The trouble with going out to get lunch in this town is that like as not, even if you can brave the cement trucks and construction hoardings and flagmen, you will find that your favourite restaurant has been knocked down.
This happened to me the other day when a friend, Jose, met me at the newspaper, which is at Bloor and Sherbourne streets. We walked west along Bloor, only to find that, at the corner of Jarvis, to make room for road crews, police had blocked the intersection and forced people to cross to the north side of the street in order to proceed west. After some time we found a piece of intact sidewalk and continued our journey. Then we walked south on Charles Street, towards Yonge Street.
When my daughter was a baby, 18 years ago, she spent time at the Charles Street Junior Y, a daycare in a lovely brick 10-storey building. I enjoyed the walk or bike ride down tree-lined Charles to drop her off or pick her up. A couple of years ago crews demolished the YMCA building, to put up a 40-storey condo tower. I used to enjoy mailing letters at the post office, a standalone building next to the daycare. Recently that too fell to the wrecking ball, replaced by a 50-storey tower.
I did not recognize Charles when we walked down it the other day. Hulking monoliths, utterly out of scale with the sidewalks and the remaining houses, loom over the street. We threaded our way around workers erecting still more monstrosities.
“It’s Planning 100,” said Jose, a PhD in planning. “You don’t put up bigger buildings than the sidewalks or the surroundings can accommodate.”
We arrived at Yonge, and I looked for the little Japanese place, where I have eaten many a pleasant bowl of soup. It had lived tucked away in the corner of a city parking garage. Alas, it is gone. The building is still there, but crews are now adding more stories to its top. Dust filled the air.
Jose remembered another lunch place, one block north. The scene looked doubtful when we arrived; workers filled the area, completing the south edge of the new, 80-storey tower at Yonge and Bloor streets. We threaded our way through the construction and lo and behold, Jose’s Indian place is still there, although, crowded as it is by new poured-concrete behemoths in the fascist realism style, and with its window covered in construction grit, it does not appear to be long for this town.
I ate a goat byriani, a delicious meal, but the serenity of our tête-à-tête was somewhat ruined by the whine of a concrete-cutting saw as a worker sliced a line down the middle of Hayden Street.
Now I know why a lot of my colleagues order in for lunch these days