Late business hours of city businesses make streets safer
With the decline in manufacturing and a propensity among coffee shops to close early, the streets of the city can seem deserted and unsafe.

thestar.com
By Edward Keenan
Jan. 19, 2017

There’s a new A&W location opening in my neighbouhood, sometime this week or next, I’m told, in the gorgeously restored and renovated Campbell Block building at the corner of Keele and Dundas.

There’s been some grumbling around the Junction and on social media about it - the usual stuff you hear in changing neighbourhoods about indistinct corporate chain stores replacing quirky local eccentric indie shops.

I sympathize somewhat.

I love me some quirk and some indie, and I hope the Junction of Smash architectural salvage and Pandemonium used books and Curry Twist fish magic never dies.

Still, in this case, I’m celebrating.

Not because as fast-food chain fare goes, the Teen Burger isn’t bad, although that doesn’t hurt.

But because there’s a sign in the soon-to-open shop that says it will be open 24 hours.

And any addition to the nighttime civilization of my neighbourhood is good news.

When I was in university, my friend April was looking for a new apartment, and while we browsed neighbourhoods, she told me she needed there to be something open all-night nearby.

I said something like, “Yeah, it’s great to have a place to go eat on the way home from a bar.”

That’s not why, she replied.

She didn’t care if it was a diner or a doughnut shop or a Shopper’s Drug Mart or a convenience store. Her interest was that there be a place with lights on and people in it that would be nearby when she was heading home at night.

For safety, above all else.

And as my own children get slowly closer to the age when they’ll be out by themselves at night, the idea seems all the more obvious to me: the more people legitimately up and around in a place - employees behind the counter, customers coming and going - the more eyes you have on the street.

The more people to help if you need it, or more likely, to fend off trouble just by being there as witnesses to whatever is happening.

I have never felt less safe in Toronto than walking at night through the long, quiet streets of winding suburban areas, where it feels like you are truly alone for hundreds of metres or more in every direction.

Better to be close to a crowd.

Of course, I like the city to be there working and available all night for other reasons, too.

It actually is great to have a place to go eat on the way home from a bar - and walking into somewhere such as Vesta Lunch at Bathurst and Dupont in the middle of the night, a favourite of mine when I lived nearby, you find an outpost of civilization where cab drivers and shift workers and insomniacs keep each other company and keep the city going while others are dreaming.

As a young man in Scarborough, I very often braved the long, quiet walks in the middle of the night - half an hour up Markham Road, often without passing another pedestrian on the way - to the local Country Style doughnut shop, where I would read and write into the early morning.

There was a whole crew of regulars there: an older man in a three-piece suit with a shopping cart full of possessions outside; a German man who’d been a P.O.W. in The Second World War and told jokes and stories; a single mom looking to relax while her kids slep; a night-shift factory worker who came by on his way home and kept quotations he liked written in a little notebook.

Sometimes I talked to them, sometimes not.

But it was a place to go, and be surrounded by other people who needed a place to go.

The existence of those places, day or night, is one of the best things about living in the city.

But those places, at night, have been disappearing.

With the end of manufacturing shift work, there are fewer and fewer Vesta-style diners left. Starbucks and Tim Horton’s seemed to lead a trend that saw coffee shops start closing at night (and led another trend that saw many of the more obscure chains go out of business). The Home Depot near my house that was open 24 hours when I was renovating before we moved in now closes at 10 p.m. The Metro grocery store up the road that was open all night recently started closing at 11 p.m. It feels like it is the way of the city: even as bars downtown are active and open later than before, neighbourhood shops are less likely to provide any nightlife at all.

I keep an inventory in my head of the places in my neighbourhood still there, defying the trend, in case I need anything in the middle of the night.

I never know when I might need to storm out of the house after an argument with my wife and find a place to calm down among other people, somewhere to sit, so that I can realize she was right.

There’s a McDonald’s, a 7-11, a gas station, a Galaxy doughnut shop.

There’s also an all-night auto body shop on Dundas West, which I once had occasion to need.

And soon, there will be an A&W in a landmark building at the busiest intersection of the local strip.

Here’s to these places!

And to anyone helping to keep the city that never sleeps alive.