In a clear case of hero worship gone haywire, hundreds of people are presently camped out on sidewalks surrounding MuchMusic’s headquarters at Queen and John streets. The line begins on the southeast corner and runs south to Richmond, then wraps around the building and snakes all the way to St. Patrick Street, where I just talked to two girls who told me they are in 836th and 837th place. Yes, it’s that time of year again: the MuchMusic Video Awards air live from the station’s parking lot on June 20, and ...

In Toronto's new Walking Strategy, adopted as official policy by city council just last year, one of the key strategy actions (5.6) under the mandate of "Creating spaces and places for people" is: Build public squares and plazas at key intersections in Toronto through the development review process, public-private partnerships and by converting under-utilized sections of roadways and public spaces. [emphasis mine] Unfortunately, the City is now poised to do the opposite -- to let one of the few squares we do have at a major intersection be mostly built over. This week, City Council will consider a plan to build over two-thirds of the square at the north-west corner of Yonge and Eglinton. The new building would be a three-storey shopping area with some interior open space on the ground floor and a terrace on the roof (also included in the proposal is adding several storeys to the existing buildings). There has been a lot of opposition from the local community, and there was a small protest at the square yesterday. But the proposal has the support of the local councillor, Karen Stintz, and has already been approved by city staff and by North York Community Council, so it is likely to go through. It's true that this square is, currently, not a particularly good public space. It's also not a bad idea to create some interior space on the west side of this square that would be available and appealing to the public during all seasons. The problem is that under the current plan, the majority of the open space would be lost and the part that is left will be little more than an extended sidewalk. Yonge and Eglinton is one of Toronto's key intersections -- it's even identified as a "centre" in the City's Official Plan (and Spacing featured it on the cover of our "Intersections" issue). It deserves better. What's needed is to use this opportunity to transform the square, to renovate it into a focal point that reinforces the intersection's role as the centre of midtown Toronto. And doing so effectively would require that a lot more of the current open space be kept.

First of all, please stop saying "very unique." There are no varying degrees of uniqueness; something is either one of a kind or it isn't.  This is a pet peeve of mine, but not something I usually bring up.  After hearing speaker after speaker utter this phrase at Thursday morning's One Bloor press conference, however, I thought it was worth mentioning. On the other hand, it means that the project's developers, architects, etc. appreciate the intense specialness of the Yonge and Bloor intersection where they will be building a 65-storey condo. "This is the most important corner in the GTA, and possibly in all of Canada," said Baker Real Estate president Barbara Lawlor. While one would expect a realtor to say that about any given location anywhere, in this case the hyperbole may very well be true.  Which is why the project is so disappointing. Certainly, it's pretty decent as far as condos go, and in a whole other league than the edifices on the other three corners.  But that doesn't mean that this is what Yonge and Bloor needs or deserves.

Brougham, a small village at the corner of Highway 7 and Brock Road in Pickering, doesn't quite make the usual criteria for a "lost village" - urban sprawl is still far from overtaking the historic buildings, and the village looks much like it did 20 or 50 years ago. But it is a lost village - or even a bona fide ghost town - in the making, and has been since March 2, 1972. On that date, the Government of Canada selected northern Pickering Township - along with sections of Uxbridge, Markham and Whitchurch Townships - as the site of a new Mirabel-sized international airport that would eventually replace Malton Airport (now Pearson) as Toronto's primary airport. Brougham - in its entirety - was now the southeast corner of this 18,000 acre (72 square kilometre) land mass that then had to be expropriated. I have touched on the subject of the Pickering Lands before here on Spacing Toronto. Before the federal announcement, Brougham was a small, yet growing, community, with a school, several churches, businesses and a community hall.  Commercial House, pictured above, is one of only a few roadside taverns  left in the GTA. Today, Brougham is largely by-passed by the extension of Highway 407, which skirts the southern boundary of the airport lands. When the brakes went on in 1975, Brougham and the huge parcel of Class I farmland to its north and west was frozen in time, owned by the Government of Canada and rented out to farmers and residents (many of which were the former land owners). As only minimal repairs were taken on by the landlord in anticipation of future construction, many houses - of which quite a number appear to be exurban ranch houses built in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s - were simply vacated and boarded up. Approximately one-quarter to one-third of all houses in Brougham are now vacant.

