Urban Shocker
Doyenne
Yorkville was indeed a village once, and it became a sort of creative club district in the 1960's with coffee houses and live music. But that scene was already dead when I came here in 1970 and tourists were being directed to see the "hippies" there. When I lived on Scollard in 1977 Yorkville was already very commercial, with several small, well designed, low rise, brick infill shopping malls between Cumberland and Yorkville and at the corner of Avenue Road, and trendy eateries like Noodles on Bay Street where Pangaea is now.
Replacing the original brick fronts of those nice old Victorian bay and gables with fake "grape chewie" fronts nicely expressed the slide into Jerkville, just as a hundred of the Beautiful People holding a Grouchfest in the Heliconian Hall and claiming that part of town was still a village as recently as three years ago speaks to the same phoniness. The five star ( pending ) Hazelton Hotel is a triumphal conclusion to a transition that has been going on for almost forty years.
Replacing the original brick fronts of those nice old Victorian bay and gables with fake "grape chewie" fronts nicely expressed the slide into Jerkville, just as a hundred of the Beautiful People holding a Grouchfest in the Heliconian Hall and claiming that part of town was still a village as recently as three years ago speaks to the same phoniness. The five star ( pending ) Hazelton Hotel is a triumphal conclusion to a transition that has been going on for almost forty years.