Gentrification is a flashpoint in any city, but in the Church-Wellesley village, the exodus of old inhabitants in recent years has political undertones.

Historically, the neighbourhood has been a place of comfort for those whose sexuality once made them social outcasts, but in 2009, the very concept of a gay village is in transition.

Rapidly rising housing prices mean Church-Wellesley is hardly the "ghetto" it was in the years before same-sex marriage and other such victories.

And for the young people who could be the neighbourhood's future, the labels "gay" and "lesbian" are just a starting point for self-discovery.

[. . .]

Church St. evokes mixed feelings for Jaques. First drawn there expecting an embrace of non-mainstream expressions of gender and sexuality, Jaques says the village imposes its own boxes.

"Not being rejected was as good a welcome as you were going to get," Jaques says of being a young trans person in the village. She has had ample opportunity to size up the neighbourhood – she lives at the Turning Point youth centre on Wellesley after being kicked out of her father's house two years ago.

Jaques has also attended the Wednesday night trans youth group at the 519 Church Street Community Centre for two years.

Preferring Dungeons and Dragons to bar-hopping, Jaques is tired of people who seem exasperated when she responds "a writer" to the constant question of "what are you?"

"You need some kind of personality beyond being queer," says Jaques, who prefers to spend free time at Sketch, an arts centre for youth at Queen and Spadina. "Honestly, on Church, there isn't a whole lot to do."

This year The Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives celebrated the opening of its brand new home, a dedicated building in the Church and Wellesley neighbourhood. The 519 Church St Community Centre celebrated a fancy new addition. The Church St Fetish Fair, Halloweek and Toronto Pride celebrations drew record crowds. The International Gay and Lesbian Tourism Association held a huge trade show in Maple Leaf Gardens. Scores of gay and lesbian athletes represented Toronto at the World Outgames in Copenhagen.

Pride Toronto is gunning for World Pride in 2014 and stands a good chance of getting it. Woody’s celebrated its 20th anniversary. Xtra celebrated its 25th anniversary. Fab is celebrating its 15th anniversay. Pink Triangle Press, which publishes Xtra and fab, completed an office renovation and continued to grow its worldwide audience of gay and lesbian people.

Visit Church St any night of the week, especially on weekends, to see thousands of queer people from all walks of life enjoying themselves.

All the above, and whatever else I’ve inadvertently left out, is missing from Balkissoo’s story.

Gentrification is a real phenomenon, in no way peculiar to Toronto. It is more expensive to live here than it used to be. This is true of urban centres around the world and various neighbourhoods across Toronto. But change is inevitable. The Church Wellesley neighbourhood is and always has been in a state of flux. Businesses, people and institutions naturally come and go over time. It is the way of things everywhere.

Southern Ontario residents will today begin picking up the pieces after a devastating thunderstorm rolled across a large stretch of the province last night, producing several tornadoes that destroyed homes, tore up roofs, flipped vehicles and left at least one person dead.

At one point, Environment Canada had issued a tornado warning extending 500 kilometres between Peterborough and Windsor. The storm, and the occurrence of multiple funnel clouds, is considered a rare occurrence in the region. Recorded winds topped 80 kilometres an hour, but are expected to have been much higher where the tornadoes touched down.

Homes across the Toronto area were damaged, but the heart of the devastation was in Durham, Ont., a small town of 2,500 just south of Owen Sound and about two hours northwest of Toronto. Police in the town told residents last night that one person had died when a tornado went through a conservation area.

[. . .]

A tornado was reported about two hours later in the City of Vaughan, north of Toronto and 200 kilometres away from Durham. It appeared to be centred in the area of Highway 7 and Martin Grove Road. Photos from the site of the Vaughan storm showed many homes where the roof had been damaged, or collapsed entirely.

The City of Vaughan declared a state of emergency last night, which allows it to call in help from Emergency Management Ontario. The city said about 120 homes, mostly in its communities of Maple and Woodbridge, were damaged or destroyed. Some homes also were evacuated in Vaughan. Residents were able to go to the Father Ermanno Bulfon Community Centre on Martin Grove Road last night for shelter.

[. . .]

Another tornado was reported in Newmarket, but damage was said to be much less than in Durham or Vaughan, where police got a first-hand account as the funnel cloud passed their station.

"It passed just south of our parking lot. The standard tornado, the dark funnel cloud, it was moving at quite a speed. Then it would dissipate and come back again," Sgt. Sterchele said. "Several areas have been hit very hard."

