Clearly east side of downtown has begun to improve and will continue to do so. Unfortunately Moss Park, the various shelters and rehab spaces, and St. Jamestown aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
 
It's a lovely area all around. I used to live at Front and Esplanade back in the mid/late-90s and have very fond memories. Yes, it was dodgy at times, but there's something very special about that part of town.
 
One might argue that Mystic Muffin is the best kind of "unsophisticated"...
 
Noticed the Jade Lofts signs have been covered over at the sales centre. This is one project that just won't move.
 
Too bad, but I figured it was just a bit too close to the heart of Eastside grit to be palatable for even the urban pioneer types.
 
Too bad, but I figured it was just a bit too close to the heart of Eastside grit to be palatable for even the urban pioneer types.
Click to expand...

That raises a question I often ask: Why is "Eastside grit" so persistent? Or, to put it another way, why has Near Queen East failed (over and over again) to gentrify?

I know the standard arguments (which we've just sort of seen here): the predominance of shelters, street drugs -- but that didn't keep artists from starting the process on Queen West West.

Babel? AndreaPalladio?
 
Oh, very well, dear ...

There was a rash of little antique shops on the south side of Queen Street, east of Jarvis, and Waddingtons auction house, about 15 or 20 years ago. But that was about it. I think the Armoury park to the north was a psychological dead end, and the social housing to the east too - there wasn't much old property to gentrify.

And there wasn't an OCA, or an AGO, or a Chinatown and a Spadina for cheap chop suey and deli meals, nor a Malibar for Halloween and the Baux Arts Ball outfits, nor a Gwartzman's art supplies, nor pubs for art students, nor cheap rooming houses for them too. None of the infrastructure that could be built on was on the east side.

And hasn't the city traditionally expanded, in waves, upwards and to the left? Didn't new immigrants settle in places like Kensington Market and then move on in waves? Wasn't the lower east side fairly stable - old Anglo Saxons and old Irish/Scots who were part of that huge, static Anglo Saxon ghetto that had roots going back to the 1830's?

When I was at OCA in the early 1970's there were illegal artist studios in some of the old warehouses along the Esplanade. Quite a few people lived in them buildings too. But the development of the St.Lawrence neighbourhood, with all those do-gooder co-ops, kinda squashed the arty potential there for good.
 
That's a really good point, actually. Socialised housing, in its various manifestations, works against social mobility and neighborhood reinvention. It's not just a matter of Regent's Park and Moss Park keeping demographics down, it's that, as Babel says, even an area like the Esplanade, where the demographics are more middling, couldn't reinvent itself if it wanted to.

Of course, what works against reinvention from gritty to liveable also works against reinvention from liveable to out-of-control trendy...
 
I think the main problem with the lower east side was the lack of any vibrant and innovative cultural focus ( unlike OCAD and the U of T to the west! ), combined with the lack of cheap rental housing for said students and residential buildings for creative people to gentrify ( just old factories! ).

George Brown College doesn't seen to have kickstarted anything much. The theatres - St. Lawrence Centre, O'Keefe, YPT - were always rather on the fringes, and the St. Lawrence Hall isn't a major venue either. The Toronto Free Theatre ( now CanStage ) was a ray of hope in the late 1970's.

Neinkamper at King and Berkeley was really the only good contemporary furniture store in the area for a decade or more, and they mostly sold to the trade. You never saw plain folks shopping there for anything. It was a wasteland.

Whatever has happened in this part of town has been parachuted in, not evolved from a creative residential population. The Distillery District is a great example of this, and how you can only go so far with re-branding a neighbourhood. They brought in non-chain stores, and banked on the arty/crafty nature of their first renters to act as a magnet for other creative enterprises. But galleries there are drifting away and - with the exception of a few large galleries with deep pockets, and the new Young Centre, what remains are twee gift shoppes for suburban tourists.
 
Jade is definitely done. I have a friend who bought into it, and he should be receiving his deposit back sometime in the next week or so. I'm not surprised either. I think that project could win an award for Worst Marketing of a Condo Project Ever. "Prepare to be seduced"? Come on.

JBM does seem to be undeplaying many of the changes that have already happened to our lower east side, but in many ways he's also stating the obvious. The area still has a ways to go, but in that sense it's quite exciting. I'm very happy to be a part of it.
 
They should go for 22 Wellesley type project on Jade's site. Perhaps a 20-storey building would succeed in that spot, especially with better marketing.
 
Jade is on the south side Queen St E, just a bit west of Jarvis St. It's been relaunched twice in the last four years. I believe the parking garage it sits on was built for a project that stalled in the late 1980s. The site seems to be cursed, but really, there's no reason it couldn't be successful with the right project/marketing.
 
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