There was a time the intersection of Yonge St. and St. Clair Ave. was considered uptown, but now it’s midtown. Today, North York City Centre is Toronto’s uptown as we’ve come around to accepting some of the new, expanded edges of this city 17 years after amalgamation — though Scarborough and Etobicoke have yet to be universally considered the east and west sides. Give it time.

Yonge and St. Clair is an in-between kind of place. Not as big and tall as Yonge St. and Eglinton Ave., and not as busy a crossroads as Yonge and Bloor Sts.

It isn’t one of the cool neighbourhoods, either; the restaurants, bars and shops here don’t make the trendy lists. The neighbourhood is like Frank Sinatra in the late 1960s: a little out of touch with the avant-garde, but still wearing a sharp suit and drinking booze out of a proper highball glass. His style remained even as the fashions of the moment moved elsewhere.

Comparisons between Toronto and New York are tired and clichéd but there’s something particularly Upper East Side Manhattan to Yonge and St. Clair, a solidly middle- and upper-middle-class place to be sure, but the kind of neighbourhood that is comfortable in being a city and, more importantly, where people are comfortable living in apartments their entire lives.

So often in Toronto, apartments are seen as a temporary living arrangement on the way to single-family home ownership; the Canadian dream of backyards, green bins and, if this past week is any indication, frozen pipes.

When I lived here 15 years ago — my first Toronto neighbourhood — there were people in my 32-storey building on Pleasant Ave. who had lived there for decades. There were families, too; sometimes I’d share the morning elevator with schoolchildren on their way to class. The great thing about older apartments is that many are built big enough to have kids in.

Buildings around Yonge and St. Clair are generally well-maintained, whether mid-century modern or pre-war. In neighbourhoods that aren’t so middle class, buildings are often left to deteriorate. House or highrise, anything that isn’t taken care of properly can become unpleasant, but this neighbourhood is a model in how apartment living can be wonderful.

In a way, Yonge and St. Clair is a Toronto utopia. Take a walk along St. Clair Ave. heading west from Yonge St. It’s one of the finest collections of pre-war, postwar and contemporary buildings in the city. There may be no “starchitect” names attached to any of them, but they’re as handsome a row of buildings as Toronto has.

Most famous are the Park Lane Apartments at 110 St. Clair W., where pianist Glenn Gould once lived in the penthouse. Less well known, a block away are the Fleetwood Apartments at number 64, a 1939 art deco gem with streamline corners and an entrance that suggests you’ve arrived someplace that matters.

Across the street is Granite Place, a bit forbidding with its “No Trespassing” sign warning people away from its park-like grounds. This is the former location of the Granite Club before it chased wealthy Torontonians north and east to the Bridle Path, relocating to Bayview Ave. in 1972.

The former Imperial Oil building is here, too, its design originally submitted in the competition for New City Hall in the late 1950s. It is now being converted to condos and renamed the Imperial Plaza. Other buildings, older and newer, are like a home and garden tour of better apartment living, with public art and interesting design abound.

If somebody sang a song about this neighbourhood, it would be Frank Sinatra. Accompanied by Glenn Gould, of course.

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