Toronto Aura at College Park | 271.87m | 78s | Canderel | Graziani + Corazza

dt_toronto_geek said:
I don't like the reference to people being referred to as lowlife. That said, I think it's only be a matter of time before Evergreen is relocated off the strip and out of the tourists line of vision as this area undergoes gentrification in the next 3 or 4 years. Assuming Aura gets built.
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You don't have to like it but I just used it as a figure out speech considering most of the people there display an image that isn't very welcoming nor friendly. More so referring to the ones that are blazin' up infront of the place or harassing the woman there. I hope your right and eventually relocate this place elsewhere. However, I could totally be wrong and these street youth could be the nicest people in Toronto:p
 
toforumer said:
Hahaha...your post made me laugh towards the end. Who else hates waking past Evergreen? All those street youth look up to no good. Most of them all look like lowlifes just standing on the street. You just don't feel comfortable walking past this in fear of being robbed.
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What exactly is Evergreen? Youth drop-in?
 
toforumer said:
Hahaha...your post made me laugh towards the end. Who else hates waking past Evergreen? All those street youth look up to no good. Most of them all look like lowlifes just standing on the street. You just don't feel comfortable walking past this in fear of being robbed.
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Whaddaya mean? Perfect place to troll for street trash to invite up to my apartment. So I might wind up a murder statistic. Big deal
 
Be careful here, about 25 years ago there was a horrendous rape/murder of a 12 year old boy.... The Shoeshine Boy. He was picked off the street and repeatedly assaulted by 3 or 4 very perverse men, living in apartments above stores along Yonge St. They eventually drowned him in a sink, wrapped his body in garbage bags and left him to rot in an alley behind Yonge. The men were caught and are still in the Kingston Pen.
 
Michael62 said:
Be careful here, about 25 years ago there was a horrendous rape/murder of a 12 year old boy.... The Shoeshine Boy. He was picked off the street and repeatedly assaulted by 3 or 4 very perverse men, living in apartments above stores along Yonge St. They eventually drowned him in a sink, wrapped his body in garbage bags and left him to rot in an alley behind Yonge. The men were caught and are still in the Kingston Pen.
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That was horrible, he was Emanuel Jaques. His body was recovered from the roof of a body rub parlor on Yonge Street north of Shuter. It began the big cleanup of the Yonge Street Strip.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Jacques
 
dt_toronto_geek said:
That was horrible, he was Emanuel Jaques. He body was recovered from the roof of a body rub parlor on Yonge Street north of Shuter. It began the big cleanup of the Yonge Street Strip.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Jacques
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Wow, I never knew about this. That's just disgusting. I hope they all rot in jail until they die.

How bad was Yonge St. during the 70s? I was born in '85, so I really didn't get to experience the downtown life and Yonge until the early 90s.
 
toforumer said:
Wow, I never knew about this. That's just disgusting. I hope they all rot in jail until they die.

How bad was Yonge St. during the 70s? I was born in '85, so I really didn't get to experience the downtown life and Yonge until the early 90s.
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I wouldn't say it was "bad", but it was somewhat seedy. I don't like NYC comparisons but think of it as a gentler version of 42nd street on the east side of Yonge from Queen to Gerrard. The area was somewhat focused on sex with lots of magazine shops, a few porn theatres, massage parlors, strip clubs and such. There were legitimate cinemas (Imperial Six, The Downtown and sometimes The Yonge), grindhouse cinemas showing lots of sex, action and horror fare like The Yonge, (now Elgin Wintergarden), The Rio, Biltmore, Coronet, Cinema 2000 etc then there were legitimate business jammed in between it all. Eaton's stores, and eventually the Eaton Centre was on the west side. I was a kid in the 70's and was fascinated with the area, I never felt unsafe nor did I ever have any bad experiences there.
Despite the cleanup many of the adult bookstores & cinemas survived well into the 80's. To my eyes I think the sex for sale business was the focus of the cleanup.
 
