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Home of the Week: $4.2 million for an Av and Dav condo that questions the supremacy of the detached house

NEIGHBOURHOOD: Casa Loma

AGENT: Dorann Gottlieb and Erica Gottlieb, Prudential Sadie Moranis Realty

PRICE: $4,195,000

THE PLACE: This two-storey condo is hidden in plain sight at Av and Dav, directly above the sleek headquarters of interior design powerhouse Powell and Bonnell. The coveted space (one of only seven units in the building) offers a bunch of features more common to houses: four bedrooms, three baths, nearly 4,000 square feet of interior space, a six-burner gas stove, a fireplace, a patio and a 200+ bottle wine fridge. This property is likely to convert any die-hard house dweller to the condo way of life.

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The Informer

Summit Survivor

January 31, 2011 | 2:44 pm

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G20 aftermath: finances less terrible than expected

No parking: thanks to the G20, there were fewer parking tickets than usual in 2010 (Image: Matthew Gray, Toronto Globalist)

We think it’s fair to say that the G20, the Fake Lake that came with it, and the police crackdown that it spawned will not be remembered fondly by Toronto. The sour feelings between the police and the city still hadn’t dissipated before the funeral for Sergeant Ryan Russell, leaving more than a few conflicted over the last time they’d seen that many uniforms in our streets. But never fear, because it turns out the G20 left Toronto with two gifts: according to the Toronto Sun, the international meeting left Toronto with a slightly smaller expense than anticipated.

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The Informer

In Transit

January 7, 2011 | 2:35 pm

4 Comments

Car-loving councillor Minnan-Wong wants to bring better bike lanes to Toronto—wait, what?

Back in the day, Denzil Minnan-Wong was about as anti-bike as any municipal politician could be; this guy (with a little help from the Toronto Sun) brought the phrase “war on the car” to Toronto because of the introduction of bike lanes. Then he started riding a bike, and we speculated he might get soft on the two-wheeled commuters among us. This morning the news came out that Minnan-Wong wants to improve and expand the downtown core’s network of bike lanes. For cyclists, it’s like walking under Ebenezer Scrooge’s window on Christmas morning.

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The Informer

Gimme Shelter

December 1, 2010 | 3:33 pm

9 Comments

House of the Week: $5.7 million for a neighbour-free home on two acres in Forest Hill

ADDRESS: 1 Peregrine Way

NEIGHBOURHOOD: Forest Hill South

AGENT: Elise Kalles, Harvey Kalles Real Estate

PRICE: $5,698,000

THE PLACE: Tucked away at the end of a brick road, this Forest Hill house is the picture of solitude. Even the neighbours are silent, as the massive Cedarvale Ravine abuts the property. The façade and extensive gardens may look like an English manor, but the interior is all-American luxury: expansive foyer with an inlaid marble centrepiece, indoor spa, and acoustically isolated screening room with a 120-inch projector screen.

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The Informer

From the Print Edition

November 10, 2010 | 8:55 am

23 Comments

Monster jam: Jan Wong on the tear-down real estate trend in Lawrence Park

In my neighbourhood, century-old houses are being knocked down to make room for super-sized faux chateaux. Something is lost, and something gained Jan Wong

(Illustration: Emiliano Ponzi)

When I was house-hunting in Toronto in 1994, my real estate agent routinely pointed out the highlights of each prospective property. At one house, she said helpfully, “There’s a Chinese family next door.” I grimaced. I’d just wrapped up six years working as a foreign correspondent in Beijing. Quite frankly, I’d had my fill of squeezing up against a billion or so neighbours who looked just like me.

What I yearned for, after living in a soulless concrete apartment inside a bleak walled compound, was a bit of green. Lawrence Park, with its wide lawns and winding streets, was the polar opposite of Beijing. I snapped up a 1938 four-bedroom Cape Cod–style house with eight towering oaks and a 95-foot frontage (which was affordable only because it faced Lawrence Avenue and needed lots of work). From my front door, I could see the Don River ravine, and from my kitchen window, I could glimpse a gigantic willow a block away at Cheltenham Park.

