Tag Archives: back alley
The Annex
Small town in the middle of The Big Smoke
Keith Carman – Metro Toronto
“We totally stumbled into this area but it kept us here because we love it so much,” beams graphic designer/Annex resident Dee Loft. “The streets are gorgeous, the architecture is beautiful, there are students everywhere … it’s just a great vibe.”
Sometimes the most enduring, meaningful relationships are those we come across unexpectedly, as Loft’s experience with the Annex asserts. Initially moving into the area out of convenience — three subway stops and vicinity to school — she and her husband have called the community home for seven years.
One of Toronto’s most diverse yet laid-back neighbourhoods, the Annex prides itself on a wealth of established trades operating in century buildings, creating a virtual smalltown aura in the confines of The Big Smoke. Proponents for independence, the Lofts frequent the district’s ample small businesses, mourning those that have been taken over by chains.
“The area has always had a casual feel to it that I hope it can keep thanks to some of the Mom ‘n’ Pop stores. There was an air around some places that they were grungy but good and that’s lost to the higher-end shops/restaurants replacing them,” she says.
Boasting a variety of commerce and entertainment, the Annex is a melting pot for everyone from students to seniors.
A young professional herself, Loft points out some of her haunts, including Lee’s Palace as her preferred live music venue, while shopping for records at Sonic Boom reveals both a huge selection and a friendly, knowledgeable staff.
“Not only that but with the great selection of vinyl and shows they have in the basement, it’s great,” Loft smiles, noting that her favourite shopping memory actually involves getting lost in the labyrinthine Honest Ed’s bargain shop. “I had to call my mother who was like, ‘Good luck with that,’” she laughs.
With everything from inexpensive bites to fine dining, Loft notes that the Annex serves a variety of palates.
Pointing out the dichotomous, she mentions Sarah’s Falafel as the quick counterpart to recently-founded Hey Lucy’s more luxurious experience. Still, the couple finds Acme Burger’s decadence and prices most alluring.
For drinks, Loft notes that despite being tucked away in a back alley The Green Room is a enjoyably off-the-beaten-path bar/eatery. Still, despite its array of diversions and focus on local support, to Loft, the Annex’s single most endearing aspect is its greenery.
“There are parks and schools everywhere with huge, hundred-year-old maple trees. You’ve also got U of T here, which brings in students and musicians, particularly at the corner of Bloor and Spadina where they play. But my favourite spot is this little side-street community garden (on Madison Avenue just north of Bloor). I stop there on my way home from work every day. It’s so gorgeous because the canopies block out everything. When I’m there, I totally forget that I live in a big city sometimes.”
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Architecture of the Times
Torontoist.com
Looking back on the need for a landmark building, William Thorsell of the ROM writes of the attraction to international starchitects like Daniel Libeskind: “they could express themselves personally; they could bring in poetic aspects to buildings that were there for reasons that had nothing to do with efficiency or form. They have to do with function, and in a broader sense of what function really is. It is partly the function of major buildings like the ROM to be a symbol.”
Love it or hate it, the ROM’s overhaul is certainly symbolic, demonstrative of the best (or worst) in contemporary architecture in Toronto. It and the other big ticket, high-profile projects of the “Cultural Renaissance” like the AGO or the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts figure prominently in Margaret and Phil Goodfellow’s A Guidebook to Contemporary Architecture in Toronto, just published by Douglas & McIntyre. But these comprise just one small portion of the architecture that’s transformed the city between 1992 and 2010. The pocket-sized book’s sixty or more entries—each illustrated by miniature photos, renderings, or floor plans—are organized by neighbourhood, letting the reader plan their own walking tour.
The expected entries are here, such as Santiago Calatrava’s galleria at Brookfield Place, National Ballet School, and Will Alsop’s tabletop at OCAD. But so are some gems: smaller, unexpected projects and public spaces that you might not ordinarily stumble across unless you knew to look for them.
The Thomas L. Wells Public School, in out-of-the-way Morningside Heights, for example, is the school board’s pilot green school—designed by Baird Sampson Neuert Architects—and it is presented here as “a leader and model for the future direction of educational design.” Also here are the Laneway House on the back alley of Croft Street and the Leavitt Goodman House on Euclid Avenue.
Two- to three-paragraph blurbs place each project within the context of their neighbourhoods, such as the way the McKinsey & Company–designed Isabel Bader Theatre blends traditional materials and stonework, which acknowledge the Neo-Gothic traditions of surrounding Victoria College, with contemporary design.
Beyond buildings, parks and public spaces like the Village of Yorkville Park and HTO Park on the waterfront are included. Even Yonge-Dundas Square is recognized: the square, designed by Brown + Storey Architects, has undoubtedly changed that neighbourhood and brought it to life. Nevertheless, would many locals consider it as a significant architectural achievement for the city, “an urban piazza framed by commercial activity and striking billboards”?
Yonge-Dundas Square’s inclusion makes it surprising that other significant and controversial projects are not even mentioned—for instance, the largest residential development in the city’s history.
CityPlace’s workmanlike, generic architecture—even Concord Adex’s websites don’t prominently list their towers’ actual architects, apart from KPMB’s Montage tower—and its suburban-esque streetscape would make it a controversial inclusion from a design point of view. “At present,” the Goodfellows note, this “area is characterized by a series of imposing but nondescript residential developments along an incongruous public realm.”
