While I agree that the Danforth should always be lively, I can sympathize with people who live near by patios and places that turn into nightclubs after dark. Loud music, traffic, blocked driveways, drunkeness, cigarette butts all over, peeing in the lanes ... it's like living in the Entertainment District or year-round Taste of the Danforth.
For example, the block between Fenwick and Logan is often problematic on the south side. (And by the way, some places around there -- I am reliably informed -- expanded into the laneway illegally.)
Many people bought their homes their when the locale was a fruit market > Shoppers > Mark's Work Wearhouse > Canadian Tire. I can appreciate their objections.
A gym meanwhile, what's the problem?
Yeah, I have no sympathy. Zero sympathy, and a good deal of contempt. Might have been a fruit market, but it's a commercial thoroughfare and it doesn't take a genius to understand that it is/could be zoned for different uses. These residents are, at best, willfully blind.
The letters of objection do make some references to late-night disruptions, but mostly focus on noise, traffic, deliveries, parking, smells, lack of consultation, kitchen exhausts, and lack of consultation. More than half of their issues would relate to any business, including any daytime operations, and I have no doubt that they'd similarly react if the proposed use was a 24/7 fruit store like back in the day.
Those people are awful. They want a lively, interesting Danforth, and love the patios - just not on their corner! People buy house two or three doors from the Danforth, and then react in horror when they realize they live close to the Danforth. It's a horrible, NIMBY sense of self-entitlement that exists in low-rise residential neighbourhoods next to commercial thoroughfares on a subway. They want their cake, they want their cake exactly how they want it, they have unrealistic expectations about their cake, they happily expect their cake to come to them at the expense of good planning and the greater good, and they want to eat their cake too.
Many of them are also worked up because the landowner on the other corner has applied to extend his building (the old Sun Valley building) a bit to the south, incorporating the existing house. That one hasn't been heard yet, and has been delayed.
Obviously, variances such as these can be approved with conditions to prevent the premises from turning into quasi-nightclubs. And patio licenses, which are something else entirely and are approved as part of a separate process, can also have conditions attached to them. Fragedakis has actually been fairly hostile to side patios, mostly because City enforcement can be inept.
