blogTO's Derek Flack looks at old malls in Yorkville, like Cumberland Terrace and the Village Arcade, that are set to come down as redevelopment beckons. Plenty of nice photos are included.

Yorkville is in the midst of a paradigm shift, the scale of which hasn't been witnessed since it transformed from a hippie hub in the 1960s to a high end ( Read more... )

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The Toronto Star shares Shawn Micallef's timely article about humble overlooked Christmas trees. This does matter, perhaps particularly tonight, when my Instagram feed is still fresh with photos of the great showy trees of the Eaton Centre and City Hall. Less showy things also matter.

The hardest-working Christmas tree in Toronto is in Cumberland ( Read more... )

Standing yesterday on the fifth floor of the Toronto Reference Library, I decided to take advantage of the view. The view north, into wooded Rosedale, was only partly blocked by condos. The view south, into Yorkville, was entirely urban.


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In NOW Toronto, Catherine Nasmith criticizes development plans in Yorkville.

Almost every time I mention Toronto’s York Square, people ask, “Where is that?” That’s a compliment to its success: its modest approach has been so widely copied that it’s almost invisible today ( Read more... )

Spacing Toronto features Kieran Delamont's article noting the importance of Yorkville in Canadian music history. Now a home of high-end condos, Yorkville was a center of industry.

With Canadian Music Week taking place just in clubs throughout Toronto, the historic Masonic Temple concert hall on Yonge Street - which has hosted the likes of Zeppelin ( Read more... )

What will I be doing on the 6th? Maybe this. From NOW Toronto:

Before Yorkville was the place to grab a gelato and drop $3,000 on a Valentino sweater, it was Toronto’s music mecca ( Read more... )

I've blogged before about the Cumberland Terrace shopping mall complex in Yorkville, north and west of Yonge and Bloor. In November 2014, I noted a public art project inside the mall--called a dying mall, unrenovated since 1974 and thus retaining a certain curiosity factor, by Shawn Micallef--aimed at reconnecting it to its Yorkville roots. In ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes a controversial condo project on Dupont just east of me, and Torontoist notes a controversial condo project in Yorkville.
• Centauri Dreams notes preliminary research suggesting rocky exoplanets will be structured like the Earth.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting that tightly-packed exoplanet systems are product of gas giants.
• ( Read more... )

The Toronto Star's Christopher Hume mourns, perhaps prematurely, for the end of Yonge and Bloor as a happening cultural destination.

The richer Toronto grows, the poorer it feels. The most recent reminder came with the death of Avrom Isaacs, long one of the two or three most important art dealers in Canada ( Read more... )