year when often anonymous architectural spaces get a lot of attention.

The building lobbies of office towers have the most elaborate decoration schemes, the handiwork of interior design teams who do this kind of thing for a living. More interesting perhaps are the ones that are obviously done by non-professionals, those found in apartment building lobbies and businesses without big decor budgets. The ornaments may not have the sentimental value found on domestic trees, but these still have a quirky human touch the big corporate decorations don’t.