Intersections are inherently a competition for space and time. In many places in the world, intersections are still governed largely by the assertiveness of the participants. Crossing the street in many parts of Italy drivers will not stop unless you walk out onto the street. In orderly Toronto, the nature of intersections has been heavily institutionalized and regulated; we expressly decide which parties will have the priority at intersections in the city based on the importance we place on different modes of transportation. While it is easy to argue that our society gives this priority to cars, Toronto is taking steps, albeit small ones, to shift its priorities and institutionalize intersections where transit and pedestrians are the primary focus. Toronto began gradually implementing signal priority for streetcars along Queen Street in the mid 1980s and since then has expanded the program to 332 intersections across the city. You will likely experienced — possibly unknowingly — a handful of signal priority intersections if you travel on the Queen, King, College, St Clair, Dundas, Gerrard, Bathurst, and Spadina streetcars or Dufferin, Jane and Finch West buses. The city has the goal of implementing priority along one route every year and is currently working on Finch East. Bruce Zvaniga, at Transportation Services filled Spacing in on some of the details of how the signals work for transit vehicles. As a streetcar (or equipped bus) approaches an intersection it is picked up as part of the control system's loop. Upon detecting the transit vehicle, the system will hold its right of way for two second intervals, until the vehicle has passed. This can last a maximum of 30 seconds. If the vehicle is facing a red light the system can initiate the pedestrian countdown and shorten the opposing green up to 15 seconds.

23 Jason Road, Thistletown's first house, built around 1802 Thistletown, perhaps Toronto's best-hidden historic neighbourhood, is located at the intersection of Albion Road and Islington Avenue. The village, which was never incorporated, was established in the 1840s, servicing the important Albion Road. The settlement got its name from a prominent local family. Albion Road was surveyed as early as 1799, predating the grid-based concession farm plot and road system, as an extension of Weston Road. Albion passed through other lost villages such as Clairville (at Steeles) to Albion Township (later amalgamated into the Town of Caledon). The road's diagonal path made the route ideal for farmers to bring their produce and livestock to market in the larger town of Weston, or all the way into Toronto, particularly before the railways were built. At its height, Thistletown had a population of several hundred, a community hall, an inn and tavern, and several shops at the corner of Albion and Islington.

The brutalist Chelmsford Apartment towers loom over an old village house. This is the first in a series I plan to do over the next little while on the hidden villages and hamlets that have been engulfed by urban sprawl in the Greater Toronto Area. This is going back to the beginning for me, as one of my first posts on Spacing Toronto was on the lost village of Ebenezer, now part of  Brampton's sprawl. I chose Agincourt to launch this occasional series for two reasons:  this is one area in which many, if not most, Spacing readers should have some familiarity with; and it is here that Transit City has its humble "groundbreaking" - namely the grade separation of the CN Uxbridge Subdivision and Sheppard Avenue East. Unlike lesser known villages around like O'Sullivan's Corners (Sheppard and Victoria Park), or Hough's Corners (Eglinton and Birchmount), Agincourt as a geographical place name lives on, in the form of a GO Transit train stop; a mall at Kennedy and Sheppard, local schools, amongst other things. Indeed, today, many Torontonians would describe Agincourt's boundaries as from the 401 to the south, Steeles to the north, Victoria Park to the west and McCowan or Markham Roads to the east (the City of Toronto's neighbourhood definition for Agincourt isn't clear either, splitting "Agincourt" into two neighbourhoods). 125 years ago, Agincourt was a bustling, yet unincorporated, rural village at the corner of what is today the intersection of Midland and Sheppard Avenues, assisted by the construction of the pioneering Toronto and Nipissing Railway in 1871 (which  became part of the Midland Railway of Canada empire, the origin of the name Midland Avenue) and the Ontario and Quebec Railway, later the CP mainline to Montreal. Knox United Church and cemetery, Agincourt. An old church and cemetery will often mark the location of a former village. The suburban creep of Toronto didn't catch up to Agincourt until the early 1960s, after the construction of Highway 401 and the wholesale bungalowization of Scarborough Township after the Second World War by  Reeve Oliver Crockford. The train has stopped continuously in Agincourt, first hosting passenger trains to Coboconk and Lindsay, later CN, then VIA rail diesel coach commuter trains to Markham and Stouffville. GO Transit took over the service in 1982. Today, Agincourt village still maintains much of its original building stock, though urbanization has blurred the old boundaries. This has had the effect so that Agincourt is a village lost in plain sight. Several churches from the village era remain in use today, though there have been some adaptations to the area's changing demographics, including Mandarin and Cantonese language services. The local school, built in 1912, still welcomes students, and the old Victorian and Edwardian housing stock, while standing out from the ranch houses, high rises and townhouse complexes that surround the area, are plentiful on several local streets as well as Midland Avenue and even Sheppard.