Hydro One said it had 63,000 customers without power last night, while Toronto Hydro said it had widespread outages and couldn't say how many people were affected. Trees were knocked down across the entire path of the tornado, from otherwise-unaffected parts of Toronto to the hardest-hit areas in Durham and Vaughan.

[. . .]

He said the storm was rare in the Toronto area, and that it was unusual to see multiple funnel clouds. Once teams survey the damage, they'll be able to say what category the tornadoes were. Most Southern Ontario tornadoes are F0 or F1 storms - F5 being the strongest - but last nights' could possibly have been as high as an F2, which see wind speeds of between 180 and 240 km/h, Mr. Coulson speculated.

Storms of this scale are rare in the region, he said.

"I think it's been a while in the GTA in the immediate area with this number of potential tornadoes," he said. "The frequency in the GTA would not be something I'd be seeing every year."

Almost nine years after the City of Toronto took over Union Station, the money has finally been found to carry out a $640 million revamp of the landmark transportation hub.

By early next year, major work will be underway to transform the building into a more commuter-friendly place with larger concourses, a major underground retail mall and new head office for GO Transit in the west wing.

The project is to be completed by 2015.

One of the first jobs is to build a new PATH tunnel under York St. north to Wellington St., which commuters will use while work goes on to refurbish the GO concourse and triple the space to 122,000 square feet, vastly improving pedestrian flow.

Yesterday, the federal government announced it would chip in $133 million, on top of $172 million from the province, for a total of $305 million from the two governments.

"All of us who use the GO train and who use VIA Rail know how important Union Station is and know how much it is in need of revitalization and renovation, and the ability to handle more people," said federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty.

[. . .]

The announcement was made on the north side of Front St. with the station forming an impressive backdrop – but one that also showed signs of the building's neglect, with water-stained and mossy masonry clearly visible.

The renovation plans have the potential to turn the building into a transportation showpiece, with improvements to the subway, GO and VIA train as well as bus travel and a possible future rail link to Pearson International Airport.

At the outset his main target was the union's bankable sick days, which can be cashed in for up to six months pay at retirement, and by the end those sick days were still there. Garbage piled up in city parks, pools were closed and swimming classes cancelled. The middle class was put out and angry, while union brass chafed at the mayor's bargaining strategy. In particular, Mr. Miller's decision to take the city's offer public on July 10 enraged union leaders. Politicians rarely go over the heads of union negotiators to appeal directly to workers and the public. Any politician knows better than to alienate the base, and from the early days in 2003 when his support was in the single digits, Mr. Miller's centrist coalition has been backed by big labour. This week the unions were tripping over themselves to say they didn't know whether they could endorse him in 2010, throwing open the possibility they might sit out the next election as they did when Bob Rae was trounced in 1995. [. . .] "We're in a new political moment where the traditional alliance between the mayor's office and organized labour has been severely strained," said city councillor Joe Mihevc, an erstwhile Miller ally who this week refused to endorse the mayor's re-election. "Toronto is 33-per-cent unionized. That's his core constituency....Winning that constituency back, establishing good relations, is something I think is absolutely imperative for him." Mr. Miller doesn't accept donations from unions or corporations, so it's not the money that he'll miss. Unions have provided him with a motivated, organized group of campaign workers who put up signs, canvass support and get their candidates' voters to the polls on election day.

Striking Toronto civic workers continued to rack up sick leave and vacation credits as they walked picket lines during the 39-day work stoppage, according to back-to-work protocols signed by the city and its union locals. [. . .] Miller had said that trimming benefit costs was one of the city's objectives in this round of bargaining. One of his targets was the sick leave bank, which allows workers to accumulate 18 days of sick time each year. If it's not used, the time can be banked, and workers get a cash payout of up to 120 days when they leave or retire. About 18,000 of the 30,000 striking workers can bank sick time. (Many seasonal and part-time workers don't qualify for sick pay.) In the settlement that ended the strike, workers covered by the current sick leave plan can remain in it and continue to bank unused time. New hires will be covered by a short-term disability plan that doesn't allow them to bank time

The gleaming 80-storey condominium tower that was to lead the revitalization of the Yonge-Bloor intersection in Toronto is teetering on the edge of extinction.