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The Informer

From the Print Edition

September 29, 2010 | 9:03 am

49 Comments

Mr. Popular: why Rob Ford’s winning over Toronto

By any measure he’s a terrible candidate for mayor. But his obsession with cost-cutting and his contempt for City Hall have pushed him to the front of the pack. The unlikely allure of Rob Ford By Gerald Hannon, Photography by Derek Shapton

Follow the leader: Ford has downplayed his family’s wealth and crafted an Everyman persona

Fifty-five barbecues.

Over the summer, Rob Ford, aspirant to the office of mayor of Toronto, ample, happy and flushed, ate his way through 55 orgies of hot dogs and hamburgers and handshakes and photo ops. Five he hosted personally; two were fundraisers in his mother’s backyard, attended by loyal supporters and political heavyweights, such as the finance minister Jim Flaherty. The rest were held by community groups and political organizations like the Ontario PC Youth Association. As the weeks passed, the barbecues grew in size, and the cheers for Ford’s speeches longer and louder.

Ask anyone in Ford Country why they plan to vote for him and you get variations on the same litany: he answers my phone calls; he helped me when I needed help; he doesn’t waste taxpayers’ money. At one event I attended, held in a plaza on Dixon Road, Wilma, an intimidating woman in a faux leopard hat, told me she supports Ford because “we need a damn housecleaning at city hall.” Twenty-five-year-old Richard values Ford’s campaign to strip city councillors of perks, like free TTC passes and free parking, and supports Ford’s opposition to the land transfer tax because his wheelchair-bound father needs a new home, but he can’t afford it because of the tax.

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The Hype

TIFF Talk

September 10, 2010 | 1:28 pm

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Absolut’s parking lot shindig was totally the party of the night

Callum Keith Rennie parties on the roof (Image: Fraser Abe)

When someone says “party in the parking lot,” it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. That’s why we were so pleasantly surprised to pull up to the thumping garage at York and Adelaide for the Absolut party last night. The minute we saw the stretch golf carts that ferried guests to the ninth-floor rooftop, we knew it was going to be a pretty good night. Live music by Scratch Scratch Scratch, Shaun Boothe and Shad, mostly of the hip-hop variety, got partiers in the right mood (especially one older gentleman who could do the running man like nobody’s business), though we also overheard complaints: “I feel like nothing kills the mood of a party faster than live music.”

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The Informer

The New Normal

August 27, 2010 | 2:57 pm

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A week in Toronto council: flagpoles, ice rinks and doubling down on crazy

Racing to meet a deadline—that pesky election that we’ve heard so much about—Toronto’s city council is hard at work trying to tie up loose ends from the past four years, and in one case, trying to tie up a loose end that’s been bothering it for 12 years. What did council get up to this week? Catch up on its hijinks after the jump.

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The Informer

From the Print Edition

August 25, 2010 | 8:57 am

8 Comments

Wild Thing: the story behind the Brick Works

The bucolic eco-paradise between Rosedale and the DVP almost never was. How big money and one ambitious entrepreneur remade the Brick Works By Sasha Chapman

On May 29, the opening day of the Brick Works farmers’ market, I pedalled past the savvy people who had parked their cars illegally outside the Mount Pleasant Cemetery’s southern gate, knowing there would be no parking spots below, and through the Moore Park ravine. The air was cool and moist, the trees still. Then, the vista of the Don Valley opened up: the sun was shining on the pretty quarry garden, burning away the morning clouds and reflecting off the wetland ponds. I couldn’t yet see the market, but I could hear it: at 8 a.m., the site was already alive with happy chatter and the slow strum of “You Are My Sunshine” on guitar.

