I wrote awhile back about the possibility of a Scott Pilgrim movie reboot. For all those reasons---a new perspective gained by age, millennial nostalgia, an opportunity to make a more balanced feature---a new one is, sadly, approaching: possible Torontonian nostalgia for the loss of the Annex neighbourhood.
Honest Ed's, the well known department store, is closing. In and of itself the loss of Honest Ed's means nothing: it is best known for it's garish lighting display which is succumbing to age, and really was little more than a proto-Wal Mart. It's loss will be missed, similar to that of the late, lamented Sam The Record Man in Yonge and Dundas. A part of the city's history will be gone forever, which is sad. Losing Honest Ed's will not change or affect the city or neighbourhood once it's gone.
It's what will happen after that what scares me.
See, Toronto is "enjoying" a massive condo boom. Every square millimeter of land is now fair game for hideous glass boxes to rise from the ground. I'm not opposed to condos on principle, since they do add density to a neighbourhood, and therefore demand for it's shops and services. However, there are some complications to Honest Ed's, namely the businesses that exist as an ancillary extension of the building. Their fate has not been discussed, and that fills me with dread.
By that I mean Sonic Boom, located within the building, chased out of it's old location by a friggin' Dollarama. In addition, there is a cluster of buildings next to Honest Ed's that is owned by the same people known as Mirvish village, where several buisnesses, from one of my favourite pubs Victory Cafe to Toronto comics landmark The Beguiling, are located. Their fate is now up in the air.
If the decision is made to gut the building, then Sonic Boom is homeless. While it's vinyl department has relocated to the very funky Kensington Market neighbourhood (another neighbourhood under siege---more on that later), what will happen to the larger store, where it will go (especially in a downtown core increasingly occupied by high end or big box retailers) would be an open question. If Mirvish Village is gutted (something that can happen either whole scale or piecemeal), the consequences will be dire.
If The Beguiling goes as collateral damage of all this, the impact on Toronto's comics community will be devastating. Granted, the city is littered with enough Android's Dungeon style comics shops, but The Beguiling is less a store than it is an anchor. Without it, the Toronto Comics Arts Festival is affected, not fatally, but definitely in scale. To be fair, if it does come down to that there will be resistance and rallies and petitions...but I live in a part of town where out local book shop was closed down by it's landlord to make way for a more lucrative nail salon. I do not have faith in the honesty of landlords.
As I mentioned, Kensington Market is under the gun as well: a recent condo/retail development has introduced the possibility (albeit a vigourously resisted one) of a Wal Mart in the area, threatening the smaller scale retailers that make up the market. If that happens, Kensington Market may go the way of Yorkville, which serves as a worst case scenario for what might happen: namely, a part of town that went from hippie stomping grounds to chic bourgeois shopping. Not a fatal blow for a neighbourhood, but I've enjoyed more fun evenings in the Annex or Kensington Market than Yorkille.
Condos aren't the root cause of this problem. Big Box chain retailers moving in and gutting neighbourhoods is the problem (best case scenario is that Loblaws or Target will move right in and establish a superstore). While we will likely gain in corporate conformity we will loose in so much else. Toronto will loose the messy, the tacky, and the grungy; that is, it will lose variety, opportunity, and discovery that dosen't just make a community, but also a city.
