At a recent family party, some of my in-laws and I were discussing one of our favourite topics: “What happened to Yonge Street?” Which is a conversation that always evolves, surely as the sun rises, into the problem of “What is happening to Toronto?”
This is a group of people who loved Yonge Street. My wife comes from a family of cab drivers and diner regulars, city wanderers and late-night writers, appreciators of the eccentric shops and even more eccentric people who make up an urban scene — they’re a family with no professional connection to city planning but a keen interest in how cities work for the people just trying to live in them.
And the consensus in that group, widely shared by a lot of longtime Torontonians, is that the city has ruined one of the world’s great urban streets.
‘What happened to Yonge Street?’ Quashing Toronto’s character is the city’s mistake – Toronto Star, December 5, 2023
Photo: Sikander Iqbal, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
