Tourism : Development News

"Harbord Village is always like this. You ask them to do something, and they turn it into a piece of genius."

Councillor Adam Vaughan is talking about the lane-naming that's been going on in and around Harbord over the past several weeks. Naming laneways around town has become a priority for the city in the last couple of years, as emergency services makes it clear that it can help them locate people and situations more precisely, and communities have used the opportunity to celebrate themselves.

Harbord Village has used its namings as an impetus to remind its residents, and the city at large, of the neighbourhood's history, organizing events around each naming, and setting up a website to provide more details.

Recent laneways have been named in honour of Barbara Barrett, founder of the Toronto School of Art, the Greenberg family, several generations of whom have lived in the same Harbord Village house for about a century, writer and poet Barker Fairley, and Albert Jackson, Toronto’s first black postman, who lived in a house currently occupied by literary editor Patrick Crean. According to Vaughan, there were guests from as far away as Atlanta who came in for the naming ceremony back on July 6.

The lane that's received the most attention, though, is the Boys of Major Lane, named for six boys, all from Major Street, who fought in WWII. Only two, including the aforementioned Greenberg family’s son Joe, returned.

Vaughan says the next neighbourhood that will be announcing its line-up of lane-names will be Seaton Village. They’ve got a tough act to follow.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Adam Vaughan

Five hundred people showed up to the first town hall discussion of Porter Airlines' proposal to extend the runways at Billy Bishop Airport.

"There was a split," says acting director of the waterfront secretariat Fiona Chapman, "as there usually has been in the meetings, between residents of the waterfront, who are directly affected if you like, and the overall city."

According to Chapman, though there were more voices in favour of the extension, which would allow small jets to take off and land at the downtown airport, they were still outnumbered roughly two-to-one by those opposed.

The opposition was mostly comprised of people in the airport’s immediate vicinity. Their complaints included noise, pollution, traffic, and ecological disruption.

Those in favour spoke of the convenience of being able to board a plane for, say, Vancouver at the base of Bathurst Street, as well as the economic benefits to the city, including one comment from a cab driver explaining the good it would do for him, as well as the hospitality industry. The issue of "gateway experience" – people’s first impressions of Toronto coming straight into downtown instead of the tangle of highways and light industrial land they’re greeted with at Pearson – was also bruited.

Counter-arguments to one of the most popular concerns, noise, included the unprecedented silencing technology behind Porter's proposed jets, Bombardier’s CS100s, the so-called "whisper jets," and the fact that there would be a curfew on whatever noise there was, unlike, as one audience member pointed out, the streetcar that ran 24 hours outside his window.

There will be further public consultations before the Dec. 5 deadline for a final report to City Council.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Fiona Chapman

Vaughan’s got a new hotel.

The aspirationally urban suburb, which is getting its own subway stop soon and is constructing a new downtown core to welcome it, is now home to Canada’s first Element hotel, a contemporary take on an extended-stay hotel that up to now has been built in business centres such as Miami, Las Vegas, and Houston. Part of the Starwood group of hotels, Element features big windows, bikes to borrow and electric car charging stations.

The seven-storey, 152-suite hotel, built by the Zen Group of Companies that owns the business park on which it sits, has applied for LEED silver status.

Construction began in April, 2012 at the intersection of Highways 7 and 27 in southwest Vaughan. According to its general manager, John Caneco, it’s 10 minutes from the airport and 10 minutes to Vaughan’s new downtown.

According to Vaughan’s municipal website, the city has more than doubled in size over the past 20 years, growing in population from 111,359 in 1991 to 288,301 in 2011, and the city’s expecting that there will be 780,000 Vaughan-based jobs by 2031.

The hotel was designed by Burlington-based Chamberlain Architects, Constructors, Managers.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: John Caneco

When developer Paul Oberman died in a plane crash in 2011, Market Street, and the buildings that line its west side across from St. Lawrence Market, was much on his mind.
 
As early as 2010, Oberman told Yonge Street that restaurants would be going in on street level, and that the work, which was scheduled to begin the month after he died, would be finished by 2012.
 
The LCBO at Market and Front, which was also part of the project, has finally opened, but the delays have meant that Temperance Street has stolen Market’s thunder, becoming the first of at least three such street restorations that had been planned in the city’s core to be completed.
 
Oberman’s company, Woodcliffe, was a leader in what's known in the development industry as adaptive re-use, the thorough renovation and reconception of old structures and spaces. Before Market Street, Woodcliffe was responsible for the Toronto North Stations becoming the LCBO’s Summerhill flagship store. Woodcliffe also owned the Flatiron Building, which was sold after his death to Clayton Smith’s similarly focused Commercial Realty Group, which recently completed its work on Temperance Street, anchored by the Dineen Building.
 
The third such street rehabiulitation in the works is St. Nicholas, an alley parallel to Yonge running south fron St. Joseph that MOD Development’s Gary Switzer has promised to turn into a shop-lined street as part of his Five project.
 
The restaurants on Market Street – which Woodcliffe tried to get re-named after Oberman – didn’t open in time for the summer. And after three weeks of communications neither Woodcliffe nor their PR agency, Vicbar, was able to tell Yonge Street what the source of the delays – or the unattractive metal corrals that have appeared on the street, presumably to house small sidewalk seating areas – was.
 
Let’s hope it's nothing serious.
 
Writer: Bert Archer