While some parts of West Queen West in Toronto teem with bars, restaurants and boutiques, the corporate sidewalk offerings feel 'clinical.'GOOGLE STREET VIEW
John Zada is a Toronto-based writer and author. His newest book is The Patchwork Cloak of Kamal Bey: An East-West Memoir.
Not long ago, a cousin from the United States visited Toronto, where I live, on business. He was giving a talk at a conference and was billeted in a boutique hotel in the trendy West Queen West neighbourhood, home to a popular strip of two- and three-storey commercial-residential buildings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some of them of Victorian heritage designation. As many Torontonians know, that section of the Queen Street drag, teeming with bars, restaurants, clothing boutiques, art galleries, and cafés, often throngs with vibrant sidewalk traffic and community events.
I met my cousin at his hotel the afternoon he arrived. When we stepped onto the street to find a place to have a drink, my cousin, who had been to Toronto before and loves its older architecture, soon stopped in his tracks and looked back and forth at both sides of Queen Street with an expression revealing slight dismay. When I asked him what was wrong, he said he couldn’t help but notice how “clinical” the other side of the street looked by comparison to where we were standing. It was true: the south side of Queen Street running east from Dufferin Street, an area of new condo buildings, resembled a spanking clean and utilitarian block in the car-centric suburbs, with offerings that included a Tim Hortons, a bank branch, a wellness centre, a spa, a pharmacy, and an animal hospital. Though all legitimate storefronts, that more corporate clustering of sidewalk offerings made that side of the street look and feel uninviting by comparison.
Since then, I’ve noticed the same unsettling trend, both in my own downtown neighbourhood of Corktown (known as “Old Toronto”), and in others across the city: Real estate developers have been knocking down scores of older row buildings for their condo and rental apartments, only to replace the previous brick-and-mortar indie businesses at ground level with large chain and franchise companies. In several places across the city you can see whole blocks – often in stark contrast to the more varied and socially interactive shops in the older buildings nearby – occupied by new and shiny dentist offices, medical clinics, bank branches, pet stores, cannabis shops, various beauty salons, and the usual chain convenience-store and fast-food suspects: Circle K, Tim Hortons and A&W. A new 24-hour convenience-store chain called Aisle 24 Market, which employs no humans – a kind of walk-in vending machine accessible by downloading their app – is starting to pop up across the city.
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This gentrification-like process involves the adoption of a homogenized glossy-building aesthetic paired with more profitable corporate storefronts (of sometimes enormous square footage) that can pay premium rents. The more organic mishmash of smaller independent retailers, and the local architectural styles that make Toronto’s neighbourhoods eclectic and vibrant, are starting to be negated, block by block. Where older buildings remain, some indie stores have been folding, or moving, due to financial pressures since the pandemic. Other cities are experiencing the same trend to various degrees. I’ve witnessed the same conglomerating of corporate storefronts appearing in parts of Vancouver and Ottawa. Much farther afield, older districts in Istanbul and Shanghai have notably undergone similar redevelopment makeovers, altering the uniqueness and community feel of those localities.
The subtle but very real sensation of streetscape alienation that this “big box effect” of storefront corporate clustering can have is already being felt in my neighbourhood in Toronto.
It is also raising the spectre among my neighbours that this development style – a kind of suburbanization of the inner core – will one day erase much of the character and community feel from our streets. The charms and social flourishing of all cities derive from the unique local character of their neighbourhoods and the human interactions they engender.
Given the slowdown in the condo market in Toronto, with many building projects stalled or folding, all of this may seem less pressing at the moment. But construction will pick up again, and perhaps sooner than expected, given the continued need for housing. Older buildings and their smaller commercial spaces will continue to be cannibalized, when possible, to make way for larger structures and their formulaic new gloss. How this bodes for our cities going forward remains to be seen, but the stakes are high. In an age where our absorption in the digital realm is increasingly atomizing and alienating us, exacerbating the loneliness epidemic, we will desperately need aesthetically pleasing and welcoming streets to walk, browse, shop, socialize and connect with other humans. These new corporatized streetfronts provide us with an experience that is diametrically opposed. After a generation or two of further development along this model, our quality of life – and humanity – stands to be further diminished.
Some urban commercial areas, like Toronto’s College Street, still have historic storefronts.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
This trend has captured my attention partly because I was fortunate enough to be exposed to the kind of thriving community synergy that a healthy and organic commercial streetscape can facilitate. Although I grew up in the suburbs, my father used to own a tiny independent drug store for 30 years in the Corso Italia neighbourhood on St. Clair Avenue West in Toronto – one of two historical Italian enclaves in the city. That main street, intersected by residential roads with older homes, was and continues to be lined by a stretch of older two- and sometimes three-storey commercial-residential buildings containing independent shops and businesses that are beginning to vanish elsewhere in the city.
As a youth, I spent much time there on weekends, expected, as is sometimes the case with a family business, to help out and provide company. Though I dreaded losing some of my Saturdays to work, there was the constant novelty of exposure to an urban neighbourhood worthy of a backdrop in fiction. Corso Italia’s street life and deeply interwoven matrix of human relationships were of the type described by Naguib Mahfouz in his novel Midaq Alley or Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Neighbourhood. It was a mind-boggling retail-residential ecosystem of social mixing, in which the storeowners, even the far-flung ones, often knew each other because they tended to buy from one another.
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All in a few blocks were a dizzying assortment of small businesses. In addition to my dad’s pharmacy, there was a record store, a bookstore, a bakery, cafés, a pasta eatery, a pizza joint, a shoe store, a few grocery stores, a wedding-dress maker, a soccer-themed tavern, doctors’ offices and a florist. Those business owners and their employees, more often than not, tended to live and be vested in the neighbourhood.
The area’s residents, some of them eccentric characters with colourful nicknames, graced my dad’s drugstore. They included a few small-time mobsters; the elderly Brit from Birmingham who lived above my dad’s store, wore a bowler hat and spoke in a Brummie accent none of us could understand; and an eccentric physician across the street who claimed to cure all illnesses with a special dark rye that contained a certain quotient of life-giving solar rays. Less ostentatious folk (that also included scores of free-range kids buying candy), when not coming in to purchase from the pharmacy, would just drop in to chat, or come bearing gifts of homemade Italian sausages, baccala, tomato sauce, panettone and outsize garden vegetables of prize-winning calibre.
St. Clair Avenue West in June, 2007. Corso Italia’s original architecture, and community feel, still remain today.Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail
Conversely, when business was slow and the weather amenable, my dad would just step out onto the sidewalk, beside the streetcar stop at Lansdowne, and would be guaranteed endless conversation. Local connections were so easily and sometimes serendipitously forged that, when I was older and working as a documentary filmmaker for television, I found a much-needed producer for a film project in someone who lived around the corner from the drug store and often visited my dad for a chat.
Admittedly, this social neighbourhood dynamic reigned during a period of heightened cultural cohesion in the community and in the headier days before smartphones existed to whisk us away to anyplace other than where we physically stand in the moment. But Corso Italia’s original main street architecture, and something of that previous community feel, still remain today. The neighbourhood demonstrates something of the civic recipe and social by-product that the late American author Jane Jacobs argued for in her seminal 1961 work on architecture and urban life, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Ms. Jacobs, who later left the U.S. because of the Vietnam War and moved to Toronto, philosophized in favour of streetscapes that embodied a free-flowing anarchy of smaller and more human parts – a mingling of an exuberant “diversity of uses and users” that resembles a kind of dance. The street, sidewalk, and storefronts played a fundamental role in the vibrancy of the urban community, she insisted. Some older buildings, Ms. Jacobs showed, were crucial to civic health as they provided space where smaller new businesses – like those that are quickly disappearing now because of untenable rents in newer projects – can more viably get off the ground. She made the case that Corbusian constructs, of the size and scale seen in some of our larger modern condo projects, tend to isolate residents and create a kind of vacuity that robs neighbourhoods of a certain “grace and delight.”
