The Diner Closed. The Strip Didn't. What's Actually Happening on Lawrence Avenue East

Drive Lawrence Avenue East between Warden and Birchmount today and the block that used to hold the Wexford Restaurant still has its parking lot, its low-slung plaza roofline, its faded sign bracket. The diner that filled it for 62 years, run first by the Kirk brothers starting in 1958 and later by three generations of the Kiriakou family, closed in 2020. By the time it shut, the place had reportedly poured something like 10 billion cups of coffee for a neighbourhood that kept coming back for the same booth, the same waitress, the same order. That closure reads like the start of a familiar story: old diner gone, tower goes up, strip disappears. Except that isn't what's happening here.

What's actually happening on this stretch of Lawrence is stranger and more specific than either "nothing's changing" or "it's all getting torn down." Towers are getting approved on this exact street. The commercial strip around them is not being cleared to make room. Those are two different processes running at the same time, on the same road, and understanding which one applies to which parcel is the difference between reading this corridor accurately and reading it the way outside coverage usually does.

Two Kinds of Redevelopment, One Avenue Apart

A kilometre or so north, Eglinton Avenue East is going through a wholesale rebuild. The Golden Mile Secondary Plan, adopted by Toronto City Council in 2020 and confirmed with modifications by the Ontario Land Tribunal in December 2024, covers roughly 280 acres between Victoria Park and Birchmount. City planners have described it as a near-total redevelopment of the existing sites, phased over what could be decades, with Choice Properties and The Daniels Corporation leading the first phase on the old Golden Mile Shopping Centre site, including a planned "Communiversity" space built with the University of Toronto Scarborough and Centennial College. As of a September 2022 count, developers had proposed more than 35,000 new residential units along that corridor.

Lawrence Avenue East, one avenue south through Wexford Heights, is not getting that treatment. What's landing there is a series of individual site approvals, not a secondary plan:

Each of those is a single landowner making a single application on a single lot. None of them requires the surrounding strip malls, the Wexford Heights Plaza, or the businesses inside it to be assembled or cleared. That's the structural difference between what Eglinton is getting and what Lawrence is getting, and it's the reason the corridor still functions the way it always has while cranes go up around it.

What Doesn't Come Down When a Tower Goes Up

The Wexford Heights Business Improvement Area counts more than 245 member businesses along this stretch, and a block-level survey of 87 of them found 81 percent independently owned, many run by Bengali, Gujarati, Iranian, Nigerian, Somali, and Filipino families who built their operations inside the same postwar strip malls that have lined Lawrence since the car took over the street. That's not a static number from a decade ago. Recent additions keep landing in the same plazas: Pastable, a comfort-food concept, opened along Lawrence Ave E in Wexford-Maryvale, and Old Soul Pizzeria has been running a wood-fired trailer on the same stretch. Diana's Seafood, managed by Wilson Ho, held on through the pandemic when a third of surveyed businesses on the block said they expected to close or scale back within months if restrictions tightened further. Most didn't take the federal rent or wage subsidies on offer. They just kept the lights on.

None of that is what a "Scarborough redevelopment" headline usually captures. The towers get the renderings. The 87 businesses on the ground floor of the plazas they're rising next to get counted, if at all, as a footnote about the neighbourhood "before."

The Corridor's Own Calendar

The BIA isn't treating the strip as a placeholder either. This past July 3 to 5, Taste of Lawrence returned as Scarborough's largest street festival, with an opening parade and a new addition for 2026: the TOL Soccer Hub at Lawrence and Birchmount, built around free workshops, a street-side mini pitch, and programming tied to international soccer nations. That's a festival investing in a new attraction in the same year that a 40-storey tower application landed three blocks away. One is not waiting on the other.

A few blocks off Lawrence, Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts has its own institutional memory worth knowing if you live nearby: its glee club, the Wexford Gleeks, once performed a duet with astronaut Chris Hadfield while he was aboard the International Space Station, alongside Barenaked Ladies singer Ed Robertson. It's the kind of detail that tells you this stretch of Scarborough has been building its own reputation for a long time, independent of whatever gets approved at city hall.

The Trail Behind the Strip Malls

Lawrence itself is built for cars, seven lanes wide through the Wexford Heights section, plazas set back behind parking lots. But the corridor behind it works differently. The Gatineau Hydro Corridor runs east-west between Ashtonbee Reservoir Park and Wexford Park, and it's now part of the Meadoway, a joint project of the City of Toronto, the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, and the W. Garfield Weston Foundation to eventually connect four ravines, 15 parks, and more than 30 neighbourhoods on a path stretching from the Don River to Rouge National Urban Park. Ellesmere Skatepark, tucked into the Ellesmere Community Centre grounds, runs a summer skateboard camp with its own youth advisory council. None of that shows up if you only look at Lawrence Avenue from a car window.

Worth noting, since it's easy to conflate: the current major construction on the Scarborough Subway Extension is happening at Lawrence Avenue and McCowan Road, several kilometres east of Wexford Heights, near Scarborough General Hospital. It's a real and active project on the same street name, but it's not the same stretch, and it's not connected to the site approvals landing in Wexford.

What This Actually Means If This Is Your Street

The version of this corridor that gets flattened into "Scarborough is redeveloping" coverage misses the actual mechanics. Towers are arriving parcel by parcel, each one a separate landowner's decision, none of them requiring the plazas around them to close. The businesses that make up 81 percent of this stretch aren't being cleared for assembly the way Golden Mile's shopping centre is. They're operating next to construction, the same way they operated through a pandemic that closed businesses on blocks with far less resilience. The diner that didn't survive closed on its own terms, not because a developer needed the lot.

If you've been watching a crane go up near your own plaza and wondering what it means for the rest of the street, the honest answer is that it probably means less than the Eglinton Avenue version of this story suggests. That's worth knowing whether you're staying put or just trying to read your own neighbourhood correctly.

If you're weighing what any of this means for what your home on or near this corridor is actually worth right now, Blue Door Realty Group knows this stretch of Scarborough block by block. Request your free home valuation and get a read grounded in the street you actually live on, not the one the headlines describe.