Yesterday, as the sun waned, I made one of my rare personal appearances amongst the west end demimonde, moving mostly unheeded through the not-yet inebriated ranks of a garrulous, glassy-eyed, bushy-tailed, primped youngish crowd that sluiced determinedly along King Street to Bathurst, and occasionally trailed off into the side streets for destinations and attractions unknown to me. There were restaurants, and bars aplenty with bouncers - or at least hefty guardians of some sort - standing at attention outside of them, and one establishment where groups of people dressed as racing car drivers were lolling about on the sidewalk, with a queue of other people waiting to get inside to do or see whatever it was they were there to do or see, and to be parted from their money for their pains. I noticed that there were signs up for new condominium apartment buildings as yet unbuilt, and a sales office or two. And then, cutting south to Wellington, I swept gloriously through the restaurant and swank bar of the swank new Thompson hotel, recognizing one particularly handsome and terribly famous young man in a suit, whoever he was ( actor? pop singer? athlete? ) who was standing about, and who aimed his steely gaze briefly in my direction as I passed. The fancy restaurant with the dim lighting was surprisingly quiet though, as was the new diner housed behind the former Crangles facade on Bathurst that I visited next. Then I was off again, through an exterior walkway in the building and along Stewart Street, past the old warehouse at the corner where we partied with Andy Warhol and Marshall McLuhan in '75, pondering how time rolls along like tumbleweed, clouding some memories and carrying off others entirely, altering or removing myriad built forms and rearranging the city around us, and how layers of memory and structural form are pasted over, how the city and those who inhabit it are continually reinvented, and how glorious and unpredictable this inevitable process makes the Great Wen that we inhabit. In this regard, the west end is certainly quite a few years ahead of the equivalent east end bolus that's starting to clog the arteries of Queen and Broadview, near where I live. Then, I walked along King, past Simcoe ( The Victorians referred to the four buildings at the intersection as: Salvation, Education, Damnation and Legislation - but only one, the church, remains ) and on to Yonge in the humid evening air, and up to Dundas ... from whence I took the streetcar home.
