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Hipster Duck

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I was thinking the other day about how Toronto has a general lack of commercial streets that are sort of quasi-urban/quasi-suburban. These would be immediately-postwar commercial arteries where most of the retail comes right up to the sidewalk, and the residential areas are all on a grid, but there are also a lot of strip malls and parking lots and all the houses are detached bungalows. West Coast cities have a lot of this. We have a few places like Avenue Road north of Lawrence and the Queensway east of Royal York, but these are just fragments here and there.

Why is this important? Because these areas represent the next area to be successfully urbanized once we run out of infill space in the older, prewar parts of the city. I know it seems like we have a lot of places still left that are redevelopable, but we can't tear down pre-war residential neighbourhoods en masse, easy parking lots are starting to get harder to find, and those masterplanned communities on derelict industrial lands need large developers and have been a mixed bag in terms of urban success. These quasi-urban strips also easy places to redevelop, because you can tear down a strip mall and build a midrise-above-retail that integrates pretty naturally with the other street-fronting retail. The buildings along these are also one-storey tear downs that aren't really of much heritage merit, so it's not like you lose character as you redevelop these properties.
 
For me, Port Credit epitomizes the type. Unfortunately, relative to things Toronto-wise, it's Port Credit.
 
How about Dundas St., pretty much anywhere west of approx. Runnymede Rd. Or approximately the same part of St. Clair West.
 
Is Eglinton pre-WWII or post? Not that it matters, there are plenty of sites along there suitable for intensification. There are also parts of Bloor and Dundas in Etobicoke, Weston Rd, Dufferin North of Eglinton, parts of Jane St around Lawrence, Albion & Islington, parts of Bathurst between Eglinton and Wilson, parts of Wilson, Laird Dr, parts of East York, O'Connor Dr and a few spots on Danforth and Kingston Road in Scarborough, Lakeshore in Long Branch, Brown's Line, Royal York in Mimico and Willowdale Ave and Yonge St in North York that I think would qualify. The thing is that with many of these roads, there are also houses and apartment buildings mixed in, and it's often small sections that are commercial and it's quite dispersed.
 
Those stores are usually individually owned stores as well, not the big corporate shopping centre of the suburbs. They at least allow the establishment of independent stores instead of chain stores or franchisees that sell the exact same things as other chain stores or franchisees a few concessions roads over.
 
Out here in the western reaches of the GTA there are all kinds of 'live-work' in-fill projects being built (Port Credit, Oakville, Bronte, Burlington). Apparently there is little room left for large new housing estates. Developers are concentrating on higher density in-fill. Regardless, the live-work concept is transforming many areas along Lakeshore and along in-town arteries, such as Fairview in Burlington etc. The commercial ventures locating here all seem to be independent too, by the way.
 
Is Eglinton pre-WWII or post? Not that it matters, there are plenty of sites along there suitable for intensification. There are also parts of Bloor and Dundas in Etobicoke, Weston Rd, Dufferin North of Eglinton, parts of Jane St around Lawrence, Albion & Islington, parts of Bathurst between Eglinton and Wilson, parts of Wilson, Laird Dr, parts of East York, O'Connor Dr and a few spots on Danforth and Kingston Road in Scarborough, Lakeshore in Long Branch, Brown's Line, Royal York in Mimico and Willowdale Ave and Yonge St in North York that I think would qualify. The thing is that with many of these roads, there are also houses and apartment buildings mixed in, and it's often small sections that are commercial and it's quite dispersed.

Yup, most of those qualify. Actually, there are more of these areas than I thought. I guess I didn't notice because they're not up to bat yet - but if current rates of growth, urbanization and gentrification continue they will have to someday. I mean, the arts community can't be pushed any further west along Queen otherwise they're going to be driven straight into Humber bay.
 
That's only the commercial side of the arts community. The artist themselves live all over the city. Many of the galleries you'll find in the west end are small and struggling. It's a revolving door - rents are sky high and marketing the visual arts has long been a challenge in English Canada. Too, those west-end galleries and many others are all increasingly competing with guerilla/pop-up galleries, which don't have the same overhead issues as ones following the conventional model (which itself is aged and show signs of endangerment). Rent-a-galleries and member-paid galleries are still doing well, but that's no longer the conventional model anyway - but even they face killer rents. Relatively few galleries actually own the buildings they are located in.