But if you compare an aerial photograph from the 1980s to the present, as Shawn Micallef does in the book’s closing essay discussing the city’s changing skyline, you’d be struck by how orphaned the CN Tower and SkyDome seem, surrounded by parking lots and rail yards. CityPlace, and high-rise residential developments in general, have been central to the city’s real-estate renaissance. As a book ostensibly for cultural tourists and local explorers, the Guidebook is not really intended to engage debates, but CityPlace’s exclusion makes you wonder about where we place tall condos in the architectural imagination of our city.
The handful of condo projects that are included are mid-rise buildings, the majority of which are designed by Peter Clewes’s architectsAlliance for Context Development, such as 20 Niagara, District Lofts, and Radiocity. With through-units for wall-to-wall daylight and cross ventilation, and community-scale design, these are certainly the upper echelon of condos in the city—and the reason why Christopher Hume has called Clewes “the leading condo designer of his generation.”
Also in the residential realm are the Toronto Community Housing Corporation’s recent projects like 60 Richmond, and 246–252 Sackville Street (the first completed project of the Regent Park redevelopment). Like these, among the merits cited for the inclusion of Evangel Hall (which architectsAlliance designed for the Presbyterian Church) is that the social housing project “masks [itself] in the skin of a market condominium.”
It’s perhaps more interesting to wonder, as Bruce Kuwabara does in one of the book’s introductory interviews, just who is transforming the city more: international sources like Gehry or Libeskind, “invited to Toronto for a single project,” or local firms like Teeple Architects, ERA Architects, KPMB, and Kohn Shnier Architects.
Taken as a whole, does A Guidebook to Contemporary Architecture in Toronto suggest a distinctive architectural style to the city? If anything, the Goodfellows suggest, it is adaptive reuse of existing buildings and infill development. “The contemporary wave is appropriating the spaces in between,” Micallef adds, “filling in streetscapes and neighbourhoods. What this gives Toronto is an extremely heterogeneous typology. Toronto does not have a uniform look, but is this urban mix that may, in fact, be the signature style.”
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Cabbagetown cultivates lanes
Lane-naming a tribute to ‘hidden gems’, noteworthy Torontonians
Laura Blenkinsop, National Post
City works crews arrived last week amid the Victorian row houses and cottages of Cabbagetown, halting their trucks at eight narrow laneways. Residents watched as they erected street signs with names like Woodward Evans Lane, after the two Torontonians who first invented the light bulb and then sold the patent to Thomas Edison; Drovers Lane, after the occupation of some early City of Toronto residents who drove herds of livestock to market; and Hagan Lane after award-winning artist Frederick Hagan, known for setting up his easel to paint in Cabbagetown’s laneways.
It is the first lane-naming project of this scale in Toronto; before they are done, 44 more lanes will get names.
They are a tribute to the persistence of Douglas Mc-Taggart, who has spent three years pushing to name all the back alleys in Cabbagetown.
“There’s a beauty to the laneways now, and I think it’s really trying to accentuate the positives,” said Mr. McTaggart, chairman of the Cabbagetown Preservation Association Laneway Naming and Signing Initiative.
“They’re part of the Victorian plan so they are historic. I think there is so much potential for them.”
Cabbagetown is the largest continuous area of preserved Victorian housing in North America
Cabbagetown, named for the flood of impoverished Irish immigrants who used their front lawns for vegetable gardens filled with cabbages, is shedding its slum past, although not quickly enough for some residents.
The signs erected this week are all in the neighbourhood’s more troubled western edge.
Mr. McTaggart’s inspiration to name lanes came as a way to deal with the problems he faced in the alley behind the Seaton Street home he moved into in January, 2002.
A Toronto Community Housing Corporation building is across the alley from his home and with all the residents, he said over time garbage was piled five to six feet high and 20-feet long. He found used syringes and broken glass when children in their bare feet were playing nearby.
After a drug deal gone wrong, a person was thrown to their death off a balcony into the alley, he said.
“I believe it’s a liability to have an unnamed thoroughfare in Toronto in this day and age,” said Mr. McTaggart. “It’s really life and property that are at risk.”
His complaints to the city proved fruitless, he said, so in 2004 he decided to submit an application to get the troubled lane a name.
In December, 2005, his back alley was officially named Oskenonton Lane, after a First Nations entertainer from the early 1900s.
Since the lane’s naming, Mr. McTaggart said he’s noticed a reduction in crime.
The TCHC building’s garbage is collected three times instead of once each week and new lighting has been installed.
“It really was a tangle of issues of urban decay,” Mr. McTaggart said. “Naming and signing the lane was a step that really vaulted us forward.”
He decided nearby lanes should also be named so they could be cleaned up, to speed up emergency response times and increase traffic safety.
So the human resources consultant and historical preservation enthusiast bought property data maps and spent three winter weeks canvassing the area and noting down the locations, problems and historical icons of every lane.
He also created the laneways initiative, which submitted the application to name 52 lanes on March 22, 2006. Desmond Christopher, the city’s supervisor for Street and Parcel Mapping, said that is a lot of lanes.
“Normally we don’t name lanes unless we are required for emergency purposes,” he said.
The city also names lanes if a new building’s front entrance looks onto an alley instead of a street, or if city councillors and residents want to honour someone who has died.
For the signage for the first eight lanes, the city has spent about $2,500 in labour and materials.
Mr. McTaggart intends to continue his activism for the laneways, pushing for road surface, sewage and greening improvements until Cabbagetown’s lanes are “hidden gems.”
He said he’s been humbled by thank you e-mails he’s received from neighbours for the signs that have already been installed.
“I don’t think anybody should undervalue the signage that’s in place,” he said. “Signage brings great benefits.”
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Contact the Jeffrey Team for more information - 416-388-1960
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