But that’s not it. There really is a lot of construction going on. In just about every direction you turn, there’s a cross educator:

Okay, well, the big ones are more like a cross. And angrier. For example:

That’s is the TIFF / Bell Lightbox, kitty-corner from where this year’s TIFFery took place. I think it’s designed to loom ominously like that.  It certainly doesn’t yet scream “film festival!!” to me.

Not all construction hangs over the city like the cold face of death, though. Take Trump Tower, for example:

Nice lid, right? And what does The Donald have to say about his new erection?

“The thing that excites me most is the architecture. Secondly, I believe that the location of this building by itself will make it very successful. So you have a combination of great location and great architecture—and that’s going to be something very special.”

Sure is, Donald. It’s a winning formula: Donald Trump™ Excitement ® + location = oodles of cash

Secondly, I hope that’s what he means by “special”.

Anyhow, these are just a couple of the more interesting taller buildings. There are many more, including ones that aren’t so tall:

I don’t think I’d be exaggerating if I said that between any two main intersections, you’d find at least two large construction sites.

I was going to stop the post here without any real point, as I am wont to do. But as I was flipping through the news over an especially messy lunch today (I must omit the details), I found a Toronto Star article about office vacancies and how they’re linked to unemployment. It deftly reveals how all this new office space is opening downtown — I can attest to that! — followed up with unemployment statistics. Get it? Those buildings are stealing our jobs!

I knew it — now it’s cranes and immigrant buildings. And Trump’s mixed in with all this too.

(Sorry about that last link. Have to keep it up as a bleak reminder never to drink and blog again.)

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I hadn’t been there since … jeez, I can’t even remember. I have vivid memories of going on the Tour of the Universe ride with my family so it’s probably close to twenty years now. God I’m getting old.

The tower obviously hasn’t changed much structurally, but they did add some bells and whistles to get people’s attention.

The most visible change is the one on the outside — the light show that the tower puts on at night. Surprisingly, this isn’t achieved through spotlights or involve any gerbils; it’s done using hundreds of small panels (about the width, height, and depth of a pad of legal paper), of ultra-bright LEDs.

The inside isn’t terribly different (from memory), but fun bits like the glass floor have been kept intact:

Three-hundred and fifty meters (eleven-hundred feet) straight down to a squishy, high-velocity death. Depending on wind conditions, you might even plummet through the open dome of the Rogers Centre (the blue building), taking out a couple of Jays players in the process. You’d be doing them a favour — and I don’t even follow baseball!

But if you ask me, the glass floor is a cheap gimmick compared to the view on the observation deck:

This is north-east. City Hall is nestled in behind the Sheraton Centre (building at far left with red neon); Yonge Dundas Square is the bright white piece (slightly up and to the right of the Sheraton Centre); the Royal York on Front Street is in everybody’s face just like the queen likes it (building at right with red neon); and I keep my clothes, food,  Oliver, and a toilet somewhere in behind the BMO building (center, tallest building).

You try and you try but you just can’t seem to escape those with too few brain cells and too many mouths. One mouth, in many cases, is too many, but in my case it was two — a Philippino couple — and they were incorrectly identifying every street they pointed at. The girl went on and on about how Calgary, the city of lights, was better than Toronto, and how neither compared to Paris.  My brain hemorrhaged a little.

Thank the darkened heavens above I had something to distract me:

This is the corner of King and Simcoe. The brightly lit building at the bottom is the north end of Roy Thomson Hall where TIFF opened on Thursday; the green rooftop is the as-yet incomplete Ritz-Carlton; and the building facing us at left is the Elephant & Castle pub for people with fat wallets.

The Philipinno girl mentioned how this section of Bathurst seemed a lot different from this height. No no, retorted the boyfriend, this was was Front; Bathurst was further south. Now I had a full-on bleeder.

The lake side of the tower is not so thrilling at night. The sky’s black, the water’s black, and if it doesn’t have a lamp post sticking out of it, it might as well not exist:

You know, for a city this size it’s shocking how few pervs hang around parks at night. That’s HTO Park and hardly a trench coat in sight. The “urban beach” concept here is a bit weird (especially in winter), but I suppose it beats sunbathing on concrete. And I’m sure all the neighbourhood cats love their giant litter box.

Unfortunately the tinted, smudged glass of the observation deck wasn’t ideal for all viewing. Do people really need to wipe their greasy hands all over the windows? Don’t you have a napkin or your girlfriend’s hair? Yeah, I’m talking to you, mister Bathurst-Street-is-in-the-lake.

I’ll have to visit again when they don’t allow special people into the tower. But even at night and with dopey conversation the place has a cool, aloof,  planning-a-bank-heist feel to it.

