By John Bentley Mays Globe and Mail Print Edition 17/03/06
What's happening on Queen Street West between Trinity-Bellwoods Park and Parkdale is one of the most interesting stories to come out of Toronto's current upsurge of people wanting to live downtown.
Until recently a dilapidated industrial neighbourhood with few prospects and no profile in the city at large, this stretch of Queen has become a vivid gallery district and home to a sizable population of designers and artists.
A couple of flop houses have been taken over by ambitious entrepreneurs and renovated into the Drake and Gladstone hotels -- watering holes for chic urban crowds and meeting places for the local creative tribe. And like the hotels, which are community centres as well as places to sleep, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art is both an exciting art showcase and a gathering spot for the people who make smart urban culture click.
Queen Street is, after Yonge Street, Toronto's most richly historic thoroughfare, and has a character that deserves mindful preservation: low-rise, mixed residential and commercial, rarely deluxe, usually rough and ready, and well rubbed-down by two centuries of inhabitation and hard use.
[I am always interested in newspaper stories our little district in the queer west end of the city, as redevelopment effects all of us...Don_Q]
FULL GLOBE AND MAIL STORY
What's happening on Queen Street West between Trinity-Bellwoods Park and Parkdale is one of the most interesting stories to come out of Toronto's current upsurge of people wanting to live downtown.
Until recently a dilapidated industrial neighbourhood with few prospects and no profile in the city at large, this stretch of Queen has become a vivid gallery district and home to a sizable population of designers and artists.
A couple of flop houses have been taken over by ambitious entrepreneurs and renovated into the Drake and Gladstone hotels -- watering holes for chic urban crowds and meeting places for the local creative tribe. And like the hotels, which are community centres as well as places to sleep, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art is both an exciting art showcase and a gathering spot for the people who make smart urban culture click.
Queen Street is, after Yonge Street, Toronto's most richly historic thoroughfare, and has a character that deserves mindful preservation: low-rise, mixed residential and commercial, rarely deluxe, usually rough and ready, and well rubbed-down by two centuries of inhabitation and hard use.
[I am always interested in newspaper stories our little district in the queer west end of the city, as redevelopment effects all of us...Don_Q]
FULL GLOBE AND MAIL STORY
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