Yeah, it’s all great until you have to get from Brooklyn to Queens

Recently there has been an emphasis among city planners on building UP rather that OUT and so some areas around the downtown core – Mission/MardaLoop/Eau Claire – have seen sizable resedential condo/townhouse developments. Still, apart from usual hot spots – Stephen’s Ave, 17th and Electric Ave – the place is still a ghost town after the work day. Calgary’s still very much a “young-family” centred city. From what I’ve seen so far, young desi professionals/families are largely buying homes in parts of the city that already have a large desi presence – e.g. NE/NW Calgary i.e. not as much representation in the newly developed areas near downtown and to the South.

Trains going North have a mixed crowd (unlike the vanilla Southbound trains) and the NE line is like a little India on wheels during rush hour. I love being there during that time – very friendly crowd, everyone smiles and says “Sat Sree Akal!” NE Calgary is still largely Punjabi, while the desis in the NW are largely Ismaili/Gujju.

Kensington Market When Ms. Jacobs and her family first moved to the city from New York in 1968, it was the market’s humming chaos — live chickens in cages, a multitude of languages, and thick knots of pedestrian traffic — that made for love at first sight. Before renting their first apartment on Spadina Road, the family looked for flats along Baldwin Street. When they began house hunting, they revisited the neighbourhood before settling into the Annex. “There was no question that it felt like home to us,” Jim Jacobs, her son, remembers of Kensington. “It was the variety, and all the things going on in the street and all the different people. It was the most intense mixture.”

the thing about jane jacobs was that i would read her… and it’d be like such an emotional release to see written in such precise, clean terms things that are so precious to me… it ‘s like having a conversation with a friend who’s so much smarter than me… and i feel like saying after every thundering passage from her… me too … me too… and i’d be like waving my hand… mouthing the passages…
on a local level, she’s also responsible for saving the dooney’s cafe on bloor st. i personally dont like that place … but one less starbucks doesnt hurt.
on a personal note, i once mused on this forum about not havign recent heroes… well, she was one – my other hero is graeme obree, but that’s another story.
now back to work… the perennial joke is that half-day means I stop work at 6. ha! more later.

Craning your neck, jogging alongside the incoming train, reaching for that doorway pole, the smell of metal, the leap, its ballet and Bharat Natyam all at once.

Neale

I’m curious, what’s the downtown situation like in Calgary now? I was there in 98 and there there was a bit of residential building going on with restaurants and clubs too but it was largely commercial. Jacobs has had a huge influence on urban development in TO and it is thanks to her that our downtown is one of the few in N. America that still has large residential neighborhoods. If more people live in the city then they are able to have a voice against freeways, which mostly cater to drivers from the burbs. One more reason to move to Toronto, J, the womb is calling…!

Someone elseIt’s funny, what Badmash wrote about TO transit is what I want to write about NY transit. I’m jealous of all your trains and stops and lines!

The Greater Toronto Area has about nine different transit systems, all of which are poorly connected to each other, as the transit folks seem to have missed the amalgamation memo.

We have this problem in New York too. I think it’s largely a vestige of the Jacobs’s era (or rather Robert Moses’s era) when they put absolutely no money into the public transit system and instead built bridges and highways. We have three commuter train systems, two of which don’t connect to the third; two subway systems which don’t connect; and, most egregiously, a transportation system that assumes that everyone is going to Manhattan all the time. etc., etc. It’s really atrocious.

I have to agree with Manish too–sticking your head out the train of the Bombay trains is super fun. Especially when you ride for free