The Beaches Boardwalk
Dear Readers, it was the last sunny day of our holiday today, at least according to the weather forecast, so we headed down to The Beaches for our annual trot along the boardwalk. We always get the 501 streetcar to Woodbine Avenue and then walk down, to stroll beside the glittering lake and admire the many, many dogs taking their owners for a walk. But on the way down, we spotted this.
The old clapperboard houses are going to be torn down and replaced by a somewhat generic apartment complex. I suppose we should be glad that it’s only six storeys. Not everyone is happy though, clearly.
The old houses have balconies and stoops and all kinds of rather lovely details, but by the look of it they would have needed a lot of repair work. And people do need places to live.
This is what the new development would look like.
Image fromhttps://urbantoronto.ca/news/2022/07/four-storey-residential-building-proposed-beach.48615
And to digress (regular readers will not be surprised at me going off at a tangent), we always stay in the Cambridge Suites Hotel when we come to Toronto. It’s not the plushest place in town, but the rooms are divided into a sitting area, work/dining area, bedroom and bathroom, and it’s in a great position for transport north to see my mother-in-law. However, plans have gone in to tear it down and replace the current 21 storey building with 71 storeys.
At the moment the plan has been knocked back (thank you Toronto urban planners) so maybe we’ll get a few more years here. Some of the staff have been here since we first started coming in about 2004, and as there is no hotel space planned in the new building they would all lose their jobs. Some condominium developers around here have gone bust, so hopefully that will slow things up as well. It’s not as if local people can afford to live in these flats, the prices are astromical.
Anyhow! Back to The Beaches. I want to check out that the sparrows are still nesting in the light fixtures of the Olympic Swimming Pool (a brutalist concrete construction) and indeed they are. There are lots of sparrows in Toronto, most of them nesting in the eaves of elderly buildings. Where will they go when everything is shiny steel and glass?
We stop to admire the lifeguard’s hut…
And a container ship way way in the distance..
And then closer to home there’s this rather fine street art – some Gouldian finches if I’m not mistaken…
But the Canadian birds are not to be outdone, with a fine red cardinal singing his head off in a bush.
So, I like The Beaches – they feel like a seaside town even though they aren’t, and there’s a proper high street with independent restaurants and shops. Well worth jumping on the 501 street car and heading east if you’re in town.
The very thought of such a high-rise building gives me the shivers!