Toronto is a never-ending construction project. This seems to annoy people, but most of the great cities around the world are unfinished, the others are museum pieces. Nice, but it might get boring living in a museum. King St. W. has been one of the biggest construction zones for the last decade and a half, beginning in the Entertainment District, and then spreading west.

Places like King West are judged long before they’ve had a chance to mature. Neighbourhoods take a few decades to come into their own, as the first wave of sometimes-boring retail changes to reflect the desires of the people living there. It becomes lived in. Go for a walk along King West sometime this summer and you’ll see this unfolding.

Just a decade ago King, west of Spadina, was busy on weekend nights when the nearby clubs were happening, but quiet most other times, save for a few pockets of activity like the historic Wheat Sheaf tavern at Bathurst St., or buildings such as The Summit, a block west, built in the mid-1980s. Otherwise the sidewalks were relatively lonely places; nearby residents tended to gravitate north to Queen St. as King was mostly lined with defunct industrial buildings, derelict land, or car lots.

It’s still a work in progress, but King has reached a point of incredible urban thickness, with people around, day and night. Lots of them. And the condo buildings on King, for the most part, aren’t the usual glass boxes either, but rather appear as stacked pavilions in various midrise configurations, especially in the blocks east and west of Bathurst. In a number of buildings there are even restaurants and bars underneath the condos, such as Weslodge or the Foggy Dew. Here it appears residents understand that if you move onto a main street, you become the caretakers of public life, allowing a variety of social uses down below. In other parts of the city new condos owners have resisted restaurants and bars in their main street buildings .

Farther west, around the Strachan Ave. and Shaw St. intersections, new buildings have created a rather elegant canyon of people 10 or 12 storeys high, with passages in between and small urban spaces like the Massey Harris Park or large ones like Stanley park as part of the mix. At Strachan, walk west along Douro St. to see the massive reconstruction of the Georgetown rail corridor and preparations for the Union Pearson Express. The width of the corridor is immense, which is why the King St. railroad subway underneath it, built in 1888, is so long. There’s a lot of railway real estate to pass under.

Climb the steps into Liberty Village on the west side of the underpass. It’s a nice view and a good place to contemplate the area. There are thousands of people along King, more thousands on the other side of the tracks in Liberty Village. Farther west, in well-established Parkdale, there are even more. The thing they all have in common is the 504 King Streetcar and its legendary awfulness . Overcrowded and stuck in traffic, the 504 creates a roar of social media angst every day.

Yet look at the sheer number of people who live along King now. If people here organized — “King West Nation,” if you will — change could happen, whether it’s a 504 right-of-way, or the removal of parking on King to keep traffic moving. King Street Nation might also ask why there isn’t a GO Train station in all that extra space atop the King St. railway subway, providing a 504 alternative, serving both sides of the tracks and the nearby Queen West Triangle. Why not throw in an airport express stop, too?

Political will only comes with numbers and King West Nation has them now. Members should start roaring in unison.

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

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