junctionist
Senior Member
Did anyone notice that I wrote this blog article? It's not my blog, though. My article echoes the Urban Toronto attitude of urban, transit and pedestrian oriented development. I forwarded it to the local councillor, Francs Nunziata, though I didn't even get a reply.
There should be midrise condominiums built along the major streets St. Clair and Keele/Weston with the proposed retail at the bottom. It's sad that a developer is fighting at the OMB to build a condo beside railroad tracks and the large NRI rubber factory just several hundred metres from this property. That's quite an undesirable location that will most likely lead to the closure of that industry, yet in a zone ripe for intensification beside a streetcar line, these mediocre suburban proposals are submitted and taken seriously. This is probably a matter of poor planning, not a lack of market justification for intensification.
As for the Old Stock Yards area, it's a very funky mix of urbanity and cheap suburban development. There are so many failures in urban planning, but seemingly random noticeable successes. Take the Tribute subdivision beside the streetcar loop for instance. It breaks the suburban rules. The front facades of homes actually face the major street, St. Clair, rather than lining it with wooden backyard fences. It's false historic architecture, but there's no bizarre double garage in that false historic facade. (I find the whole false Victorian with double garage architecture rather mindless.) Garages face laneways behind the houses, and there's a proper grid. The streets are narrow too. The McDonald's at Keele and St. Clair has a drive-through, but at the actual intersection there's a patio built. The Swiss Chalet and Harvey's actually front the street. Of course, the area is nonetheless more suburban than urban, but it's still interesting and hardly boring.
Aesthetically there are the successes of Old Stock Yards Road. Here, the street is lined with healthy green trees which were densely planted. The utilities are buried and the streetlamps are the classic style, making it a very nice stretch of street. The Rona even has some public art for some reason on it's walls. Perhaps the reason for that was the loss of the historic CPR roundhouse.
Historically, the area has been part of the Junction. If you look at old maps, it's apparent. The history books on West Toronto Junction have sections devoted to this area, which was once a key part of the industrial community. In fact, even in the 1980s, planning documents discussed how important this area was to Toronto's economy. It was observed to be second in industrial jobs only to the Portlands and home to 4000 businesses. By the mid 1990s, most of that disappeared, and the suburban style developments began to be built.
But there are still small pockets of the past here and there. Glen Scarlett Road as mentioned above is a dirty road with some nasty meat industry operations still active. I once saw a dump truck of animal parts roll down Keele from St. Clair. That Glen Scarlett area (map) was what I was talking about when adma suggested the vacant Symes Transfer Station as a residential conversion in this thread. I noted that the area around it was an "industrial wasteland".
