Yonge Street is one of the few Canadian streets that resonate nationally, known for its Guinness Book length (1,896 kilometres) and as a civic symbol. Yet for much of its life, it has been a fraud. Its claim to length derives from the idea that Highway 11, which it turns into, and which runs through Northern Ontario to Rainy River, is still a street. By any reasonable measure, Yonge Street quietly dies in Richmond Hill. It is epic in the city’s imagination despite its shortcomings: too narrow to be a meaningful traffic artery, lacking the boulevard drama of University Avenue; too unhip to be a cultural draw, graceless and jumbled in its commerce and architecture, a place for tourists to talk among themselves.

In 1997, as part of the Yonge Street Regeneration Project, the city began to expropriate properties on either side of Dundas, and the buildings were demolished. Gone were the World’s Biggest Jean Store, Lick’s, various dollar stores (there had been dozens between College and Queen) and an arcade known more for drug deals than video games, replaced by Yonge-Dundas Square and the building on the north side formerly known as Metropolis and now called Toronto Life Square. (Toronto Life’s parent company bought naming rights to the building in 2007.)

The Eaton Centre’s east side, which had been opaque, a fortress against the louche world outside, put in windows and new entrances and erected billboards to embrace the new street as kin. The divide between the sanctioned calm of the mall and the suspect street life was gone. In effect, a parallel mall is materializing alongside the Eaton Centre, up to Toronto Life Square—which will contain 24 AMC theatres, an Adidas store, Future Shop, Shoppers Drug Mart and a food court within its 500,000 square feet. The building has been done in a style that could be called Suburban Brutalism: gunmetal grey with ducts on the outside, though with a rounded generic form that suggests a dental clinic. But architecture isn’t the issue: the building is really a vehicle for its signage, continuing a Yonge Street tradition. Like the World’s Biggest Jean Store, or the World of Shoes before it, the building is essentially a sign.

On an inhospitable November Monday, Yonge-Dundas is host to 13 luxury cars that will be won in a hospital lottery, and 12 guys who sit smoking at metal tables nearby. This lull is enlivened slightly by the surrounding video signage. The south side of Toronto Life Square will be one of North America’s largest series of billboards: 20,000 square feet, of which 2,300 will be video moni­tors—one large screen (30 by 54 feet) and 34 smaller ones. Today the main screen is alternately advertising WestJet Airlines and itself (“largest contoured screen in Canada”). Across the street, the 223-foot-tall Atrium Media Tower, erected in 1999, has the 20-foot tongue of a Fido dog and Peter Mansbridge pitching for CBC. In direct competition is the video billboard to the south, fastened above the Hard Rock Café, which outlines CTV’s lineup. To the east, another video billboard—mounted on the Torch building, which housed the defunct Olympic Spirit centre—features an ad for Global Television. The building was bought in 2007 by Rogers, which will use it to house Citytv and Omni, and its billboard will soon be alive with Citytv’s jivey street presence. The giant screens on the southwest corner at the Eaton Centre have the increasingly annoying Bell beavers and L’Oréal. A smallish video screen presides over Yonge-Dundas Square, but the sun has made it a noirish mix of dark shadows. In total, there will be 10 large screens at this intersection.

Designed by Toronto architects Brown & Storey, Yonge-Dundas Square is a granite tabula rasa that since its inception has gone from bereft to animated, and still lurches between these extremes. It has been successful as an event venue, less so as an informal gathering place. Last summer, it hosted art markets, concerts, receptions, vigils, protests and outdoor films (among them, appropriately, Blade Runner). If you program it, they will come. Surrounded by advertising and information, the square isn’t an urban oasis, a relief from the consumer experience, but rather a place to witness the 21st-century mall.

For all the distractions of the mall, the main attraction is us. Yonge-Dundas Square is intended as a gathering place. It’s where Toronto the Good can see itself. But how good are we? Is the expropriation of businesses, some of which were long-standing and legitimate, a moral exigency in the service of a larger good? The rehabilitation of Yonge Street, which is quietly moving north toward Bloor, has been heralded as both necessary and a good thing. What once was dead is now alive. The issue is what kind of life it will be.