I drink a lot of coffee. Not as much, I'm sure, as my wife, and nowhere near as much as fellow Canadians, whose thirst for java in all its forms means that major coffee franchisees can open on competing corners from each other, and no up-and-coming urban neighbourhood has truly arrived until it has at least one stylish, serious shop selling latte with artful little swirls etched in foam.

Te Aro opened last spring in a former garage in Leslieville, a neighbourhood with no shortage of coffee shops. Given this saturation, owners Jessie and Andy Wilkin decided to offer coffee tastings to educate their customers on what goes into a cup - and showcase their beans. I managed an invite to the first test run of the tasting - or "cupping," as it would more properly be called - as a way of addressing the fact that, for all of the java I down, I don't really know much about the stuff.

There's an interesting - and potentially frightening - experiment happening on Lower Ossington right now, and how it turns out could affect how you shop and eat and party for years to come. It's been five months now since Ward 19 councillor and deputy mayor Joe Pantalone dropped a surprise interim control bylaw on the street - a "bar ban" that stopped any eateries and drinkeries from opening while a study was undertaken on where the street was going.

At a public meeting last week, the results of the study were revealed, and among the recommendations is an ongoing ban on patios in backyard spaces of restaurants and cafes and a limit on the potential size of restaurants, among other regulations. From here, the proposed new by-law will go to Toronto and East York community council on November 10, and then to the City of Toronto council meeting at the end of November. "I would fully expect it to be approved," Pantalone tells me.

At any given time, without anyone really noticing, some aspect of our life is becoming obsolete. In my lifetime, I've seen TV and radio repair shops disappear, along with neighbourhood tailors, and those hairdressing shops that seem to have been carved out of someone's living room. At the moment, the running bet is whether the record store or the movie theatre will last another generation, but every now and then someone ritually tolls the death knell for a kind of store that didn't even exist when I was a kid - video rental shops.

They've weathered the switch from VHS to DVD, and for some reason they're apparently set to survive the economic downturn, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported that, while DVD sales are collapsing, video rentals are thriving. In Toronto, Blockbuster soldiers on, though the Rogers chain has seen some contraction and smaller chains like Mr. Movie have apparently disappeared. That leaves indie stores like Suspect, Black Dog, Eyesore, Bay Street, Marquee, The Film Buff and Queen Video - the majority of them clustered in the west end and, according to their owners, still going strong.

Before there was Queen West or Yorkville, there was Gerrard Village, a long-gone artists' enclave described as "Toronto's Greenwich Village," and in operation as such for much longer than either of these legendary bohemian hangouts. There's not much left today except a conspicuous stand of onetime Victorian homes running along a short block on the north side of Gerrard between Bay and Laplante Avenue, an isolated island of weathered brick in a forest of office towers, condos, hotels and hospital buildings.

There was some public agonizing this week over the ongoing gentrification of the Church-Wellesley "gay ghetto," which made me wonder at how permanent a neighbourhood can seem when it's thriving, and how utterly it can seem to have disappeared when its residents move on with the fashion and the times - either voluntarily or with a developer's hand pushing firmly at their back. Don Cullen remembers Gerrard Village all too well, back when the actor/writer was the proprietor of the Bohemian Embassy, its most famous coffee house.

Everybody likes poking around strangers' houses - it's probably the only really enjoyable part of the decidedly anxious process of hunting for a new house or apartment. After launching their Art Of Living: Architecture series with a tour of artist Charles Pachter's home near the AGO, artsScene finished up their summer series with a visit to another private home in the Queen and Ossington neighbourhood - a starter home with a dubious past owned by a young couple.

You can tell that Joe Troppmann and Danielle Lam-Kukzak are both architects by a rather cute detail in their living room: twin copies of Rem Koolhaas' S,M,L,XL sitting on top of each other. The semi-detached house they bought in 2004 had a bit of a history - it was built in 1865, and remains one of the few homes of that vintage on the street, but before they took possession, it was a rooming house, and the home of a neighbourhood drug dealer who used the attic crawlspace to hide his stash.

When the Garrison opened its doors last weekend, it gave Dundas West one more reason to glow with the rosy glow of "it" neighbourhood vitality. While the intersection of Ossington and Dundas already boasts a music venue, the arrival of the new club brings the indie sound and sensibility to an area so far musically defined by the country twang of the Dakota.

Whatever the Garrison comes to mean for music in Toronto - with less than a week in operation, it's probably unfair to call it anything yet - it definitely signals a long overdue shift west of the city's musical heartland. It was way back at the turn of the '90s, after all, when Queen West gave way to College Street, and for much of that time one grungy little bar, Sneaky Dee's at Bathurst, has been the default epicenter.