"Which many would say has a certain charm and would be a shame to lose"

[kathleen_dailey]

Modest, graceful apartment buildings--and their accompanying trees and gardens--are steadily disappearing from my neighbourhood so that towers can be built. Today I saw a bumped thread on the Urban Toronto website outlining the development proposal that threatens one of my favourite residential buildings. (Scroll down to the second photo, which is captioned "while parcel 3 is this," to see it.)

Every time I walk past that building, I imagine the people who've lived there and what the neighbourhood was like in the past. The area east of Jarvis, west of Sherbourne, and south of Bloor is, for the moment, a leafy enclave of SFH, semis, and small apartment buildings--a compact version of an east-end Annex, in a way. If you live in Toronto, take a walk (when the weather permits) in the area around Casey House--Huntley, Earl, Linden, Isabella--and enjoy the experience while you can.

Oh, and one of the posters in the UT thread mentioned the trees on Earl and how good they smell in the spring. True!

Comments

[kathleen_dailey]

I also think we should get rid of forced "back to the office" and re-purpose the empty office buildings.

This would make so much sense. Developers whine about how difficult and expensive it is to do office-to-residential conversions as opposed to construction from scratch, but I'd like to see some actual figures that compared the two methods. (It isn't easy to find such data, in my experience, but then I'm not a professional.)

[the_siobhan]

I wouldn't be surprised if it is more expensive. But you know, if they make one million dollars on a project instead of two, I'm ok with that.