A friend calls the Aura condo building “Toronto’s new CN Tower.” The tallest residential building in Canada for now, it’s the new landmark in town.

Aura’s slanted roofline cuts like a knife through the middle of the city. It’s visible from far away and peeking in-between buildings when closer to it. The most graceful part of the building, elegant and minimal white LED lights running down from the roofline were switched on last year.

Are they icicles? A beacon? Perhaps they’re tears, a kind of “tiny violin” playing for all the people who hate condos, no matter that condos are the only home many people will ever be able to purchase in this expensive city.

Architect and design-minded friends hate the lights. “They’re not art,” they say. “They’re vulgar.” Perhaps, but the longer they’ve been switched on the more I love them. A bit of low culture very high up. Not every building should have lights like Aura’s, indeed most shouldn’t, but this slightly audacious yet energy-efficient addition is pleasant and sharp: a sign of human life where there wasn’t any before.

While the design of the building itself seems like a boring boardroom compromise, and the above ground retail feels more big box suburban than downtown, Aura’s basement mall is the other potentially great part of this building.

With its tiny, glassed-in micro-shops, they’re a cheaper space for independent small business owners than those found on the sidewalks above. It could be a teeming bazaar like those found in cities on other continents, but retail analysts will tell you in North America small shops need a big anchor to attract people, and since there is none here, few venture down despite the visibility of the top floors.

So few, in fact, that last week the Star reported the condo corporation representing the retail tenants launched a $31.6-million lawsuit against the building developers.

Descending down an unremarkable escalator by a sign promising 130 shops, visitors are met at the bottom by a jumbled collection of signs, some even hand drawn, that point to various businesses. Though a sign of the desperation felt by shopkeepers, they’re a welcome and unexpected bit of messy commercial action, more like what we find on less regulated sidewalks than in sterile malls. The food court even has a built-in stage, a currently lonely place that seems to be pleading for the community that could one day develop here.

Aura is not attached to the main underground PATH system connecting buildings downtown, but it is connected to College Park, one of the “mini-PATHs” that are found all along the Yonge subway line up to North York. But getting into College Park from Aura is like negotiating a game of mousetrap, the connection is so Byzantine.

Famously, the PATH’s way-finding system is difficult to negotiate because, so the lore goes, each property owner wanted people to stay and shop in their part of the system, but the Aura-College Park connection is nearly invisible and almost hostile to pedestrian passage.

The connection should be redesigned, seamlessly linking Aura to the College Park mall with its Art Deco flourishes that stretch all the way to Bay and College Sts., where a small obscure door on the lower level connects to the Residences on College Park buildings on Bay St. There are potentially thousands of residents connected to these underground passages.

Already in the Aura mall residents wearing shorts in the middle of winter can be seen, free to wander their nascent subterranean civilization without a coat.

Go visit the shopkeepers that are down there now - some have sunk their life savings into these businesses - and give this unusual-for-Toronto space a boost. You can’t miss it; just follow the Aura lights from wherever you are in the city.

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Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef