Cross Street = Brock and Frankish
Part of a row that was once all stores, this one was the last to go.
Cross Street = Brock and Frankish
Part of a row that was once all stores, this one was the last to go.
Cross Street = Queen and Beverley
The ground floor may change, but remarkably, the blind in the upper window stayed in the same exact state for twenty years, until HMV carved out both structures for their store. Unpainted became very painted, but a vestige of the cigarette days remained with the Player’s logo, and vestiges of another ending era remain in a store that still sells CDs.
Cross Street = Lippincott & Ulster
Sometimes a house gets regingerbreadized.
Cross Street = De Grassi & Queen E.
Another street, another Gothic cottage. More care has been taken here as it’s on desirable De Grassi, the most famous street in Canada. An earlier paint job from a down-at-the-heels era has been sand-blasted down to the original polychromatic bricks. All over Toronto these bricks are our workmanlike building material, often yellow and red but sometimes with a little black creosote sprinkled into the mix. These bricks were most often made locally, at brick yards found across the city, including the most prominent, the Don Valley Brick Works. A chain-link fence, the scourge of the urban landscape has been removed and a garden planted. Kinder, gentler, this worker’s cottage has been faithfully restored. Victoria would be proud.
Cross Street = Adelaide and Duncan
A rare Gothic cottage survivor in Clubland. Residential homes in this loud part of town continue to exist even as 50,000 or more partiers descend on the area every Friday and Saturday night, though generally, as here, these homes were converted to commercial use.
Cross Street: Broadview and Eastern
Like an infectious cold, decay can spread. Things fall apart and the centre does not hold.
Cross Street = Queen and Carlaw
The end of Toronto’s unanimous monarchism, as Queen becomes the more republican ‘My’ variety. Nestlé got into the sign-sponsoring game after cigarette advertising was banned. In the bottom photo are tags by Skam, Horus and others.
Cross Street = Lansdowne and Wallace
‘It’ shoe-polish signs were once as ubiquitous as Coke and Kit Kate signs are now – the shoe-repair shops they appeared on were far more plentiful than they are now.
Cross Street = Dundas St E and Church St
Here’s Toronto’s do-it-yourself typology at work. Two old buildings, the common ‘sticks’ that Brigitte Shim refers to, enduring much longer than ever intended, become the bones of the city waiting for whatever skin the current owner wishes to apply. The exhaust vent over Peter’s Variety, from Pagliaggi next door, realigns at one point, disappears entirely, then eventually reappears. What’s left on the second floor, behind those boarded-up windows? Second floors are the mystery spaces of the city. Stare at them from the streetcar at night, when you’re closer to their height, and catch fishbowl glimpses of their interiors.
Cross Street = Queen St. W. and Lansdowne Ave
The neighbours lie awake with worry every night, waiting for the arsonist to accept the invitation. The invasive ‘Tree of Heaven’ weed tree sneaks through quickly for a spell.