Is It All Downhill for Ossington? ⇒
16 March 2009, lunch time
Are there any Vietnamese Karaoke bars or boarded up shops people are seriously going to miss?
This is a post from my link log: If you click the title of this post you will be taken the web page I am discussing.
that pretty much sums up my feelings. i can’t stand that strech of ossington anymore, especially at 2:00 am on a weekend.
i thought douchebags were confined to king west?
by matthew on March 16 2009, 1:13 pm #
Oh man I hate King West. That has got to be the lamest strip in Toronto. I don’t think Ossington is nearly as bad, but I hardly ever go to any of the places out there.
I just find knee jerk reactions to gentrification kind of stupid, since it’s almost never the Portagese dude that has been living in the neighbourhood forever that is complaining, but the hipster doucebag who moved in a couple years back who can’t stand the yuppie douchebag who bought the house he was renting.
by ramanan on March 16 2009, 1:39 pm #
King Street is Queen Street for Bay Street.
(the above made sense when Queen was actually any good)
Maybe I don’t have the latest definitions of hipsters and yuppies… (‘poor artist’ isn’t the same as hipster, right?) but I see something to loathe in what has happened to Ossington. It’s nothing new, it’s the usual gentrification, but still. The alarming part is how quickly it happened. Ossington was awesome from 2001- what… early 2008? A year later, it’s bordering on club district. The destruction of Queen (& Spadina) took about 20 years. It’s not like there’s a Gap on Ossington yet, but still.
It’s this inevitable ‘poor neighbourhood attracts artists attracts yuppies destroys neighbourhood and leaves Yorkville-shaped crater’ cycle that we need to stop. I think what we need is an artist ghetto to prevent all this from happening. No one’s using the Distillery, right??
by D on March 16 2009, 4:32 pm #
I remember when we were in high school, Queen West still had Uncle Otis, Jet Blue, and all these other little boutiques. And then it also had a couple electronic shops, and active surplus. I remember if you ventured past Spadina you’d his all the vintage shops too. It’s strange how much it has changed now.
Ossington is crazy because it feels like in the span of half a year the entire road has transformed. I agree that ideally you don’t want all of downtown to turn into rich yuppie land. I am surprised planners haven’t solved this problem. It seems to me the city relies on drug use, prostitution, and high crime rates to keep portions of downtown affordable.
by ramanan on March 16 2009, 5:09 pm #
it’s funny…on the subway i can pretty much pick out with 99% accuracy who’s going to get off at ossington.
full disclosure: i get off there too.
by matthew on March 16 2009, 6:24 pm #