[BLOG] Fifteen Toronto links

• 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.

[URBAN NOTE] Ten Toronto links

• blogTO looks at the Toronto of the 1950s, when Highway 2–Lake Shore and Kingston Road–was the way into the city.
• Jamie Bradburn takes a look at a 1950 tourist guide to Ontario, specifically focusing on its descriptions of Toronto.
• Jamie Bradburn looks at how, in the post-war era, dining at the Coxwell Kresge in-house restaurant was a thing.
• blogTO notes how many in Leslieville are unhappy with the idea of the Ontario Line being built above-ground.
• Samantha Edwards at NOW Toronto notes that there is going to be a Pride rally outside of Palmerston library where Meghan Murphy will be speaking.
• Spacing looks at the connections between Nuit Blanche and the Toronto Biennial, for Toronto as an artistic city.
• NOW Toronto shares some photos of Honest Ed’s in its dying days.
• Toronto Life tells the story of Peperonata Lane, a west-end laneway that took its name from a popular neighbourhood pepper-roasting event.
• blogTO notes a new movie being filmed in Regent Park, here.
• blogTO shares photos of the new Garrison Crossing pedestrian bridge, here.

[URBAN NOTE] Twelve Toronto links (#toronto, #topoli)

• Because of a lack of support from the University of Toronto, Ten Editions Bookstore on Spadina Avenue between College and Bloor has closed down permanently. blogTO reports.
• Statler’s on Church Street, a popular Village bar known for its performance spaces, closed down suddenly on account of massive rent increases. blogTO reports.
• The famed Coffee Time restaurant at Coxwell and Gerrard, subject of a documentary that looks at this affordable coffee place’s connections to locals, has closed down permanently. blogTO reports.
• Gilbert Ngabo at the Toronto Star reports on how Torontonians now have now choice but to use the Presto card. My experiences reflect others’ in that things have been working out for me, so far.
• GO Transit’s connections directly to York University have ceased in the wake of the subway extension, as promised. Many who depended on the direct link are unhappy that it is no longer being sustained. Global News reports.
• This Toronto Sun article shares the call of a brother of a victim who died by suicide at a TTC station for more action to prevent such unfortunate events.
• Steve Munro reports on the different challenges facing the TTC board in 2019.
• Enzo DiMatteo at NOW Toronto makes the case that Toronto needs to continue to address gun violence as a public health issue if it is to control this plague.
• A tall and skinny home in Riverdale that has gone on sale for $C 3 million has as many detractors as supporters. Global News reports.
• CBC Toronto notes that the new nickname of the Economist for Toronto and its tech sector, “Maple Valley”, is not catching on with locals.
• Marco Chown Oved at the Toronto Star shares the story of Don Sampson, a long-time resident of the Toronto Islands who faces losing the family home there because he cannot inherit the property from his brother.
• The cast of the venerable Global Television drama Train 48, filmed on a GO Transit Lakeshore West train in 2003-2005, recently reunited. Global News reports.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: #650Parliament, Leslieville, Bathurst, Sheppard, Scarborough

• 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.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: the honoured dead, Cinesphere, Casey House, Quayside, Leslieviille

• Torontoist’s Historicist takes a look at the issue of improving the grave of William Lyon Mackenzie in the 1930s.
• Norman Wilner celebrates the newly reopened Cinesphere, down at a reenergizing Ontario Place.
• Alex Bozikovic celebrates the beautiful new renovation and expansion of HIV/AIDS hospice Casey House.
• John Lorinc notes the many potential problems with the investments of Google’s Sidewalk in Quayside.
• Vjosa Isai celebrates the 30th anniversary of a mural that helped name, and give shape, to Leslieville, over at the Toronto Star.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: East Chinatown, Leslieville and east, Kirby GO, TTC, Eden Smith

• 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.

[URBAN NOTE] Five links on a changing Toronto: the Ward, Yorkville development, school crowding

• 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.

[URBAN NOTE] Five links about Toronto neighbourhoods, past and present and future

Metro Toronto‘s David Hains reports on a new interactive map of Trinity-Bellwoods Park designed to help users find other people in that large complex space.

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.

The Toronto Star‘s Jennifer Pagliaro describes the catastrophic state of repair of far too many of the houses of Toronto Community Housing.

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.

Back in August, Yasmine Laarsroui wrote for Torontoist about the potential for the housing co-op model to help solve the Toronto housing crisis.

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.’”

Also back in April, John Lorinc wrote in Spacing about the oft-overlooked musicality of the lost neighbourhood of The Ward.

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.”

The Toronto Star‘s Azzura Lalani describes how the rapid growth of young families in Leslieville threatens to overload local schools. What will the Downtown Relief Line do?

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.”

[PHOTO] CBC cool in Leslieville

The T-shirt with the classic CBC logo on the mannequin in the front window of a Leslieville clothing store tries to evokes a certain cool, successfully I think.

[URBAN NOTE] “The hidden pockets in Toronto where gentrification is really happening”

Robin Levinson King at the Toronto Star looks at where gentrification is, and is not, happening in Toronto. It’s present in Toronto generally, but it’s intense in only a few areas.

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.”