Reflections on Yonge Street

Look up. Waaaay, up!
Toronto, ON
May 2019
This photo originally shared on Instagram

Let's be brutally frank for a moment: I hate crowds. Walking down one of the busiest downtown streets in the country makes me more than a little uncomfortable.

Don't get me wrong: I like people. A lot. But I get thrown off when there are so many of them, so close to me. I guess big cities just aren't my thing.

Be that as it may, my role dictates that I spend a good chunk of time in the Big City to the East - aka Toronto - so I can't be a baby about it. Or, as my late dad would have said, I've got to suck it up.

So on this perfectly sunny and warm spring afternoon, I decided to skip the subway and walk back to the train station. I left a bit of slush time in the schedule to accommodate stops along the way. And as it turned out, ducking out of the spawning salmon-like crowds to steal photos here and there was a perfect antidote to my urban squeamishness. Because nothing says "stay away from me" more than a guy pulling out a camera and pointing it skyward. Maybe I'm onto something here.

The scene here fascinates me, as Yonge Street is increasingly being built over with massive, gleaming condo and office towers. They cast huge shadows on a streetscape once dominated by three-storey walkups with mom-and-pop retail on the ground floor. And as the old-style architecture gives way to the new, it seemingly opens up opportunities to view the landscape in new ways.

Not better. Not worse. Just different.

But we've got to be willing to time-out from the day-to-day and allow ourselves the opportunity to take in scenes and moments like this. I hope the next time I decide to take the slower route home that I'm not the only one looking up and wondering what scene will reflect back at me.

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