On Monday, the Toronto lender that advanced a $46 million loan is going to ask a court to put the Kazakhstan-backed project into receivership and sell off the now-vacant land its international developer boasts is the "best address in the world."

The lender, a consortium of Toronto businessmen, alleges in court documents that Kazakh developer Bazis International has defaulted on its land loan and the Kazakh bank backing the tower portion of the project is involved in a "massive financial scandal involving fake loans, racketeering and money laundering activities."

"The (land) loan has been in an almost constant state of default since December of 2008," said Toronto consortium leader Gary Berman, in a court affidavit supporting his group's bid to appoint receiver Ernst &Young.

[. . .]

Yesterday, the presentation suite at the southeast corner of Yonge and Bloor St. was locked tight. A sign noting its hours indicated it should have been open. The sign encouraged interested buyers – condo unit prices start at $500,000 to "over $8 million" – to book an appointment. The Star left a message, but did not get a call back.

For centuries, geography has been disappearing. Slowly, at first: The wheel rendered modest, walkable distances passable in a fraction of the time. Then, it was quicker, much quicker, thousands of miles vanishing at once as carriages, galleons, ocean liners and cars, and finally air travel, made it almost irrelevant, reducing a once epic 5,700-kilometre transatlantic journey to a trifling six-hour stretch of boredom salved with filmic interludes from Will Farrell.

It's all awfully fast. Too fast, Will Self says. So he's trying to slow it down. Six hours, more or less, took him from London Heathrow to Pearson yesterday. Six more hours, give or take, of walking took him from Pearson to Swatow, a Chinatown icon (the grilled pork really makes it) on Spadina Ave. last night.

[. . .]

Self, the iconoclastic British author of such novels as My Idea of Fun and Great Apes, is here this week for the International Festival of Authors. He writes a column in the Independent called "Psychogeography," accompanied each time with an illustration by the artist Ralph Steadman. Four years' worth have been collected into a newly released book of the same name.

It's not as confrontational as it sounds. "Really, it's about being where you are, about trying to infuse human geography with physical geography," Self says.

Then again, maybe it is. Self's position runs counter to modern modes of living taken for granted long ago. Living in a city, for most of us, means a handful of significant nodes – home, work, shopping – connected by high-speed journeys – cars, cabs, trains. The space in between wings by barely visible, unexperienced, untouched.

Self comes by the fascination honestly. His father was an academic whose field was urban planning. Self was surrounded with urban theory his whole life. Then, in his 20s, he experienced "an odd epiphany – I had lived in London all my life, and I had never seen the mouth of the Thames, only 20 miles away."

Self's mother was American, and he was making trans-Atlantic flights as a matter of habit. Yet here he was, at home, yet somehow foreign-feeling, displaced. It occurred to him that modern travel "destroys that sense of where we are," and thus were the seeds of psychogeography planted: Knowing a place from a human perspective, not through the side window of a plane, train or car.

Psychogeography embraces those ignored liminal zones – the spaces in between – step by step, as actual, tangible and real. "The whole thrust of the mass transit folkway is to annihilate those places we seek to recover," he says.

Benjamin’s image of the flaneur, wandering the streets idly and with a dandy’swardrobe, was the one that stuck in the popular imagination until later theorists ofwalking – also, notably, from Paris – tweaked the idea a little. Michel de Certeau and Guy DeBord politicized the pedestrian, and turned him from a passive observer to an activist of sorts. Without making him do anything in particular – Certeau’s and DeBord’s flaneur is just as directionless and whimsical as Benjamin’s – these latertheorists showed how the simple act of walking makes a statement as loud as words.Certeau argues that a city – its buildings, streets, and crowds – is a language initself, and that by taking a walk, the flaneur preserves this language and thuspreserves the space itself. Guy DeBord, co-founder of the Situationists, turnedwalking into art and activism. Spawning a whole movement – which endures today,in Paris and Toronto and elsewhere – Guy DeBord and the Situationists coined theterm “psychogeography” and gave a whole vocabulary to walking and the streets.After the Situationists, the flaneur had a purpose if not an itinerary.

The sad, but perhaps inevitable, news came today that Pages, one of Toronto's most-loved bookstores, will indeed be closing its doors on August 31st. Efforts by owner Marc Glassman to maintain the viability of his business amid "skyrocketing rents" on Queen West have ultimately hit a brick wall in the form of lease-cycle that's finally run its course.

