Stand at Roselawn and Avenue on a Sunday morning in July and count the minutes to a train platform. It is now roughly the same time it takes to walk to Phipps for a coffee. That is the change nobody quite prepared for, and it is the reason this summer in Allenby does not feel like last summer, or the ten summers before it.
The Eglinton Crosstown finally opened for service on February 8, 2026, after fifteen years of soil tests, closed storefronts and revised timelines. For the rest of the city it is a transit story. For people who live between Briar Hill and Chaplin, it is a neighbourhood story, and the plot turns on one detail most write-ups miss.
The 90-second detail that changes the map
Avenue Station's main entrance sits on the northwest corner of Eglinton and Avenue Road, with a second entrance about 80 metres east on the north side of Eglinton. It is also the deepest underground station in the entire Toronto subway system relative to street level, which is why the escalator ride feels theatrical. Chaplin Station, one stop east, has three entrances, one of which was a fire station in the 1920s, plus 32 outdoor bicycle parking spots.
For most of Allenby, this means the walk to rapid transit is now under ten minutes without touching Yonge Street. The 34 Eglinton bus, once the only surface option, has been reorganized around the line, and the 13 Avenue Road now runs northbound via Avenue Road between Chaplin Crescent and Eglinton to feed Avenue Station directly. Trains run every three to four minutes in peak hours and every five to six minutes off-peak, with service currently ending at 11 p.m. daily until full service phases in later in Q2.
The centre of gravity for a typical Allenby weekend has quietly slid west from Yonge-Eglinton to Avenue and Eglinton. The Yonge side is still there. It is just no longer the obvious answer.
Sunday, redrawn
Consider the classic Allenby Sunday: bagels, a walk on the Beltline, groceries, maybe a coffee on the way home. Every one of those stops has shifted this summer.
The Eglinton Way BIA's Sunday Farmers' Market is in its 9th season, running from June 7 through October 25 in the Green P parking lot on Burnaby Boulevard, just north of Eglinton near Castle Knock Road. It is a short walk from the eastern half of Allenby and now an even shorter transit hop from friends visiting from the east end. In practical terms, that has thickened the crowd; a market that used to draw mostly regulars from Chaplin Estates and the south end of Allenby now pulls from further afield.
From the market, the Kay Gardner Beltline Trail is a two-minute detour, with access south of Eglinton off Chaplin Avenue and at Oriole Parkway. The 7-kilometre path is still the same corridor of shade and gravel it has always been, but the density of dogs on Sunday morning is measurably higher, and the stroller traffic near the Chaplin entry point now backs up in a way it did not before.
Groceries after the walk still means Summerhill Market on Yonge, an Allenby institution for more than 70 years, or a shorter trip along Eglinton to the shops that have anchored The Eglinton Way BIA since it was formed in 1987, one of the first BIAs approved by the city.
A quick before and after
| Sunday errand | Old default | Summer 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Rapid transit to downtown | 34 Eglinton bus to Yonge, then Line 1 | Line 5 from Avenue Station, one transfer at Eglinton |
| Farmers' produce | Weekend drive to St. Lawrence | Sunday walk to Burnaby Blvd Green P |
| Cross-town dinner in Leaside | 20 minutes by car | 15 minutes on Line 5 to Laird |
| Airport run | Cab or drive up the Allen | Line 5 to UP Express connection at Mount Dennis |
None of these were impossible before. They were just annoying enough that most residents skipped them. The change is in the friction, not the destination.
What Dream Wheels tells you about the street
On July 25 this year, the Eglinton Way BIA closed the road between Elmsthorpe Avenue and Russell Hill Road for the fourth annual Dream Wheels on Eglinton. Nearly 130 classic and vintage vehicles were on display, alongside food vendors, a beverage garden, live music and a pin-up contest that has become a small tradition. Attendance for these festivals sits around 15,000 people.
Read the festival as a data point rather than an event. A BIA does not close its own high street for a full day unless the surrounding businesses are confident the foot traffic will convert. That confidence, after fifteen years of construction dust, is new. Expect more of these closures. Expect the block between Avenue Road and Bathurst to behave more like a destination corridor and less like a commuter shortcut, particularly on summer weekends.
Weeknights on Eglinton
The dining stretch that borders Allenby has always been quietly competent rather than headline-grabbing. That has not changed, and residents who have lived here for a decade will already have their rotation. What has changed is who is joining them at the table.
- 7 Numbers remains the candlelit southern Italian standby for date nights and small anniversaries.
- Ferraro 502 still runs the wood-burning oven for pizzas and antipasti that reward showing up early.
- The Abbot on Eglinton is where the fireplace and the craft beer list argue for a slower Wednesday.
- Phipps Bakery and Dessert Shop covers the take-home cake, the school-day quiche and the emergency cookie.
- The Bagel House handles Saturday morning breakfast and the dozen you bring to a cottage.
The reservation books at all five have tightened noticeably since February. The most useful practical advice for a resident this summer is the least glamorous: book earlier in the week than you used to, especially on Thursdays, which have quietly become the new Friday since transit made a spontaneous dinner from Leslieville actually feasible.
The bikeway question, honestly
The other change coming to the street is the eglintonTOday complete street project, which City Council approved in May 2024 for the stretch between Bicknell Avenue and Mount Pleasant Road. The design adds bikeways and reallocates road width; installation was planned for summer 2025 but was pushed to align with the LRT opening and minimize construction chaos on top of transit disruption. The City's project page has not yet set an opening date.
For Allenby residents the practical question is parking. Eglinton between Bicknell and Mount Pleasant currently has 366 pay-and-display spaces plus roughly 100 short-term unpaid spots, most restricted during peak hours. The complete street design brings that to 313 all-day paid parking spots. Fewer total spaces, but many more of them usable at 5 p.m. on a Wednesday, which is when most residents actually try to grab a spot outside Phipps. Whether that trade lands well or badly depends entirely on how often you drive versus how often you walk.
The anchor that has not changed
For all the movement on Eglinton this year, the reason people live in Allenby has not shifted. Eglinton Park sits at 8.5 hectares between residential streets, with a baseball diamond, wading pool and enough shaded benches to absorb a hot Sunday afternoon. The North Toronto Memorial Community Recreation Centre continues to run its indoor and outdoor pools, gymnasium, walking track, and two artificial ice rinks that are converted to tennis courts in the summer. On a July afternoon those courts are busier than they were a year ago, which is either the transit effect or simply a good tennis summer. It is probably both.
The house-lined streets between Roselawn and Briar Hill still slope the way they always did, still hold the 1930s and 1940s brick two-storeys that have been carefully renovated one at a time, and still empty out to the sound of the schoolyard at Allenby Junior Public School in September. What the Crosstown has done is not change the neighbourhood. It has widened the radius of what counts as convenient without asking the neighbourhood to give up any of its texture. That is a rare trade in this city.
The most honest summary of Summer 2026 in Allenby is that ordinary things now take slightly less time and ordinary places now hold slightly more people. Whether that reads as gain or loss depends on the resident. Ask again in October, once the market wraps for the season and the pool covers come off the ice pads.
If you have been watching how these changes are reshaping demand across Allenby, Chaplin Estates and the rest of the TREB C4 pocket, Adam Weiner + Associates tracks these shifts street by street. Request a concierge consultation when you would like a considered read on your block.