That said, I don't worry about the fate of those spaces. Entrepreneurial forces will ensure that artists continue to find venues for their work. Location-wise, it's likely to be further out from the core - cheaper rents being the main draw. Artists in this town are quite used to colonizing seedier districts, helping to eventually make them hip - and often succeeding so well that many of them are forced to move on. So it goes.
 
That said, I don't worry about the fate of those spaces. Entrepreneurial forces will ensure that artists continue to find venues for their work. Location-wise, it's likely to be further out from the core - cheaper rents being the main draw. Artists in this town are quite used to colonizing seedier districts, helping to eventually make them hip - and often succeeding so well that many of them are forced to move on. So it goes.

At this rate, leapfrogging to Hamilton will be the primary option.
 
Not a bad idea. Certainly cheaper. But I imagine there's still plenty of places in Toronto where it may yet happen. The arts scene has steadily moved westward along the Queen St. axis since the late 70s. There are holdouts on Spadina, of course, but land values in the core are going to displace all but the most powerful and prestigious of galleries. A new arts area (or two) is pretty much inevitable. I'm thinking Gerrard St. East and Eastern Avenue between Broadview and Leslie are possible future hosts. To the west, Mimico might be the next logical place. Lots of buildings that would be likely conversions for nervy upstart gallery spaces.
 
Artists in this town are quite used to colonizing seedier districts, helping to eventually make them hip - and often succeeding so well that many of them are forced to move on. So it goes.

That has happened in part, and probably mostly, because Toronto's real estate market became so grossly inefficient in the 90's. We had abnormally delapodated, very low density neighbourhoods that were located a few minutes, or in some cases, a few sconds from established high demand prime real-estate areas. In the 90's you could literally cross the street and go from crack-town to chic. And, yes there are still places like that, but with a much diminished effect. I think we have used up all the low-hanging fruit and the idea of some shabby run-down neighbourhood being made a hip artist colony is dead for the forseeable future. There are neighbourhoods in the city it could happen, but they are so far removed from the existing infrastructure, like the old city of York or Weston, that it would be very difficult to co-ordinate.
 
But there's nothing to coordinate. These things spring up organically and require very little in the way of establishing infrastructure, at least at first. Remember, they're attractive for one reason only - they're cheap. That's the siren call for many a student and burgeoning artiste. Once it's got some critical mass and a few people start calling attention to it, hipster cred sets in and the pace of change begins to accelerate. Then you get more supporting infrastructure - coffee shops, bars, modest gallery spaces stuffed into odd corners, etc. Still, all this requires time.

When I went to art skule in the late 70s, the scene, if you can call it that, basically ran from McCaul to Spadina, or a couple of streets west of that (can't forget the Cameron!). Not even to Bathurst. A huge stretch of Queen West was a collection of dusty appliance shops, ancient diners and bookstores... decade by decade it filled in, got gussied up, became cool, then became corporate (Club Monaco, HMV, etc), became a huge shopper's and tourist destination (having long ago dislodged virtually all of the original artists and entrepreneurs)... it's a pretty established cycle. The result? The scene moved relentlessly westward, following the cheaper rent. Very little about this stuff is fixed in stone, save the cycles themselves and the cultural and market forces which drive it.
 
Yup, most of those qualify. Actually, there are more of these areas than I thought. I guess I didn't notice because they're not up to bat yet - but if current rates of growth, urbanization and gentrification continue they will have to someday. I mean, the arts community can't be pushed any further west along Queen otherwise they're going to be driven straight into Humber bay.

Wilson Avenue west of Dufferin: Exactly the type of neighbourhood you're thinking of, a mix of plazas and rental blocks built from the 1950s through the 1990s. The old Wilson Lanes Bowling Alley is going to be redeveloped as a compact stacked townhouse complex.

http://app.toronto.ca/DevelopmentAp...icationsList.do?action=init&folderRsn=3035237
 
Wilson Avenue west of Dufferin: Exactly the type of neighbourhood you're thinking of, a mix of plazas and rental blocks built from the 1950s through the 1990s. The old Wilson Lanes Bowling Alley is going to be redeveloped as a compact stacked townhouse complex.

http://app.toronto.ca/DevelopmentAp...icationsList.do?action=init&folderRsn=3035237

And when it comes to that general zone of Toronto: who knows what long-term effect the presence of York University might have...
 

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