As previously reported, a six month extension worked out with Pinedale Properties in February was occasion for cautious hope, but the discrepancy between what Glassman can afford to pay and what Pinedale believes it can charge is simply too wide. A fixture for artists, intellectuals and book lovers coming on 30 years, the store will be sorely missed.

[. . .]

Hesitant to give me a drop-dead date on a search [for a new location], Marc instead explained that beyond just finding a new location, it's become both necessary and desirable to rethink the store from the ground up. In the age of the Kindle and eBooks, it's his belief that the independent bookstore will have a better chance to thrive if it's operated as something of a split between a retail venture and an event-space. (Perhaps something like powerHouse Books?)

[. . .]

While the importance of the materiality of books will certainly continue to fade, it's unlikely to completely disappear. There's plenty out there who'll continue to treasure the beauty of the book as an object. Indeed, I'd count myself one of these people. But to rely solely on this form of business is, given the current situation at Pages, hardly prudent.

As garbage continued to pile up in Toronto's streets amid widespread illegal dumping, the city's top politicians said Tuesday they were still optimistic they could soon reach an agreement with striking municipal workers.

Garbage bins across the city have been stuffed with trash. Most are now filled to overflowing.

Tuesday is usually the first day of regular garbage pickup in Toronto — and the city has asked residents to keep trash in their homes for at least a week before trying to dispose of it.

But some people wouldn't wait.

Garbage bins have been crammed full, and green garbage bags filled with trash are starting to pile up on the streets.

Mayor David Miller pleaded with the city's residents not to make the situation worse.

"It is becoming clear that there is a small group of people that are taking advantage of this strike to use Toronto as their personal dumping ground," he told reporters at a Tuesday news conference.

"This is not and should not be acceptable to any of us. I would ask people to be patient."

That the striking workers and the city are negotiating is "a good sign," said Miller.

But Mark Ferguson, president of CUPE Local 416, which represents outdoor workers, said Monday the two sides were still "miles apart" from a deal.

A garbage bin wrapped in plastic
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

A girl next to a Christie Pits pile
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

A false alarm triggered a school lockdown in downtown Toronto this morning.

At about 10:30 a.m., Bickford Centre on Bloor St. W. near Christie St. held an emergency lockdown drill. A student was unaware it was a drill and contacted someone on the outside reporting a gunmen was in the school. That friend contacted police and a real lockdown was put in place.

"I've just received word that the situation has been resolved. The school was having an emergency drill earlier on in the day," said Const. Wendy Drummond, adding that there were no injuries and the lockdown had been lifted.

• 'Aqoul suggests that Maghrebin immigrants in western Europe, especially in Spain, are going to shrink as the economic contraction hits.


• Centauri Dreams suggests that the astronomical state of the art is advancing to the point where telescopes might detect massive moons orbiting some of the extrasolar planets discovered over the past decade and a half.


• Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell notes that Ireland is set to experience a crushing recession, worse even than the one experienced by Finland in the early 1990s.


• Daniel Drezner critiques New York Times columnist David Brooks about one man's thoughts on global governance, while being skeptical about the chances of a Republican Party revival.


• A Fistful of Euros' Alex Harrowell lets us know that Russia's radar system--you know, the one used to detect incoming missiles?--is holey and needs to be helped, immediately.


• Language Hat points readers towards a Silk Road-centric view of Eurasian history and looks at the dynamics of Indo-European language evolution.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen wonders whether Arlen Specter's defection to the Democratic Party might actually weaken his hand and that of the party.


• pauldrye examines the origins of the phrase "Yellow Peril" in the late 19th/early 20th unseemly competition for territory and power by various imperialists in China.


• The Pagan Prattle lets us know that some anti-Semites believe that the Starbucks logo is an iconic representative of Jewish world domination, or something.


• Slap Upside the Head points out that a British Columbia politician who wrote an E-mail a dozen years ago comparing homosexuality to pedophilia wrote it to a fellow teacher in opposition to an anti-bullying initiative.


• Spacing Toronto examines the travails of poor neglected beat-down Jarvis Street and its improvement plans, tours the Shops at Don Mills, Toronto's latest anti-mall, and examines the zonards, people in the mid-19th century who lived on the fringes of Paris.


• Torontoist reports on the threatened gentrification of the famously eclectic Kensington Market neighbourhood and links to a panorama of Toronto as seen from the top of the CN Tower.


• Window on Eurasia reports that Russians tend to prefer the term "post-Soviet space" as opposed to "near abroad" to define the other fourteen Soviet successor states.


• Finally, the Yorkshire Ranter points out that Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who engineered the 2003 invasion, has come out and admitted the lies. Surprise.

When it's open, Yorkdale Shopping Centre up in North York likely does more business than almost any other mall in Metro Toronto. Negotiating the crowd becomes as much of an art as a science, dodging this way and that around window browsers and slow ramblers, and it only gets more complicated when you're walking against the flow.

Things are different in the mornings. This photo was taken at 9:06 AM on a Saturday morning, about half an hour or so before the majority of the stores were to open for business. That early in the morning, Yorkdale's shopping promenades are as empty as sidewalks in Mississauga. A quiet mall is a strange thing, an almost unnatural thing, an echoing temple of capitalism with no one bowed to pray.

This vast complex is an integral destination and point of origin in the Greater Toronto Area's transit network. Not only is the mall physically connected to the Yorkdale TTC station, but it is one of the main nodes of the GO Transit network inside Toronto and is directly accessible from Highway 401. Yorkdale was built in 1964 near the height of Canada's post-Second World War economic boom, that miraculous event girded by free trade and high technology. It reflects those times and that ethos well, its gleaming body integrated with Toronto and self-contained in a way almost consistent with the arcologies of Paolo Soleri's arcologies. Technology--things that we had, or would have--would soon suffice to detach humanity from nature, whether in Arcosanti in the Arizona desert, or under the surface of the Earth's oceans soon, or in an imaginably realizable future embedded on the basalt of Oceanus Procellarum above our heads or Mars' low-lying desert of Utopia Planitia. Technology's triumph was inevitable.

It turned out that technology wasn't good enough for that, or at least that our technology wasn't up to the task: Biosphere 2 failed. More to the point, on a much smaller scale complexes like the Charlotettown Mall have contributed to the sterilization of my hometown's downtown. Future generations of engineers will likely work on these problems, and on many others that we've not yet begun to imagine. Perhaps the technological project of Yorkdale will come to a full satisfying conclusion one of these days. In the time being, there's still something that has to be said about the experiencing of strolling down a quiet side street lined with small shops and homes, the yellow maple leaves of fall crunching under your feet.

This isn’t an easy decision to make and lines from a Sinead O’Connor song keep running through my head: “This is the last day of our acquaintance / I will meet you later in somebody’s office / I’ll talk but you won’t listen to me / I know what your answer will be / You don’t love me anymore.” Such an intimate part of my life is going to end with a perfunctory email to TTC headquarters, making it all even sadder.

Thinking of Metropass subscription as abusive isn’t meant to mock more serious physically and emotionally violent relationships, but the pattern is similar. The TTC controls a big part of our lives, and when it doesn’t work like it should, our lives are affected. I’ve found I automatically apologized for the TTC’s faults, and defended it, even when the inner rage hadn’t completely vanished. I’m aware and sympathetic of federal and provincial funding issues that have strangled the commission, but, then, there I am on the corner having paid for a ride that hasn’t come, feeling like a sucker. By buying a Metropass, I’m enabling this kind of activity, a passive acquiescence to too-often crummy service. If I walk, I’m leaving money at the corner. If I wait too long and have to take a cab, I’m resentful now of the cab money I’ve paid out. I didn’t notice this when I lived on a subway line, but now that I rely on a streetcar, it happens too much.

[. . .]

It was a fine romance in the beginning, as most relationships are. The Metropass replaced the car I left behind when I moved here. I bought the first few at the booth but soon had it delivered every month. The money is withdrawn automatically and it would arrive in a brown, unmarked envelope, like illicit transit pornography. (I regret that as I quit the Metropass, their design is just starting to get interesting as the TTC is finally incorporating some of its iconic images onto the card.)

The Metropass was liberating because I stopped thinking about how I was going to get someplace. I had this thing that allowed me to get on and off the system at will. Two stops or across the city, it didn’t matter, the city’s electric nervous system could be ridden at will. I’d shame friends into getting one too, suggesting it was a terrible drag if one was without a Metropass as we rolled through the city, because they didn’t have the same freedom as the those of us who did, or worse, they insisted on cabs. Cabs aren’t fun because they can’t compete with the way the TTC functions as Toronto’s living room, and I’ll miss that the most: overhearing and bumping into the rest of the city.