dt_toronto_geek said:
I wouldn't say it was "bad", but it was somewhat seedy. I don't like NYC comparisons but think of it as a gentler version of 42nd street on the east side of Yonge from Queen to Gerrard. The area was somewhat focused on sex with lots of magazine shops, a few porn theatres, massage parlors, strip clubs and such. There were legitimate cinemas (Imperial Six, The Downtown and sometimes The Yonge), grindhouse cinemas showing lots of sex, action and horror fare like The Yonge, (now Elgin Wintergarden), The Rio, Biltmore, Coronet, Cinema 2000 etc then there were legitimate business jammed in between it all. Eaton's stores, and eventually the Eaton Centre was on the west side. I was a kid in the 70's and was fascinated with the area, I never felt unsafe nor did I ever have any bad experiences there.
Despite the cleanup many of the adult bookstores & cinemas survived well into the 80's. To my eyes I think the sex for sale business was the focus of the cleanup.
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Thanks for the insight dt_toronto_greek.

I still see a lot of sex shops along Yonge though so I can imagine the amount of them in the 70s then. When you walk up Yonge from Dundas, there's two strip clubs, recently I found out Remingtons was a gay strip club and never really noticed it before..lol and then you have Zanzibar, who came to fame on the big screen in Harlem, NYC in The Incredible Hulk..lol...then you have all these other shady shops that advertise selling fake ids..lol...then you have all those sex store, you walk by and the doors open, you'll see lots of dildo's on display, then you have your adult movie theatre, street youth centre, and good ole' BIG SLICE...I love BIG SLICE...lol I think Yonge st., particularly that block is still very loaded on sex.....Good ole' Yonge st!!
 
I also spent a lot of my early life down on yonge street during the mid to late 70's. When they had the street closed to traffic it was amazing. There were so many drugs, everyone always seems stoned or drunk. One place I really liked was called "the meat market" it was a pickup place. It was the time of free love. I was a hippy love child, with the hair, bell bottomed pants painted in flowers. Sex was open, male/female, male/male, groups what ever, it just didn't matter. It was all around the time of "Woodstock" Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. It felt safe but evil is evil and some got used up and spit out. As I recall murder of "the shoeshine boy" a portugese kid, put the whole cleanup in motion. the Portugese community revolted and marched, demanding the sex shops be closed down, they marched and marched, week after week, yelled and screamed, got the churches involved and the sex shops, not being able to take the pressure closed one by one. An amazing and exciting time. There should be a statue for Emmanuel Jacques, his tragedy alone changed a community and a city and brought us into a new multicultural age where minorities found they could be part of the city and that they could affect change
 
^^ I don't think it is off-topic, as we're discussing the neighbourhood and history of the building site. "Downtown Yonge" or the strip's BIA has done a good job of cleaning it up even if their designs are a bit lackluster. While I don't want Yonge to lose it, um, character, the inevitable gentrification will take place and Aura should play be a big catalyst. The other catalyst will be Ryerson and its master plan. Sadly, Big Slice probably won't survive. But no worries, there are three pizza pizza locations within sight and who knows, maybe Aura will open up a pizza pizza on the ground floor *shudder*.

I realize that one of the main transformations of this strip of Yonge came between Queen St and Dundas when the Eaton Centre opened up its stores to the street. This brought life and light to the street and made it more consumer friendly and thus more mainstream.

Yonge/Gerrard is not an exciting corner. Like most of Gerrard East, it is populated with a certain clientele that some people (lets call them visitors) find really uncomfortable. Instead of addressing the severe social issues, mental health problems and roots of despair, the approach seems to be pushing this group away from Yonge. For better or for worse, this change has been gradual and has no doubt influenced developers to invest in Yonge Street and neighbourhood (TLS, Aura, The Met & Encore, Pantages). If the rumours of a Delta Chelsea exterior reno are true then this is yet another example of area improvement. It is a very interesting display of community change, development and revitalization. And while we tend to concentrate our discussion here on this board to the aesthetics and construction of different developments I feel it is definitely worth discussing the impacts, trends, and environment that these developments have on their community. After all, these changes are just as or more real than the effects of the built form.
 
on another topic, does anyone know anything new about Aura? This one has fallen off the face of the earth! I had to go back 4 pages just to find the thread.

Is this thing happening?
 
Big Daddy said:
on another topic, does anyone know anything new about Aura? This one has fallen off the face of the earth! I had to go back 4 pages just to find the thread.

Is this thing happening?
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I believe they are at 85% sold, so I don't see why not.
 
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