(Image: Jeremy R. Jansen)

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The Informer

In Transit

July 15, 2010 | 12:58 pm

8 Comments

All hail our cyclist overlords! Jarvis bike lanes going in; bike racks colonize Spadina

Bike lanes are coming to Jarvis Street (Image: Bitpicture)

Most days, talk of Toronto’s “war on the car” seems like so much overheated rhetoric. The vast majority of roads have no bike paths, streetcars or pedestrian scrambles; parking in downtown remains expensive but ample. If this is a war, imagine what surrender would look like. But then some days, the headlines conspire to make it seem that Toronto will soon look like 1970s Beijing, dominated by bikes, with cars rare and/or spat on. Today is one of those days.

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The Informer

Cityscape

July 13, 2010 | 4:50 pm

1 Comment

New rink proposed for Lower Donlands: elegant, sparkly, will probably never be built

Stacked: this gleaming four-rink cube has been proposed for Toronto's waterfront (Images: 3LHD Architects/RDH Architects)

After all the ballyhoo over the proposed hockey rink for the Lower Donlands project, someone decided to take the city’s lemons and make architectural lemonade. That someone was Bob Goyeche of RDH Architects Inc., who submitted a proposal for a gleaming, four-rink, eight-storey structure. The Toronto Star reports that this new design is a far cry from the Walmart-esque proposal that everyone was howling about last spring.

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The Informer

Summit Survivor

June 24, 2010 | 10:45 am

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Toronto’s Path system already bled of business, busyness

Toronto's Path: cue the tumbleweeds (Image: John Vetterli)

With a huge decrease in pedestrian traffic, several access points closed off, hordes of police with riot gear and the possibility of being flooded by protesters, Toronto’s Path already looks to be a microcosm of G20 Toronto. “Traffic has dropped by about half,” says Domenic Minici, manager of the Path’s Piazza Manna, during an unusually slow lunch rush. “It’s killing us because we should be getting a boost from the World Cup.”

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The Informer

The Sporting Life

June 15, 2010 | 10:41 am

4 Comments

Wait—street hockey is illegal in Toronto? No wonder our kids are fat

Outlaws (Image: doviende)

Spacing publisher Matthew Blackett was at Yonge and Dundas when Sidney Crosby scored the gold-medal goal for Canada back in February. He watched as an impromptu hockey game broke out on the street, thinking: too bad that’s illegal. According to Blackett, the by-law outlawing the most Canadian of pickup games came from the pre-amalgamation version of Toronto, and became the law of the megacity afterwards. Breaking the rule comes with a $55 fine—something most hockey-playing kids don’t typically have on hand—and certainly not the kind of punishment a doctor would order when 1/3 of young male Torontonians are overweight.

And that’s why if Blackett and his supporters get their way, street hockey and other ball-playing would be legalized once again.

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The Informer

Mayor May Not

June 10, 2010 | 10:42 am

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Giorgio Mammoliti’s Kyle Rae jokes more interesting than his waterfront plan

The Gardiner gets a garden in this image provided by the Mammoliti campaign

In his mayoral campaign, Giorgio Mammoliti has proposed a war against spray paint, a tween curfew and a Freudian redesign of Emery Village. All of these, though, have a kind of small-change flavour. Giorgio, we ask, where’s the big idea? Well, this week, Mammoliti showed us: a car-free version of the Gardiner Green Ribbon paid for by road tolls and a buoyant casino.

The Informer

In Transit

June 9, 2010 | 3:44 pm

3 Comments

The city releases secret to cancelling parking tickets: pretty much any excuse works

Even the Batmobile gets ticketed in Toronto (Image: Gary J. Wood)

After what sounds like years of conspiracies and cover-ups, drivers finally have a shot against the sneaky tactics of parking officials. Thanks to two plucky city councillors, a formerly confidential document that offers guidelines on when to cancel parking tickets was made public last night. In the Star, Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong explains the adventure: “Myself and Councillor [Howard] Moscoe have been trying to get it released for a long time, and staff have constantly been saying ‘It’s confidential, it’s confidential, it’s confidential…’ Here a group of bureaucrats have set up these secret rules that nobody knows about.” Until now.

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