Exploring Carlaw

A bag lady in fashionable sunglasses poses on townhouse grounds where a lumberyard once stood. The fence screens off railway tracks. Carlaw is just on the other side.
We went looking for the base of two large smoke stacks that are prominent on the skyline around Carlaw and Gerrard Street East. When we lived in Riverdale a couple of decades ago, there were plenty of factories and industrial businesses in the area. Surely the smoke stacks belonged to one of them.

Today, Carlaw is more of a studio district and the factories have been turned into work spaces and retail stores that are rather distinctive.
We tracked the smoke stacks to their building on Carlaw, immediately east of the train tracks. Inside, long concrete hallways are punctuated with old style freight elevators and big steel double doors. Rock musicians, martial arts studios, designers, metal fabricators and people who use a lot of spray paint (to judge by the fumes) toil within.
Kill the 8 helps bands with their merchandising efforts. They find couriers too loud, apparently..
A set of glass doors, on the second floor at the end of a long hall, seemed inviting. Green Tea Design. We were welcomed cordially and left to look around at marvellous furniture and cabinetry, mostly made of reclaimed ginko wood or elm. Loads of character. There were plenty of accent pieces, too… things that would add interest to lofts that are selling well in the area. Big ceramic pots, weathered Asian carvings, wooden screens, polished gourds, weaving shuttles… things to relieve the sterility of contemporary glass and concrete.
A cabbie once told me that the area is weird to drive through at night, when commercial photographers pop flashes as they work on their sets. One window lights up brightly here, then another over there, and so on, from building to building.
The smoke stacks smoke no more, but I guess they will be preserved as reminders of East Toronto’s industrial age. This side of the city has more towers than downtown, even if they don’t sport revolving restaurants.