Of course, for that I’m going to have to enlist the help of George Clooney. I know he’s down there somewhere!

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I’m veering away from my regular existential indulgences for a bit to wax oracular about a highly visible trend around the sprawl: the influx of permanent influences that will change, and are changing, the face of city.

None of this will even begin to approach news for most Torontonians.

The slow and stealthy creep of Metro stores over the past few years as the company gobbled up A&P/Dominion, Loeb, and other grocery stores, was clearly visible even as it came as a bit of a surprise to locals (that was my impression anyway). The re-branding was simply a facelift on a done deal, but it threw light on a trend which is continued by extra-Torontonian projects such as the Ritz-Carlton Group’s Ritz Residences, the Maned One’s Trump Tower, and even the sweet and matronly franchise of Chez Cora’s.

This isn’t even anything that’s new or unique. Walmart’s been blighting the burbs for years and Starbucks has become so ubiquitous that one recently opened in my living room.

What makes the changes happening now different is the fact that they involve the take-over of at least a block (or more) of prime downtown real estate and, more often than not, a razing and complete rebuilding on the site. Unlike a simple facade or signage appended to part of a lot’s building, the entire lot is being transformed. It’s not that these external influences are simply appended to the fabric of Toronto, they become the fabric of Toronto. In other words, people who neither live here nor spend much time here are guiding the development, look, and feel of Toronto.

Everyone knows that generalizations suck, so let’s not do that here. There is a lot of city-borne development going on and even if some are of these projects aren’t Torontonian, at least they’re Canadian.

Cora’s influences on Toronto, for example, have been to broaden the breakfast experience and give permission for thriving businesses to come across as local and quirky. Although the company is expanding quite quickly, Cora’s locations are mostly appropriated ones. The restaurant is a blush of Montreal colour on the broad palette of Toronto.

The Ritz and Trump Tower, however, are much more direct. In these cases, even if the building’s ownership changes to Canadian hands, many of the characteristics of U.S. design, U.S. ownership, and U.S. management will remain. The architectural style will definitely stick around for a few generations and, although the buildings will become part of the Toronto skyline, they will remain at heart un-Torontonian.

I’m not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing.

Toronto is superbly racially and culturally mixed and, unlike the necessary Americanization of immigrants south of the border, here you can spend your entire life in the isolation of your own culture (whatever that happens to be). Immigrants have left their mark on Toronto since day one, but the majority of the city is built on Edwardian ideals.  Stores may have Cantonese signage, but this is often affixed to confederation-era (or analogous) buildings.

The new mega-developments that are springing up around town in increasing numbers are removing these colonial vestiges, but not with anything that is uniquely Torontonian or even Canadian.

The general stance taken against all of this is that new architecture is removing the beauty and uniqueness of Toronto along with its history. Change, goes the argument, is slowly eating away at the city. What this seems to forget, however, is that change is sometimes a catalyst for improvement.

The modern city of Paris, for example, only became one of the jewels of Europe when Napoleon decided to completely raze it and re-build it from scratch. If the occasional city block bothers critics now, old Parisian revisions would have driven them insane.

That’s not to say that this is all a good thing either, but I’m hardly qualified to make a judgment either way. Like Paris, only time will tell what these big changes bring. However, it’s not the changes themselves but their influences that make this such a unique moment in history.

Most major urban renovations have been, up until maybe the last one-hundred years, fairly isolated. In GTA suburbs this is still mostly true, but also with a characteristic that sets them apart. A hundred years ago, urban buildings were built locally and were also, for the most part, unique. Today’s urban buildings are unique but not, as mentioned, always built or owned locally. Suburban communities are mostly built locally, but uniqueness isn’t a prominent (or sometimes present) feature.

I think that the suburban trend is horrendous, not only for the lack of uniqueness or character, but also for the deep environmental, social, and cultural impacts such communities have.

The urban trend, however, is a bit more hazy. There’s no indication that it will abate any time soon so it’s reasonable to expect more xenophilic ownership, development, and cultural influence into the future. With big names like Ritz-Carlton and Trump jumping into the game, an increased American role in urban re-development is quite likely.

What this means is that, unlike any other era in urban planning or development, Toronto (and I suspect many other North American cities as well) will be facing an even greater crisis of identity — if you buy the notion that we already have an issue in this area. Many of the facts used to support this belief also incorporated the changing downtown environment as proof of a disappearing culture (not that anyone can clearly define what that culture is). In the past I would’ve used the Parisian counter-argument to moot that point.

With truly non-Torontonian influences carving out great swathes in the city’s make-up, however, they have more solid footing for their complaints. Then again, Trump Tower could be the greatest thing ever to happen to this city and may help to add some edges to that definition of what it means to be a Torontonian.