If you were riding on a streetcar on King St. W. through the Theatre District this week, you might have noticed a strange marketing gesture aimed at you. A giant ice sculpture on the patio of the Kit Kat restaurant, in the shape of a raised middle finger.Why would this restaurant be flipping you the bird? A handwritten sign on the door of the restaurant cleared up any doubt about who the “profanity” was aimed at. “The King Street Pilot Project is hurting our business,” it reads. And by mid-week, the fingers were multiplying as more of them appeared, flipping off potential customers along the route.For people who say business is down because of streetcar traffic, I gotta say the owners have chosen a really bizarre way to try to welcome riders in.Despite the TTC’s reporting on the ridership and transit-travel success of the pilot project, recent headlines have been dominated by the complaints of business owners about sales declines they say correspond to the yearlong pilot’s launch in mid-November. These business owners say the elimination of street parking and imposition of local-traffic-only car travel restrictions are responsible for the downturn.Fred Luk, owner of Fred’s Not Here, another Theatre District restaurant, wrote an op-ed in the Star recently making the case that transforming the street into an “urban freeway for streetcars” has turned the strip into “a wasteland. No vibrancy, no pedestrians, no culture . . . and soon to be inhabited by ‘Closed’ and ‘For Sale’ signs.”It’s worth noting that Luk has a bit of a habit of declaring that the end is nigh for his restaurant and the businesses around it. My colleague Shawn Micallef recently enumerated how often Luk has cried “wolf” in the media: last year Luk called the increase in the minimum wage a “small business killer,” and said that businesses like his “cannot survive” thei ...
|