photos by Sam Javanrouh -- also view series on Spacing's Flickr account In a rainy debut Friday morning, Toronto's newest pedestrian scramble came online at 10am at the corner of Yonge and Bloor. The revamped intersection has two differences from the city's first scramble installation at Yonge and Dundas: right turns are allowed on green lights, which may gum things up slightly at first, but there are also no streetcars to contend with. City staff are expecting the standard confusion and grumbling to accompany the ...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JJ7vv3QCfs[/youtube] On my way home after work last Saturday night, I walked by the corner of Brunswick and Bloor where a three-man rock combo was playing out of a U-Haul parked in front of By The Way Cafe. Named the Dildoniks, they'd outfitted their U-Haul with flood lights, a drum kit and amps running through their rented truck's battery with a banner on both sides announcing their band's name. They drew a pretty substantial crowd, with the audience spilling off the sidewalk and onto the road (without, however, blocking traffic on either Brunswick or Bloor). A relatively new band, Dildoniks member Kire Paputts told me in an email that part of what led them to do the half-hour show in a U-Haul was that it would be entirely "on our terms," as Kire put it. Now obviously the idea of an impromptu concert amplified from inside a rented truck at eleven on a Saturday night provokes a lot of questions. Add this to the fact that they played at the Brunswick/Bloor intersection, the case in point of recent debates both locally and in the press on how the neighbourhood is changing. With the closing of Dooney's Cafe and Mel's Montreal Delicatessen, and the two freak shootings that have taken place in the last two summers, many have been quick to conclude that the Annex is in a steep decline, where beligerant and occasionally violent partiers are setting the terms rather than long-time residents and middle-aged community members. There's no denying that with Mel's and Dooney's Cafe gone, the old character of the Annex has suffered a significant blow. Yet rather than seeing their departure as the canary in the coalmine, much still remains of the old Annex, but more importantly, much has changed and will continue to change as the neighbourhood evolves with the times and the people who inhabit its spaces. Take the bookstores, for example. On Bloor St. between Spadina and Bathurst plus one block south on either side, there are a total of eight book stores currently open (not to mention the man often seen selling used books on the sidewalk at Madison or Brunswick), making the Annex still the most concentrated hub of independent booksellers in the city. Book City and the BMV are flanked by three used book stores who've been open since who knows when; Ten Editions Bookstore on Spadina, Seekers Books at Borden St., and Willow Books over at Bathurst. As more alternative literature goes, there's A Different Booklist also on Bathurst, plus the Labyrinth Comic Book store across from the BMV. With at least five more on nearby Harbord St, for booklovers, the Annex is alive and well. The Annex Billiards Club, Sonic Boom and Lee's Palace also remain as active as ever. Meanwhile, despite declining attendance, the Bloor Cinema still puts on a wide variety of films, for better or for worse. As food goes, George's BBQ and Country Style still remain to represent the old guard, while tasty new places like One Love Vegetarian on Bathurst and Burrito Banditos on Walmer definitely inject some well-needed  diversity into the neighbourhood's sushi-saturated array of restuarants.

At Richmond when the lights change. Street Scene will appear each week showcasing the illustrations of local artist Jerry Waese.