Too bad they don't have Toronto listed. There was a place called Il Gato Nero on College St that had been in a couple locations in the area for about 50 years. The family has a new and different location in Etobicoke, but I spent probably 20 years drinking coffee at its College bars and they were an anchor for the street and neighbourhood.

If you were from downtown, it was where a lot of our stories and memories happened. You knew legends about people who you saw there but might not have talked to much. I left the city shortly after it closed because there wasn't anything to replace the life it made possible, where you could spend a saturday morning with a newspaper at the bar that served real food and make small talk with strangers. You might learn their names and what they did after a decade of seeing them, but it didn't matter. I still pop into the new place once in a while to pick up the coffee that is like nowhere else and it's worth the trip, but the downtown chapter is closed.

Same with La Hacienda on Queen St. Those two spots were landmarks of the city and its culture, and when they went, they took a lot of the coherence of the stories of people who grew up in them with them. Brunch tables full of punks, goths, and rockers wearing last nights makeup at La Hacienda usually with some awful local hardcore blaring over the speakers and farcically hostile service were what defined Queen st. People there were legends too. You'd see them and hear stories about them even if you'd never been introduced, and everyone would always talk about how they knew each other when.

Pandemic policies killed those places and also destroyed the culture of the city, so I left. I'm sure new people will make new memories, but it takes generations to make anything like that again.