Food and design delights in Agincourt best seen on foot
Agincourt is packed with interesting details but most of them are only noticeable on foot.
That’s what I discovered last weekend on a walk along Sheppard Ave. E. between Kennedy and Brimley Rds. Just a short linear bit of the neighbourhood, I’ve passed here in a car many times and even biked along busy Sheppard, but what I found on foot was yet another reminder that walking reveals details that other modes of transportation are too fast to notice.
A walking discovery is fitting, as this is Jane’s Walk weekend with many dozens of free neighbourhood walks taking place across the GTA.
Beginning at Agincourt Mall at Kennedy, the commercial presence of Toronto’s Chinese community is evident in the signs on office buildings and plazas, along with a mix of other multi-ethnic establishments.
On foot those structures are much more porous than they appear when speeding by. Passages and warrens of shops not visible from the street include basement restaurants and even banquet halls in these Hong Kong-style malls.
Also not so visible is a branch of West Highland Creek that crosses through the neighbourhood in a semi-concrete channel that sometimes runs in unnaturally straight and diagonal lines, a testament to the prowess of 20th-century landscape engineering. The creek slips through the neighbourhood almost invisibly, and certainly unceremoniously, but in Collingwood Park, south of Sheppard, it’s possible to imagine the creek in its natural state.
At Midland Ave., Midtown Plaza is a fine example of the 1980s postmodern strip-mall style with its pastel pinks, browns and decorative architectural elements that reference earlier, classic styles. Its spaceship-like front atrium leads to a short interior mall. Wellness clinics, a few restaurants, and one shop with dozens of old pianos in storage can be found there. From the second floor, the sound of a piano being practised echoed through the corridors.
A little farther east, the Dragon Centre is not much to look at from the outside, but passing through its doors reveals a compact mall with small shops, a stocked koi pond and more postmodern references of old village-style houses.
Each plaza or building reveals more neighbourhood layers. The sprawling Dynasty Centre looks like a standard strip mall from the era, with ample parking, but tucked in the back is an airy food court with sun streaming in through the skylights. A walk through Agincourt is a great Toronto food tour.
Exit Dynasty’s food court and head east, cross the parking lot and slip through a gate and be transported to early settler times in the Knox United Church cemetery. Like many Toronto and GTA neighbourhoods, Agincourt was once a small rural village, in this case settled in the mid-1800s and centred around Knox, originally a Presbyterian church. In its cemetery there are old crooked tombstones with dates from that era. Standing in it is a kind of time machine that, for a moment, makes it easy to forget that much of the Agincourt today is a much more recent creation.
There are other churches, like St. Timothy’s Anglican with its 1919 cornerstone, older houses on side streets and ones on Sheppard turned into offices that reveal the long history of this community.
One older, pre-war house at the corner of Brimley and Sheppard stands alone and is surrounded by parking lots. Now a dentist office, it’s interesting to think about the changes this one has seen, and to imagine the roads slowly creeping up on it over the decades as they grew, eating away at whatever front and side yards the house originally had.
While the landscape is dominated by the car and the wide streets and parking lots they demand, there’s much potential for Agincourt to become a major GTA hub.
Signs at transit stops say Sheppard buses provide frequent “10-minutes-or-better” service. That’s not bad, though not the same as the Sheppard East LRT plan that was fully funded in 2009 and slated to open in 2013, part of Mayor David Miller’s Transit City project.
It was scrapped during former mayor Rob Ford’s Transit City purge but later revived, somewhat, and put on the back burner, unfunded. The TTC projects completion for this project, to be built by Metrolinx, between 2028-2032. Bet on that at your own risk.
What is being built right now is an expanded and enhanced Agincourt GO station, an effort to prepare for two-way, all-day train service on the Stouffville line. Already an adjacent underpass here was completed a few years ago to eliminate the level train crossing.
If all this transit work came to pass as planned, Agincourt would be well connected — a big change from the infrequent GO service and buses today. Despite the delays in more substantial transit, change is still coming to this strip and there are development proposal signs in some of the parking lots.