I’m told privately by people who work in real estate development and related sectors that the emergence of whole blocks of corporatized storefronts in Toronto is a complicated issue to address. On one basic and fundamental level, the internet has made it easier and cheaper for smaller businesses to forego the overhead costs of running a physical storefront and to operate as e-commerce businesses, which creates a dearth of small renters. Moreover, decisions around which businesses are permitted at street level in a new building are often tied to the legal framework of that project; in some cases, where it’s allowed by the city, condo corporations decide against certain businesses or any public-private interface, eliminating, in some cases, any retail on the ground floors.
Meanwhile, on a business level, return on investment, profitability and viability for developers and owners drive decision-making in new projects. I’m told that the main players – the real estate developers, the banks, leasing brokerages and property-management companies – all know one another and work together to bring in high-end renters with relative ease. A Subway or Tim Hortons is infinitely more preferable over a small indie business, like an ice cream parlour or a thrift store, which are also de facto community gathering places. Landlords tend to favour corporate and professional tenants as they can pay higher rents, and are perceived as more stable and reliable. The gargantuan retail spaces that new buildings are creating cater specifically to these renters with deeper pockets. All of this is encouraged by the fact that civic planning and what is called “development programming” in the parlance of the planning and development sector doesn’t much prioritize human-societal implications of new projects.
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Obviously, flux is fundamental to the nature of life and cultures; change in architectural styles is inevitable and part of the lifecycle of cities and societies. We can’t preserve all streets in amber or turn the clock back completely to what was. But perhaps some deft changes in the process that governs urban development and redevelopment may ease, or steer us clear, from aspects of a more dystopian urban future.
Stakeholders in this process should better take into account the lifestyle ramifications of commercial and retail development on our streets. The encouragement of business diversity, inclusive of smaller independents, should take up a larger part of the conversation. City planners, developers and condo corporations should try to work more in tandem, each in their own way, to help encourage and create spaces at ground level that are more community-friendly and more socially interactive.
Some areas of Toronto are being rebuilt with bigger storefronts meant to accommodate large retailers or restaurants.The Globe and Mail
One approach could be to create a commercial counterpart of what is called “inclusionary zoning,” the process by which a certain number of units are set aside for affordable housing. A commercial version can be applied to smaller grassroots and upstart businesses that add to community feel, connectedness and local authenticity. Further reducing property taxes for small businesses (which, in Toronto, is 15 per cent less than the commercial rate), would be another.
City councils can also take the bolder move of widening the criteria of what older buildings could qualify for protection, helping to preserve more of Toronto’s two-storey commercial-residential architecture containing those smaller storefronts. This would prevent or reduce the wholesale demolition of entire city blocks and their replacement with structures resembling futurist-brutalist monoliths, such as one in my own neighbourhood that resembles The Borg cube, a starship used by an alien collective in the newer Star Trek series.
A few Toronto projects, such as Westbank’s Mirvish Village and The Daniels Corporation’s redevelopment at Regent Park, are trying to make room for smaller businesses. Further inspiration can be gleaned from projects in London, where adaptive approaches of this sort are becoming more de rigueur. Redevelopment projects at King’s Cross and Battersea Power Station are combining retail, residential, office and leisure spaces, aiming to create vibrant, experience-driven hubs rather than just rows of big-box and franchise retailers. “There’s been a conscious effort, especially post-pandemic, to revitalize secondary high streets and encourage local, independent retail through pop-ups, flexible leases, and adaptive reuse of space,” says Dan Labbad, CEO of The Crown Estate, a British property company that manages the British Royal family’s holdings. “London’s planning approach increasingly emphasizes mixed-use, flexible and experiential retail.”
Ultimately, all stakeholders need to care about maintaining community and social-friendly neighbourhoods, while also feeling like they have skin in the game, even after they’ve gone, knowing that what they are doing will have an impact on a city’s quality of life for their children and grandchildren. How we reshape our cities determines what a city and society will be, and chiefly how we relate to and interact with one another – and what it means to be human.