As the first week of June began, Torontonians awoke to some heartbreaking news. The city would now have less pizza and more condos. The Big Slice, a Yonge Street institution 45 years strong, was closing to make way for a new tower. According to the CBC, it spent its last hours handing out free food to the homeless people who often sat on its stoop. Then they locked the doors for good. “Sorry,” reads a paper sign taped on each end to the window, “due to property reconstruction by the (landlord) we will be closed at this location beginning today.”
With lake-shaped pies and long, floppy, $4 slices the size of your face, The Big Slice wasn’t fibbing with its moniker. It’s the kind of pizza where you’d play a sort of carnival game with the toppings, trying to balance and slide it into your maw without bumping any meatballs off toward the worn tiled floor. Tasty, slimy, and sloppy—the type of humble pie that gets harder to come by in a city where most new businesses seem hungrier for a franchise.
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Open so late it’s practically morning, Big Slice was a regular stop for locals, drunk Ryerson students pining for for something greasy and non-alcoholic, genre nuts getting ready for TIFF’s Midnight Madness line wrapped around the corner, Skinny Puppy and Sarah Polley, to name a few types of customers.
While many restaurants would shoo the homeless or the emotionally distressed from their premises, Big Slice employees often seemed to accept the in-need as part of the makeup of downtown Yonge, in the same manner as they were. Besides, the young and the inebriated were usually bigger shit-disturbers. The Big Slice experience essentially involved fixing your eyes on the Chernobyl Diaries poster, unexplainably mounted on the wall, while ignoring some after-partier a few feet away revving to flip their table.
At The Big Slice I have had post-movie slices with friends and post-breakup slices alone. The green and red OPEN sign was a siren bringing you closer, a signal letting you know that the cheesy, wheezy comfort you need is right here, buddy. Manager Sammy Chaudry told the Toronto Star that future plans will be announced shortly, but it will be hard to imagine a Yonge street without Big Slice. For that matter, imagining the future of Yonge has never been easy.
Inside The Big Slice now. Photo by the author.
The final fight from The Incredible Hulk, with Sam the Record Man’s amazing sign intact in the background, is starting to feel like a stroll down memory lane, with added cars getting flipped over and two giant ogres repeatedly bopping each other’s noggin. Even more recently, nearby icons have also closed for condo developments, such as Bar Volo and Play De Record. Not to mention the suspicious circumstances when Salad King was forced out of their heritage building by a career arsonist.
Yonge has changed immensely. Despite being one of the longest streets in the world, and one of Toronto’s main attractions, for decades downtown Yonge was better known for porn shops, doorway vendors, and arcades. In an effort to clean it up, the city developed a privately owned public space, now known as Yonge and Dundas Square. A success in the long-run, construction that stretched from the late 90s until the Square’s opening in 2003 seemed to put the surrounding area in limbo. Hesitant business owners might have preferred seeing how it played out, letting the same head shops and porn depots the project wanted to combat thrive. This whirlpool gentrification was even more apparent with One Bloor, a massive condo at Yonge and Bloor serving as a bookend to the north. Stalled by mismanagement and the 2009 financial crisis, One Bloor created a speckled wasteland where the city’s two most important streets meet. It still hasn’t opened, though it is taking form, and can be seen way down along Yonge.
New businesses certainly develop among the towers, but it’s a different ball game. Many condominiums have ground-floor retail spaces, though much like the units, they’re an awkward fit for individual businesses. In the basement complex of the Aura condo at Yonge and Gerrard is Kaiju, a Japanese curry stand that’s worth taking note of, but it’s hard not to notice the rest of the food court has been nearly hollow for over a year.
CityPlace, a concentration of condos close to the waterfront, struggled with luring business into the complex. With a surge of condo projects closing shops and beginning simultaneous construction along Yonge, it becomes frustrating to predict what the area these buildings will end up living in. Former mayor John Sewell chimed in on the Big Slice crisis, telling the CBC, “We’re building all these new buildings—well, then there’s no place for these little things that have managed to become The Big Slice… It means you can’t have small shops or people starting up little businesses and doing really interesting things in the downtown core.”
For generations, Big Slice—a wide tiled hallway that served greasy pizza and hung the kind of Scarface posters you’d buy in a parking lot—was a beloved institution. And as much as it’s just another part of life to let these places go, the frequency and density of these joints getting bowled over for condos can’t help but cause anxiety for the future of Toronto.
