Curtain

GTA Living in a clockwork ghost town

Filed Under Kitchen Curtain | Posted on April 20, 2008

At 4 p.m. on an April work day, Bay Street at King Street is cool and a study in contrasts. Bright sun warms the granite steps of the TD Canada Trust tower. The sidewalk across the street lies in deep shade.Office workers push through the glass doors of the financial towers that define Toronto’s skyline, spilling out onto the sidewalk. Smokers light up, Blackberries and cell phones are urgently consulted as the crowd surges south towards Union Station. When the clock at old city hall strikes 5 p.m., a new wave crests, forcing pedestrians heading north to step into the street to avoid being stopped in their tracks.A hundred and four thousand people are going home, to suburban backyards and barbecues, to Riverdale and Rosedale, to the Beach, to neighbourhoods where they know the butcher, the baker, the bookseller. Shops close up on their heels, deserting Canada’s most densely-populated workplace. Theatre-goers and concert-lovers clog King Street before curtain call. More often the traffic lights blink at empty intersections, at elegant, empty towers.Defined by glass and steel, by Yonge and Simcoe, Queen and Front streets, the area includes the Sheraton Centre, but not the Eaton Centre, a view of Roy Thomson Hall, but not Roy Thomson Hall, a view of Union Station, but not Union Station, the Hockey Hall of Fame, but not Shopsy’s.The 2006 census reported that the number of single family homes was zero. Thousands of people spend much of their lives here, but few call it home 548 in 2006.They live mostly in two condominium towers, a curved, red-marble-front condo, 28 storeys, on University Avenue at Wellington Street, and another condo building facing Roy Thomson Hall, rising high behind St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church on King Street. There are another 50 residential units at 1 King Street West.Around noon on a Wednesday in April, Michael Casely-Hayford pauses in the lobby of 33 University Ave. with his infant daughter Cuba in a buggy. They are rushing to make a medical appointment. Casely-Hayford understands why people who work in the district don’t understand why he loves living in it. I had that argument with many of my friends in Canada, says Casely-Hayford, who lived in London for 20 years and travels often to New York City. I tell them it’s all relative, isn’t it? If you stand and watch the people going home at the end of the day on their way down most main arteries to Union Station, suddenly there’s this massive crowd of people and they spill out and they cascade down these streets on their way to their Go Trains that is what New York is like all the time on a normal day. That’s what Oxford Street is like pretty much every day.It’s almost comically convenient, and more of a neighbourhood than the workers who flee at 5 p.m. believe.When Kevin Chan, 30, who works at HSBC on Wellington Street realizes he’s forgotten his wallet, he runs across the street to his condo at 33 University to grab it. His wife works downtown; they both walk to work. There’s a Rabba down the street and a Longo’s in BCE Place, or they take the car for groceries at Loblaws on Queen’s Quay. For a night out, they walk over to one of the restaurants on King or Queen. It’s good in terms of convenience, but sometime you don’t leave work, says Chan.Bob Coffey, 73, was vice-chairman of KPMG, working in Commerce Court when he bought his condo in the building on Simcoe in 1990. He knows the restaurateurs on King Street. He knows his neighbours. When a $15,000 statue of a little boy outside the building was stolen a few years ago, they joked that they should try to get the boy’s face on a milk carton. You do have a sense of community, says Coffey. Casely-Hayford is a strategic communications consultant. No surprise there. Among the 548 people who live in the area, 330 have a university certificate, diploma or degree, 120 of them in business management and public administration, 90 in social and behavioural science and law, 55 in architecture, engineering and related technologies. (Because of the sample size, Statistics Canada has rounded the smaller numbers up or down.)Few have children. Statistics Canada recorded 30 people aged 19 and under in the district in 2006, and only 10 under the age of four.Casely-Hayford likes the glass-and-steel urban landscape, the fact that it’s quiet at night and on weekends. He was surprised to discover the humanity. He’s struck up friendships with several residents in his building. He knows the staff at the coffee shops and stores in the P.A.T.H., the downtown’s underground city. When Cuba was born three months ago, staff at one of the food-court restaurants where Casely-Hayford often stops for grilled pork chops presented the family with a gift a little winter jacket to keep Cuba snug.It’s not some kind of faceless functional environment. It may appear so on the surface, but there’s more to it than that, says Casely-Hayford.He buys sandwiches at the Petite Marche, a tiny restaurant a few steps from the main entrance to his building.When I first went there, the Petite Marche was just some place you could get a sandwich. After a while it became a real place where you see the same people in the mornings, getting their coffee and reading their newspapers and passing the time of day. It’s just as human and sensitive as anywhere else. It’s an entire neighbourhood.At noon on a weekday, the tiny Petite Marche Soul Food Inc. bustles, with owner Rosemary Gallagher dispensing freshly-made, home-cooked meatloaf specials for $6.95 and free advice on the benefits of dandelion salad for the liver.A lot of the people who come in, they’re regulars. I know who they are. They want a home-cooked meal, something healthy, not frozen. They need they’re almost craving that personal touch, says Gallagher.She shuts down at 5 p.m., but at 3 p.m., the exodus has already begun.People are eager to go home. No one’s stopping.Within 10 years that might well change. By then Al Rezoski, senior planner for the downtown section of Toronto, expects that as many as 10,000 more people will be living in the area around Union Station. Three new hotel-and-condo towers are under construction in the district: The Ritz-Carlton on Simcoe Street, the Shangri-La on University Avenue and the Trump Tower at Bay and Adelaide Streets. What we’re anticipating is a huge transition to a large amount of residential development. Certainly we’re going to be more of a vertical village in our financial district, says Rezoski.At 8 on an April night, Toronto’s grand canyon of gridlock is still. The moon glows hard and bright over the financial towers, the sky is a deep, dark blue. At Bay and King streets, a few pieces of crumpled paper float on a breeze. It is a strangely heart-warming sight.

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