Sobeys at CityPlace and Bremner/Fort York: Coming soon, but when exactly?

We strolled past the new venue for the Sobeys Urban Fresh at Fort York and Spadina today and noticed a few things that you could find interesting

• First, that despite the Coming Soon signs plastered all over it, we still don't know when it's opening. On a building permit we spotted back in April, it called for a building completion date of June 19 (which is in two Fridays).
• They've already stocked the non-perishable aisles (ie bottles, cans, packaged goods) and there are at least seven aisles in the store. From looking inside and comparing it to the location at York and Queens Quay, we think this new one is actually bigger.
  
• We see near the entrance work still needs to be done but it looks like they're ready to roll. There is either a salad bar or, maybe more likely, some sort of pick your own olives area. We see what looks like to be a bakery at the (which was confirmed since we know they were looking for people to work in their bakery department.)

So, who else is excited we're welcoming another grocery store to the neighbourhood? We predict very brisk business.

Becel Ride for the Heart pictures: Cyclists take over the Gardiner

This is one of our favourite things to see on a summer Sunday. We go outside on our balconys and instead of hearing cars whir by on the Gardiner, we hear something totally different. Hundreds, thousands of cyclists whizzing up and down the Gardiner and DVP for Becel's Ride for the Heart.

So we went up to snap some pictures from overhead. (Nothing like the Tamil protests recently, but for sure a sight to see)

Luminato's Cirque crew setting up at Music Garden

We were walking by the Music Garden last night and noticed that the Cirque de Soleil setup crews were installing a few venues. We'll grab pictures tomorrow, but so far, we see a mini pirate looking ship towards the Canada Malting Plant building, and a big dome on the park's eastern edge, right after the steps. So we're now thinking arrrh, pirates! and some sort of aerobatics or suspended act.

SkyDome and the birth of condoland on Toronto's waterfront

We were reading a few days ago one of many pieces that have been done about the SkyDome, that hulking neighbour to the north of Queens Quay. It was 20 years ago today, June 5, 1989, that the Dome opened, ushering in a few glory years of baseball in this city.

Sports columnist Stephen Brunt writes about a "pretty standard, multiuse stadium of the type much in vogue during the 1970s" and that it's "functional, but charmless."

He goes on to write about the politics behind the dome (a Grey Cup during an ice storm at Exhibition Stadium supposedly changed minds) and that.

What's perhaps missing from some of this sports analysis of what the Dome meant for the sporting life in this city is what it has done for LIFE in the city for general. In the Google Map below, we mapped just some of the developments that took off right around the SkyDome in the years after 1989.


View SkyDome and a emerging neighbourhood in a larger map

It's pretty stark, isn't it?

If SkyDome was a seed, or weed, then you can see its offspring in the developments of condo around it. CityPlace, for instance, has sprouted out. Queens Quay saw more than a few parking lots turn into late 1990s and early 2000s developments. True, the condo bust of the 1980s turned condo development cold until the late to mid 1990s, but it's undoubtedly true that this area was made all the more fit for building once you brought the people to the area.

For good (uh, we live here) and bad (for the detractors of condoland).

Happy 20th, Rogers... er, SkyDome.

LCBO BBQ on QQ

Thought we'd pass this on:

Media Alert - LCBO Queens Quay BBQ helps send kids with cancer to camp

TORONTO, June 3 /CNW/ -

WHAT: The LCBO Queens Quay store and its suppliers are presenting their
18th annual barbecue in support of Camp Oochigeas, a year-round
camp for children affected by childhood cancer. The barbecue is
open to the public and all proceeds go to the camp.

LCBO President & CEO Bob Peter and Queens Quay store staff will
present Camp Oochigeas Chair Howard Breen and Executive Director
Rob Drynan with a cheque for $135,000. This represents donations
from suppliers participating in LCBO in-store tastings and
anticipated proceeds from this year's barbecue. With this
donation, the LCBO and its suppliers will have raised more than $1
million for the camp in the last 18 years.

Fundraising activities include skill-testing games and a silent
auction.

Located on a private lake outside Rosseau, Ontario, Camp Ooch, as
it is affectionately called by the kids, offers eight weeks of
summer camp for children with cancer. It also provides weekends at
camp throughout the fall and winter, day camp programs and year-
round programming at The Hospital for Sick Children and in the
community. Camp Ooch remains the only residential camp in Ontario
to provide on-site chemotherapy and blood transfusions.

WHERE: LCBO Queens Quay Store parking lot
2 Cooper Street (two blocks east of Yonge at Queens Quay Blvd. E.)

WHEN: Friday, June 5, 2009, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

Webcams let you keep track of Waterfront Toronto's work

Waterfront Toronto has a few neat webcams set up so you can track the progress of the Simcoe Wavedeck, the East Bayfront construction on Queens Quay East and of the West Don Lands.

It's pretty neat, because it also has an archive function that lets you look at pictures from past days. For example, here's a picture of the Simcoe Wavedeck on April 9.



And a picture from this past weekend, May 31.



View all the webcams here