My favorite street is Lindenwoods Drive. Just one block uptown from the hustle and bustle of Kenaston and McGillivray--Canada's most famous crossroads--you can turn off Kenaston and experience the charms of another time (1993, maybe). With 50,000 parking spots instead of 75,000, retail on the Drive is more charming and compact car-scaled.
On the way, you can drop off your elderly parents at the seniors' home that looks out onto the loading bays of Canadian Tire. For the generation that emerged from 15 years of depression and war victoriously, they deserve only the best!
Past the seniors' home, at the intersection of Lindenwoods Drive and Lindenwoods Drive, with the din of the city still humming in the background, urban turns bucolic, and the Drive turns into a cathedral, as saplings soar, as if to the heavens along the Drive. Beyond them, service road and garages of the inhabitants. The houses (and garages) convey a sense of permanance (in stark contrast to the cookie-cutter kit houses they build in Linden Ridge today); these houses along the drive were built to stand 50 years.
Peering into the garages that are open, the pride of the Drive's denizens is evident; in less refined ages, stables, horses, carriages harness equipment, hay, seed, manure, hockey equipment, etc. were relegated to the back of the estate or town-house. In a neighborhood as beautiful as LindenWoods, there is no need to hide your dirty garage in the back--it now meets the front of the street.
Off the Drive, the sidestreets beckon your exploration. It is hard for the driver-by to imagine that a scant 25 years ago, this was all swamp-cum-farmland. Farmingdale Boulevard--it probably was a farm before becoming a boulevard that would make Haussman flush with envy. Foxmeadow Drive--foxes used to scamper along this bald piece of prairie. Deer Run Drive--where deer ran, you now drive.
With such tribute to nature and the very things these houses replaced, you know the men who built this place were confidient in humanities' progress, and the man-made environment they were making; that the cities we build are actually worth caring about.
The Drive continues on with the same unrelenting charm until it terminates at Lindenwoods Drive yet again, by the seniors' home. And, as T. S. Eliot wrote, "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
Last edited by rgalston; Dec 21, 2006 at 5:26 PM.
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