BenchMark: Musical Bench and School Bakery & Café

BenchMark Blogs: the Art Benches of Liberty Village

If you have missed the previous posts explaining the Liberty Village Benchmark program and the art benches we have located in our village go here to fetch them all and read the earlier posts. This is the 9th post in the series to feature each of our 19 art benches.

The bench I am featuring today is on the north east corner of Fraser and Liberty Street. It is bench number 12 on the Benchmark Map which can be accessed here.  Titled "Musical Bench", it was created by Paul Aloisi and sponsored by the Softchoice Corporation.   Softchoice is a local business providing Business Solutions, IT Asset Management and Technology Acquisition from their Liberty Village Offices.

Don't you just want to pick up the mallet and tap out a tune?  There are so many clever art benches and most all of them make me smile as I walk through the village.   When I first wrote this blog I used the summer pictures -the two left most - and noticed that there was something missing - a mallet to play the benchzylophone with.  I was thinking that perhaps  someone made off with it - I have noticed that at one other art Bench (which I have yet to blog about), pieces have gone missing.  I drove by the bench on Sunday and saw that the mallet was now in place!  So I took some additonal pictures of the Music Bench with mallet, though the day was rainy and they are not so good as the summer ones do add a lot to this bench blog's completeness. 




A restaurant or Café on Every Corner...

Across the street from Musical Bench is the School Bakery & Café, located  at 70 Fraser Street.  It does seem that there are a tremendous number of restaurants, bistros, bars, coffee shops, and the like in Liberty Village.  Just to recap the ones I have already covered in previous blogs:  Mildred's Kitchen (where I went last summer for a scrumptious birthday treat), Liberty Bistro (lots of blogs about the Liberty Bistro!), Brazen Head and the Roastery.  I have just done a mental count and that still leaves more than a dozen places that I've not even mentioned yet.  For an area which is only 38.6 hectares (less than .15 square miles) it is quite dense, consisting of 109 properties zoned commercial or industrial, home to about 500 businesses, employing 6,000 full and part time employees.  The residential area, mostly the easterly half, is (by my guess - I've seen no census) maybe only 1,000 people but will reach perhaps 10,000 in the next decade when the 10 or so high rises eventually fill that area.  So there are lots of restaurants now and there will be even more needed in the years to come.

 You can see the Toronto Carpet Building in the background. It is a really hopping place during the summer with tables in the front and side patios. It services mainly the daytime business crowd and the brunch - lunch weekend crowd - the kitchen is closed at 4pm, although the bakery is open until 7 pm on a weekday.  They are open for dinner part week during the summer.  Go here to read a review which describes the school house decor and also gives a very unflattering judgment of the food. There are however a few rebuttal comments from the local regulars. As I said it seemed to be pretty busy whenever I walked by this last summer.