• Bloor Street commercial strip (South Kingsway to Ellis Park Rd.)
• Ontario Heritage Trust BIA plaque (Bloor & Runnymede)
• High Park (adjacent)

Bloor West Village is a west-end Toronto shopping strip that grew along Bloor Street after West Toronto's 1909 annexation to the city. Most of its storefronts were built between 1920 and 1930, as the streetcar line — extended to Jane Street by 1921 — brought steady foot traffic. When the Bloor–Danforth subway opened in 1966 and pulled shoppers downtown, local merchants responded in 1970 by forming the Bloor West Village Business Improvement Area, the first mandatory business-improvement district anywhere in the world.

Chairman Alex Ling led the BIA for 24 years and went on to found the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas in 1980, a model since adopted by cities worldwide. An Ontario Heritage Trust plaque, erected in 2011 on Bloor Street near Runnymede Road, marks the innovation, and the strip still counts roughly 400 businesses between South Kingsway and Ellis Park Road, alongside High Park.

Wearing Bloor West Village means repping the merchants who worked out how to save a main street — and whose idea travelled around the world.