With a slate of galleries, restaurants, vintage shops and cafés name checked by urban tastemakers, the stretch of Lansdowne between Dundas and Bloor is no longer risky, seedy and bypassed. It’s now not only the city’s locus of hipster culture, but a destination for families looking for a nice semi in the $500,000s. The area’s two best real-estate pockets—Wallace-Emerson and the adjacent Brockton Village—are blooming with new developments. North of Bloor, empty lots are filling up with new townhouses (including the Brownstones development on Wallace Avenue, west of Perth), work and retail spaces (like the Junction Triangle Lofts) and design-conscious condos (Upside Down, a mid-rise near Dupont aimed at young professionals).
Read the rest of this entry »
Adapting any novel for the stage is a tricky thing, a task the British writer Sebastian Faulks recently likened to “trying to turn a painting into a sculpture.” Stories that unfold over hundreds of pages must be recreated in just a slim script; whole worlds must be confined to a patch of boards. Adapting the 2007 Governor General’s Award winner Divisadero—a meandering book that abruptly leaves main characters midway through their narratives and appears unconcerned with dramatic thrust—would seem a maddening, impossible job, but it’s what Michael Ondaatje has chosen to do with his first theatre project in more than two decades. Divisadero: A Performance is produced by the ambitious company Necessary Angel, directed by Daniel Brooks, and stars film actor Liane Balaban and the excellent Tom McCamus and Maggie Huculak. The piece’s success, however, hangs on the chemistry between Ondaatje and Justin Rutledge, the young singer-songwriter who will be making his theatrical debut when the play opens this month.
At Fromagerie, the latest culinary addition to the ever-evolving Junction foodscape, the wide-plank floors, exposed brick and enormous vintage glass windows lend an Old World vibe. Husband and wife team Jeff Brown and Jennifer Rashleigh take an equally continental approach to their stock: a carefully curated selection of house-churned butter, lush preserves of organic Niagara fruits, and rare wheels of small-batch cheeses, including the irresistibly rich and ripe Grey Owl goat milk cheese pictured here ($7.40 per 100 g). A slice of baguette, a bite of cheese and a dollop of apricot jam, and the Junction could almost pass for a Parisian arrondissement.
Follow Toronto Life on Twitter, Facebook and via RSS