Coming home from tonight's seminar, I was walking through the intersection of Bank St. and Laurier Ave. Recently, a large apartment building/condo was built on the southwest corner. The main floor is home to a Shopper's Drug Mart. The drug store had relocated from the northeast corner of the intersection. It's now bigger and quite a bit nicer. This was definitely an improvement.
Unfortunately, that left a rather large storefront vacant. Considering the state of the economy, and the fact that a number of storefronts downtown had been vacant for quite some time, I assumed this would lie fallow for a while.
As you can see by the picture to the right, this is not the case. A new cosmetics store, Murale, is opening up. They're currently renovating the interior, and I don't know when they'll start doing business, but this seems like a good sign.
The storefront is quite striking. There's a long stretch of these white signs with purple lettering (along the side of the building that you can't see). It doesn't quite fit with the brown brick, but I think, overall, it works, in an odd urban-renewal sort of way. And regardless, I'm just happy that the site won't be empty and boarded up for months.
