Toronto Memories part 1
2011/08/25
Today I revisited three of the four places I lived in Toronto, rode the subway a bit, (delightful!) walked through the Underground, revisited one of my college campuses and met up with some relatives I’ve not seen in ages (and some I’ve not met before).
First stop: 11 Newton Drive. This was actually the third place we occupied in Toronto between our two stints at the farm in Manitoba.
I don’t have a “before” picture handy for this one. It was a small two-bedroom house with a decent-sized yard. We had a garden beside the house and the back yard was all surrounded by tall hedge which gave decent privacy and some quiet.
We adopted our most recent cat (Dude) here. He was a feral kitten who kept coming into our yard looking for food. My father started feeding him and since there was no sign of anyone considering him missing, we soon adopted and attempted to tame him. He was a surprising find for a stray – a Burmese Blue. Silvery dark grey fur, with sky-blue skin underneath. He adapted well to the house overlord lifestyle and stayed with us until his death of pneumonia sometime around 1998.
Anyway, this place has since been torn down, along with the neighboring house, and reincarnated as this:
Is that a house or a storefront? I can’t tell.
Here’s some nearby rephotography though. Yonge Street looking south from the end of Newton Drive then:
And now:
Not much difference is immediately evident from the photo, but there are a lot more high-rise buildings in the distance down between Finch and Sheppard, and most of the businesses in this area have some Arabic language on the signs now.
And looking north then:
And now:
Very little change there. Even the mall just up the street from here is the same as it was 19+ years ago, when last we were here.
I walked south on Yonge for a while, passing this strip mall on the way:
If you notice right near the middle of the photo, there is a bowling alley sign. I often used to stop off there to play games, as they had an arcade. It was actually mostly pinball – they had an impressive row of pinball machines, and since the best video game they had was the fairly crappy Simpsons side-scroller, I played pinball more than video games.
The North York town hall area has been built up, but the library where I did most of my research when I was taking electronics at George Brown is still there, in the back of this building:
And the fourth and final house we occupied, 93 Hillcrest Avenue, has also been razed and replaced.
With this:
This is where we lived when I completed my training at GBC, and when we bought our first Intel-based PC, a ‘386 with a whole 4MB of memory and a 128MB hard drive – and Super VGA graphics, all for under $2,000!
I had a huge upper-floor bedroom that I really liked, and I was sad when we had to pack up and leave this place to return to Manitoba.
Moving on, our second residence in Toronto was in this crappy little apartment building:
It was noisy, we paid a ridiculous sum per week rent, rode the elevator with drug dealers, and they didn’t allow pets so we had to keep our dogs cooped up in the truck in the parking lot – that really sucked because we could easily have got into trouble with animal control authorities for that, and it was awful for the dogs too. Thankfully we weren’t there very long.
Here’s me on the balcony, from when I was starting to look for work. This was before I started at GBC, and I felt the need to earn some money. You’re not likely to see me in duds like this again.
This area is still a slum despite the shiny new buildings going up.
Also still present is the sub shop across the street:
I used to hang out here for hours at a time. This is where I learned to master Shinobi, getting every possible point and finishing the game without dying once. There were a crowd of kids about my age who also hung out and took turns at the game. One of them wore a felt trenchcoat and had a pet rat living on his person – the coat was easy for the rat to climb around in and on. He smelled. The proprietors yelled at me once for having a persistent cough that was annoying the paying customers – and they had a point. I had a particularly bad cold that year and I had a frequent dry cough that didn’t go away for two months.
Next I went downtown to walk around a bit. First stop, Union Station. very nice train station, and this somewhat obscure spot in the lower level:
used to be home to a pretty decent arcade. Great place to stash kids between connecting trains. This is where I played most of my Moon Patrol, and where I mastered Wardner.
Obligatory shot of the gold building:
Interesting bit of trivia: Management of some other office buildings nearby sued when this thing was built, on the grounds that the reflected sunlight was raising their air conditioning costs in summer. They lost, on the grounds that there is a complementary season.
I then walked north through the Underground, which is a series of connected below-ground mini-malls that together comprise one giant mall. You can walk all the way from Union Station to the Eaton Center without going outside, with shopping all the way. I found that my favorite Underground cookie store, Treats, is still in business but their cookies are no longer as good as I remember.
City Hall:
And looking in the other direction, First Canadian Place (the white building at center):
My mother worked there as an office temp for a while. Remember I mentioned earlier that I was looking for work at the time? I also signed on with the same temp agency, and my first assignment was in another office building down here. Sorting paper files. It didn’t work out well – I was paired with another teenage temp, and all he wanted to do was loaf around in the file storage room playing cards. My first professional dilemma. I turned him in, and then also quit myself because I didn’t like the office environment.
Interesting digital display I encountered on Bay Street. Dynamic wall displays are coming closer to reality:
Oh, and I’m sure that five gigadollars will totally solve all the banking problems.
Moseyed over to the St. James campus of George Brown College, where I started my electronics training. Then:
Now:
This building had a cavernous enclosed courtyard inside it, with games. I mastered Black Tiger here, and also played a lot of Cyclone – the machine that taught me to appreciate pinball. That courtyard is now filled in by hallways and classrooms. The rest of the maze-like interior is roughly the same as before though. Too many stories associated with this place to go into now.
This monster nearby:
sits mostly in the parking lot of what used to be a Goodwill store – a notable one because they had a huge basement department for electronics, and had a weekly computer auction. I got my first Apple II kit here, as well as an Osborne portable and an Apple III (which I foolishly stripped for parts instead of waiting for eBay to be invented).
And just around the corner from that:
The basement of that red brick building used to house an Active Components store, which was a very convenient source of parts for those of us in the electronics program at GBC. Now empty.
After all that, I took a spin through the St. Lawrence Market and then went to the new Distillery district for dinner. I met up with my aunt Winnie and cousin Tanya, whom I haven’t seen for about 22 years, as well as Tanya’s husband Ralph and my second cousin Ayla (daughter of Tanya’s sister Angela Rose). I had never met Ralph or Ayla before, both having come on the scene long after I last saw anyone from this branch of my family. It was a good evening of much conversation.
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