Posts Tagged ‘st. clair avenue west’
[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: extreme weather, Jodi Emery, Little Jamaica, public art, Mnandi pie
- Matt Elliott at CBC Toronto asks what, exactly, the City of Toronto is doing to prepare for the increasingly erratic and dangerous weather hitting the city.
- NOW Toronto reports on how Jodie Emery plans to start expanding her marijuana empire, and her wider influence, after opening a new café in Kensington Market.
- This NOW Toronto article reporting on some of the restaurants of Little Jamaica, along Eglinton Avenue West, is informative.
- I honestly have to say that I have taken note of Three Points Make Two Lines, down at Vaughan Road and St. Clair Avenue West. I will. Murray Whyte at the Toronto Star makes the case.
- Suresh Doss describes the Mnandi pies sold by Evis Chirowamhangu at Wychwood Barns.
[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: #winterstations, Toronto Islands, King Street, 401 Richmond, coffee
- Muriel Draaisma talks at CBC about the art installations selected for this year’s iteration of Winter Stations, including a “Pussy Hut”.
- The City of Toronto has, unaccountably, decided not to allocate all the money needed to repair the Toronto Islands after last year’s flooding. CBC reports.
- Mayor John Tory talks about the various plans–some new, some I think old–to bring more people to King Street during the transit experiment, over at the Toronto Star.
- This Toronto Star article about changes to taxation that will let downtown arts centres, like 401 Richmond, not get priced out of their homes is older but still quite important.
- blogTO notes local upset in Corso Italia that the local Starbucks, at Dufferin and St. Clair (not far from me!) is set to close. (I’ve never been there, which I suppose helps clear up any mystery around the closing.)
[URBAN NOTE] Rosie DiManno in the Toronto Star on the Badminton and Racquet Club fire
Rosie DiManno’s long-form article “’I’m getting burned!’ Slaying the beast that was the Badminton and Racquet Club fire” examines just what happened at the recent devastating fire at Yonge and St. Clair, in detail.
Fire and water: The crisis and the cure.
But it took 20 hours of steadfastly blasting the latter to extinguish the roiling conflagration of the former last week at the Badminton and Racquet Club of Toronto.
Bringing the blaze to heel — preventing it from leaping to condos and businesses on the four corners of St. Clair Ave. and Yonge St. — required a collective yeoman effort over three days: 520 firefighters, 167 fire engines, pumpers and three tower trucks with articulating booms, hazardous materials unit, dozens of hoses pumping simultaneously, an excavator and countless air cylinders consumed.
And still, days later, small spot fires continued sparking back to life.
A tall chore, killing a fire; throttling it.
[URBAN NOTE] “Yonge and St. Clair business owners left reeling after Valentine’s Day blaze”
The Toronto Star reports on one strongly negative element from the fire two days ago at Yonge and St. Clair of the Badminton & Racquet Club: It deprived many stores in the area of much-needed business on Valentine’s Day.
It was a rotten Valentine’s Day for many businesses near a blaze that devoured a building in midtown Toronto.
Especially hard hit were the flower and card shops that rely on sales from the holiday.
“Yesterday was Valentine’s Day and I’m a greeting card store, so you can only imagine that it definitely hit us hard,” said The Papery owner Marla Freedland, whose business sells cards and stationery.
The six-alarm blaze, which ignited Tuesday morning, tore through the historic Badminton and Racquet Club of Toronto until firefighters contained it in the evening. They stayed on-scene all night, and the fire was under control as of 5:45 a.m., said Chief Matthew Pegg of Toronto Fire Services.
“The two days of Valentine’s Day take care of the month of February. It’s not quite like Christmas, but for two days it’s like that,” she said of February 13 and 14.
Her business, at St. Clair and Yonge St. was closed at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, and didn’t reopen until 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday.
[URBAN NOTE] “Massive fire at Toronto racquet club closes down midtown intersection”
The Globe and Mail‘s Dakshana Bascaramurty reports about a devastating fire at the Badminton and Racquet Club here in Toronto, just west of Yonge and St. Clair. The pillars of smoke are rising, and transit links at St. Clair station have been cut off.
A massive six-alarm fire has caused serious damage to a 93-year-old members-only racquet club in midtown Toronto and has now spread to an adjacent building to the north.
Toronto Fire says The Badminton and Racquet Club at 25 St. Clair Ave. West and neighbouring buildings have been evacuated and there are no reported injuries. Of the approximately 160 firefighters on the scene, one captain was separated from his team and injured on site but has since been rescued and was treated by paramedics, said Capt. David Eckerman.
Capt. Eckerman says they received a call for a fire from occupants fleeing the club around 9:20 a.m.
By the time firefighters arrived, fire had ripped through the roof, the south part of which has since collapsed. The intersection of Yonge and St. Clair has been closed. The St. Clair subway station has been evacuated and subway trains, streetcars and buses that pass through the intersection have been diverted, according to the TTC.
Capt. Eckerman said the south and east walls have partly caved in and could collapse. The north wall is also “spongey,” he said.
[PHOTO] Playing the game, on Tichester Street in Toronto
I was exiting the northern exit of the St. Clair West subway station on Tichester Road/Heath Street when I saw a team playing on the field in late evening. A later googling brought up the below photo from 1974, revealing that even before this space became a high-end sports field for St. Michael’s College School–I think–it was still used. Continuity impresses me.
[PHOTO] Pool on rock, Montclair Avenue Parkette
This rust-stained pool in the top of some kind of metamorphic rock in the Montclair Avenue Parkette, on Spadina Road just above St. Clair, caught my attention as I passed by. It looks almost primeval, don’t you think?
A Bit More Detail 