Toronto Downtown Quotes

Cambridge or Boston. The same urban tech migration is playing out in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York City as some of the hottest tech companies in those areas establish themselves in downtown offices. For example, Twitter Inc. is headquartered in the gritty Mid-Market neighborhood in San Francisco, and the crowdfunding site Kickstarter Inc. opened its headquarters in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, N.Y. “It didn’t surprise me that young people wanted to move back to the city, because cities are fun,’’ said Richard Florida, director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto. “What really surprised me was this move among tech firms back to the cities.

This thing right here is an edgy sex-type thing: all po-mo and throwback, at once passionate and insincere. It creeps around downtown, goes underground in the financial district, resurfaces on Queen West, becomes a full-blown geyser in bars like this. The Cramp are on, and everybody’s All Tore Up, probably snorting coke in the bathroom, shooting bourbon at the bar, and pretty soon it’ll be The Creature from the Black Leather Lagoon, red satin curtains in the window behind the stage, hubcaps on the walls.

Girls must learn to make do with the limited spaces that they're offered. In my servant adolescence, that space was the mall. Easily accessed, inviting no probing questions from our parents, always warm and safe. I can't begin to count the hours spent wandering the convoluted corridors of ever expanding shopping centers in Mississauga. I suppose we were lucky that given Mississauga size and growth rate, we had choices. […] despite the mall's inherent homogeneity, we entertained ourselves by looking at things we couldn't afford, imagining the cool people we'd be if only we had the right clothes and shoes. We found ways to make our own spaces, and stairwells, corners, and service corridors. My best friend Erica and I didn't go to the same school, so the mall was the place where we could actually gather instead of talking on the phone. But as we got older, the mall didn't reflect our changing identities. We needed to find the space and styles and people that would let us start to define ourselves as more Jewish girls from the suburbs. […] If the mall was our default space – easy to access, parents happy to leave us there for a few hours – then downtown, as we called neighboring Toronto, was our aspiration. We could take a commuter train and in about 30 minutes we'd be at the foot of Yonge Street, one of Toronto’s central shopping and tourist districts. While we might venture into the enormous Eaton center mall, our targets were the vintage shops, used record stores, poster shops, and head shops of Yonge and Queen streets. […] Of course all of this feels like a cliche now. We weren't unique. Suburban girls all over seek out ways to push back against the pressures of conformity. Like with young people we were trying to figure ourselves out and “different” space has helped us create fresh moments for self-expression. Girls’ presence on city streets, a place where they have been deemed out of place, can and should be considered part of girls’ repertoire of resistance to varying modes of control within an adult-dominated, patriarchal society.