I went down last Thursday night. I don’t live that far away, but I’ve lived not that far away for long enough that I don’t get down to that part of town much. When I moved into not that far away a decade or so ago, King and Spadina was not a place one went. It wasn’t dangerous; it wasn’t anything at all. The Wheat Sheaf at the corner of Bathurst was the closest thing to an attraction. I liked it well enough, but I tended to stick to the Bathurst corridor, rather than stray too far east or west on King, where dreary retail vied with dreary office space to make for a thoroughly uninviting strip.
Then the condos came.
They actually started coming more than a decade ago, and a little farther west than Bathurst at first, but these things work slowly. Also, some of those earlier condos weren’t that great. Like 701-725 King West, a hulking brickbat of dead streetscape that still weighs the hood down. But most were pretty decent designs, ones that allowed them to become part of the neighbourhood, rather than just tower above it.
Thursday was a bit of a revelation. When I started really looking at what was there, I was amazed at how full and self-sufficient a neighbourhood it was.
The problem with many downtown neighbourhoods – traditional, pre-condo neighbourhoods – is that the real estate was too expensive to justify things like grocery stores and other common necessities for people who live there and don’t want to drive all over to get what they need. (Driving all over downtown to get your necessities is a lot more enervating than driving down to the mall or the megagroc in the burbs.)
There are various things that signify a place is a neighbourhood. In the burbs, it’s lawns, small slow roads, neighbourhood amenities like community centres, pools, parks, and neighbours you recognize and maybe even talk to. In more urban settings, backyard barbeque-style neighbourliness tends to take a back seat to the amenities, which in this context tend to be local pubs, corner stores where the shopkeeper knows your name (or at least your brand of cigarettes), and a restaurant or diner where the same rotating group of locals has a tendency to show up on the same rotating sets of suppers and brunches. The absence of many of these things from places like King Street, or Front Street, or Bay Street has meant that people have had a tendency not to think of downtown areas as neighbourhoods at all. It’s one of the reasons young families move to the burbs, or at least the outer regions of the city. They say they want to raise their kids in neighbourhoods, and they do, but they also want to live in neighbourhoods themselves. Most of us do.
There are a couple of reasons things like grocery stores have generally been absent from these urban non-neighbourhoods, but the most important is that there haven’t been enough potential customers. Without towers, no matter how developed a downtown strip is, there can only be so many residents. But when you add even a couple of 30-storey towers, a block that once had maybe 100 residents and a similar number of workers, suddenly has five to 10 times that many people. This ups the potential profit for the grocery store (or housewares store, or café, bar, etc.) and makes it more feasible to open one.
But King between Spadina and Bathurst has gone way past this. There are the grocery stores, Fresh & Wild and Alimento (have you not been to Alimento? You should go to Alimento. It’s the closest thing Toronto’s got to Eataly, and Eataly, my friends, is a very good thing). And there are the high-end bars and restaurants that presaged the strip’s neighbourhood phase catering to the advertising and design business that moved in first. But now there’s also Soma, Wverst, Lou Dawg’s and a huge pub.
(Huge pubs, by the way, seem to be Toronto’s own harbinger of neighbourhoodiness. The Annex has its Paupers and Madison, Liberty Village only really started to feel like home when it got its Brazen Head. So when Flynn’s, previously a single-level basement pub at 489, moved into a multi-level space previously occupied by an ad agency at 469, it was clearly a sign.)
There’s also Lee Valley, the hardware store -- a rather fussy one, but hardware nonetheless -- a spa, a hair place and a gym (once again, fussy, but it’s there). The men’s clothing store moved recently a couple of blocks south, there’s no women’s wear spot in the immediate vicinity, and there’s no dry cleaner or laundromat on the strip. But, it being downtown, none of that is more than a five- or six-minute walk. I also wouldn’t be surprised if at least one or two of those popped up in the next little while. Even without those amenities, however, this little strip of King Street has managed, in the few years since the condo boom really took off here, to become as convenient as a suburban strip mall while sacrificing none of its distinctly urban charms. It’s like a germ of Supercity planted in the heart of our already Very Good City.
King and Spadina should stand as a model of what could happen, what should happen, when density increases downtown. Cityplace should pay especially close attention and take notice, for instance, of the lack of chain businesses. Cityplace is a wonder of urban density, making King Street look positively rural by comparison, but at the moment, it’s paying no attention to the street. Doughnut shops, wings places and chain coffee shops are about all they’ve got there. And nearby mega-structures like the Rogers Centre don’t help.
It’s a problem with condo-created neighbourhoods. Since the developers sell out by definition, they have little long-term or even mid-term interest in what happens to the area. They’re already on to the next thing. We’d have fewer potential problems like Cityplace if we had a few less condos and a few more apartments. But as King Street shows us, it can work perfectly well even when developers do what they do and move on (though the fact that Freed [http://www.freeddevelopments.com/] has pitched his tent in this corner of the city, developing building after building, amounts to a mid-term commitment to keeping the area livable and attractive, and therefore sellable, and has probably not hurt the strip).
Condos are, of course, popping up all over. Bay Street is lousy with them, for instance. There’s still time to learn from King Street. Wouldn’t a strollable Bay Street be keen?
Original Article
Source: toronto standard
Author: Bert Archer
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