Cross Street = Brock and Frankish
1999
2009
Part of a row that was once all stores, this one was the last to go.
Cross Street = Queen and Beverley
1983
1988
1998
2009
The ground floor may change, but remarkably, the blind in the upper window stayed in the same exact state for twenty years, until HMV carved out both structures for their store. Unpainted became very painted, but a vestige of the cigarette days remained with the Player’s logo, and vestiges of another ending era remain in a store that still sells CDs.
Cross Street = De Grassi & Queen E.
1988
1997
Another street, another Gothic cottage. More care has been taken here as it’s on desirable De Grassi, the most famous street in Canada. An earlier paint job from a down-at-the-heels era has been sand-blasted down to the original polychromatic bricks. All over Toronto these bricks are our workmanlike building material, often yellow and red but sometimes with a little black creosote sprinkled into the mix. These bricks were most often made locally, at brick yards found across the city, including the most prominent, the Don Valley Brick Works. A chain-link fence, the scourge of the urban landscape has been removed and a garden planted. Kinder, gentler, this worker’s cottage has been faithfully restored. Victoria would be proud.
Cross Street = Adelaide and Duncan
1983
2001
2010
A rare Gothic cottage survivor in Clubland. Residential homes in this loud part of town continue to exist even as 50,000 or more partiers descend on the area every Friday and Saturday night, though generally, as here, these homes were converted to commercial use.
Cross Street: Broadview and Eastern
1983
2010
Like an infectious cold, decay can spread. Things fall apart and the centre does not hold.
Cross Street = Queen and Carlaw
1999
2003
The end of Toronto’s unanimous monarchism, as Queen becomes the more republican ‘My’ variety. Nestlé got into the sign-sponsoring game after cigarette advertising was banned. In the bottom photo are tags by Skam, Horus and others.
