I’m with Joe Clark – I think the Leslieville Starbucks is a good thing. Actually, I think the whole bien-pensant objection to Starbucks is a west-end affectation – ‘Drake, you ho,’ etc., etc. If you have as many Labradors as the east end does, the tall lattes naturally follow, and you have to buy them somewhere.
Besides, I like their coffee, though I refuse to play the whole tall/grande/venti/short game - 'Large and strong' seems to work.
However:
At Queen and Logan, the city should never have let them get away with removing the three bay windows from the second story of the building. They were a sort of commercial façade version of the Toronto residential bay and gable, and as far as I can see from about the same period. In general, Starbucks isn’t all that bad at site preservation, for a big company – doesn’t the King and George one still have a pressed tin ceiling? I'm too sleepy to notice, most Saturdays. (Update: Apparently not. It's a nice Victorian storefront, though.)
It’s bad from an architectural preservation point of view, but also bad for the new use – why wouldn’t you want three south-facing bay windows in a coffee shop? They would have been nice in white or off-white.
Before-and-after shots are at Joe’s site.
It's not a very interesting building, and now the new owners have taken off the only thing that could really be called an architectural detail.
