An application to construct a four-storey building at 416 Eglinton Ave. W will be heard Wednesday March 20, 2013 at 10 a.m. at North York Council 5100 Yonge Street. It is expected to be a lively meeting. Sources say the plan involves adding floors to the present structure, which was built as a grocery store in 1936 at the same time as the Eglinton Theatre. 416 Eglinton sits at the T junction of Elmsthorpe Ave and Eglinton. There is a four storey residential building which also houses a Bank of Montreal branch on the southwest corner of that intersection  at present. Although a variance from the present city plan will be required, it may be tempting for councillors to support the request. There is much talk now of “building up” Eglinton Ave. in keeping with the arrival of an LRT.    

The CRTC has told Corus Entertainment to fall in line with an educational mandate for OWN Canada, or face losing its broadcast license. That call came via a rarely-issued mandatory order from the regulator to ensure that the Canadian version of OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network complies with an original 1996 licensing mandate for Canadian Learning Television to “provide formal and informal educational programming and learning opportunities” that generally focus on adult education. Corus subsequently rebranded CLT as Viva and then as OWN Canada, to bring Oprah Winfrey’s female-skewing network to Canada. Corus issued a statement in the wake of the CRTC decision indicating it was “pleased” with the decision to allow OWN Canada to continue operating as a category A service. “Corus will work within the guidelines set out by the commission and will ensure that OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network (Canada) continues to provide a compelling service to its viewers,” the broadcaster said. Corus gave no details on how it will meet the guidelines and monitoring requirements imposed on it. Today’s events follow a December 2012 hearing where Corus argued it was acting in good faith and complying with the educational mandate of OWN Canada, and the CRTC finally ruling it remains in non-compliance with the nature of service definition.

The boarded up windows of the last few street level homes on Roehampton and Redpath Aves can give the area a kind of creepy feeling. But the promotion for new condominiums (in this case  155 Redpath) is giddy by comparison as it extols the value of owning a unit next to the Eglinton LRT.  These townhomes of relatively recent construction will soon be gone to make way for the glass walled high-rise which is now selling units on the basis of  “incentives.”  The 155 Redpath website offers “free first year rental management free, a free iPad or iPad mini, free lawyer contract” with more incentives coming, it declares. Picture inset into yesterday’s photo is a Google picture is from 2011. 

This magnificent car is a recreation — not a restoration — of the 1935 Bugatti coupe. It is the work of a Toronto area firm Guild of Automotive Restorers. The staggering challenge of creating a car which quite literally no longer exists just makes the mind swim. In fact, the one-off original appeared in public but once  at a car show in the United Kingdom and underwent a single road test and then, for reasons not exactly known, the prototype vehicle just disappeared. The story of how the recreation occurred is told by Nicholas Maronese on the Sympatico site. Inset are the black and white snapshots which represented a major source for the recreation along with some rough blueprints of the day  Sympatico

The annual Fraser Institute report card on high schools has revealed a very mixed bag in and around South Bayview. Inset is a list of seven local high schools and the scores given to them by the Fraser Institute in its latest report on how Ontario high schools performed last year. The first number is the score achieved on standardized testing in the current year and the second is an average of the school’s score in the most recent five years. Bloor Collegiate and North Toronto have really pulled up in recent years. They appear to be two of the Toronto area schools that are among the 20 fastest-improving secondary schools in Ontario. Fraser Institute said its 2013 report card suggests that school improvement is occurring across Ontario, with some of the biggest gains in the Toronto area. Even so there is lot of work to be done at schools like East York Collegiate and Jarvis Collegiate which is the only one of the seven shown here that is below its previous five year average.