scarberiankhatru
Senior Member
There's more to sleaze than strip clubs and more to grime than peeling paint.
Yonge north & south from Bloor St.
Hasn't online porn killed off a lot of the raison d'etre of sex shops anyway? I kind of miss them too, not the services but the grit of downtown
To a great extend it has, however there is still a - let's say "social aspect" - for some people who patronize these establishments.
It would be nice to see Younge St. turn into St. Catherines street in Montreal.
Yonge is a mixed bag. I have a love/hate relationship with the street.
The Front to Queen section is great and feels kind of like an American downtown: impressive buildings with unimpressive retail. Queen to Dundas is where the grandiosity starts to fade and the low-end chain retailing begins to pick up.
Dundas to Gerrard is an embarassment and the part that I can't love no matter how hard I try. Sam's is gone and HMV seemingly only sells DVDs of Lost. The remaining buildings and stores along this stretch are both almost entirely expendable: low-end hootchie fashion outlets and stores that sell faded Scarface posters inside low-slung commercial buildings that aren't befitting of the centre of St. Thomas, let alone Toronto.
Things remain at a low through the Gerrard intersection and then dramatically pick up again at College, which is a very metropolitan-feeling intersection. The stretch from College to Bloor is great - with a certain midtown headiness to it. There is a great Victorian streetscape unobscured by wires and it packs in the city's seedy underbelly of shopping experiences (everything from leather chaps to nerd gaming places to an upstairs marijuana lounge) without resorting to the commercial tackiness of the Dundas to Gerrard strip. The Bay street condos are a great backdrop, too.
North of Bloor, Yonge kind of becomes the dumping ground for Yorkville's cast offs: endless hair salons which strive to look more cool and cosmopolitan than they are, stores that sell authentic yet tasteless rugs and stuff like that.
Dundas to Gerrard is an embarassment and the part that I can't love no matter how hard I try. Sam's is gone and HMV seemingly only sells DVDs of Lost. The remaining buildings and stores along this stretch are both almost entirely expendable: low-end hootchie fashion outlets and stores that sell faded Scarface posters inside low-slung commercial buildings that aren't befitting of the centre of St. Thomas, let alone Toronto.
I used to go to Montreal every year or so in the 80's & early 90's and I found the two streets very similar in character and vibrancy back then. I don't know what Rue Ste-Catherine is like today, but Yonge St has certainly changed since the 80's/early 90's. The main change that I can contrast is the loss of so many popular pubs/nightclubs and cinemas thus removing a lot of nightlife from downtown Yonge.