[CAT] Shakespeare, wondering

[VIDEO] 510 Spadina, south from Spadina Station to Front Street

"510 Spadina, south from Spadina Station to Front Street" (Watch on YouTube)

Yesterday, I rode a Bombardier Flexity streetcar on the 510 Spadina route southbound, from the Spadina TTC station south to Front Street. This video, clocking in at 18:02, shows the smooth ride and the rapid progression through different neighbourhoods: the Annex and the University of Toronto, then through Chinatown and past Kensington Market, finally ending up at the new condo developments south of Queen Street West.

[PHOTO] Ten photos from Jane at Home, Urbanspace Gallery, Toronto

On Tuesday, I linked to an interview in The Globe and Mail with Jim Jacobs, son of Jane Jacobs, about Jane at Home, an exhibit of artifacts from his mother's life. Hosted in the Urbanspace Gallery in the 401 Richmond complex at 401 Richmond Street West just east of Spadina, the only element of the exhibit of concern to me was its shortness: It is running only from the 29th of April to the 8th of May. That meant that I had to get down there, quickly. I found the time to do that yesterday.



Jane at Home is definitely a thorough exhibit, bringing together material from across her entire life. Her Pennsylvania childhood is represented by, among other things, some of her childhood toys and a book of her very early poetry.



From her final years in Toronto, not only do we have one of her trademark ponchos and reusable Annex shopping bag ...



... we even have some of her bottles of preserves and jams.



The exhibit is filled with artifacts of her quotidian life. I quite liked the many photographs, of friends and family and Jacobs herself, taken throughout her life in both of her countries. The deck chairs reupholstered into living room chairs were also neat, too, and comfortable, as was her old kitchen table from her Greenwich Village home.

I was delighted to find out that she was, more so than me, a collector of buttons. The sheer heft of her collection of fifty years of protest buttons, from the United States and Canada, left me in awe.



Jacobs had also accumulated a thorough collection of buttons from the campaign of Wendell Wilkie, challenger to FDR in 1940 presidential election. (She had supported Wilkie's campaign on the grounds that FDR's opting for a third term was a worrisome break from America's two-term tradition.)



Many of the artifacts tied in directly to her books. Her The Question of Separatism was represented by the pins and buttons she had taken from a 1981 Québec sovereignty collection, as well as by an Irish one-pound note.





And, of course, there were her books, in their original English and in their many translations.



We even saw her typewriter.



I had the chance to chat with Jim Jacobs, a genial man who filled me in on Jane at Home's backstory. The exhibit's shortness is a consequence of his very rapid development, from its initial conception this past winter to its installation in an art gallery that happened to have some free time between regularly-scheduled exhibits. If there is a single flaw in the exhibit, it is in the short time that it's up. I only hope that Jane at Home will be remounted for a longer period, ideally as some kind of permanent collection open to the public.

This exhibit will still be on display for two more days. I strongly recommend that anyone within reach of downtown Toronto with an interest in Jane Jacobs' life and work head down to the Urbanspace Gallery to see Jane at Home.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• blogTO shares ten facts about the Toronto Islands.


• Centauri Dreams features an article talking about "exoanthropology", a theoretical branch of that social science aimed at examining human adaptation to offworld environments.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper speculating that white dwarf NLTT19868 shows signs of having eaten a rocky world.


• The Dragon's Tales links to one paper identifying different species of bacteria which can grow under simulated Martian environments and notes another looking at the possibility of a subsurface ocean on Titan.


• Languages of the World looks at patterns of religiosity in Russia.


• The NYR Daily considers Donald Trump's long-term strategy.


• Peter Rukavina reflects on the new music of Jane Siberry and Brian Eno.


• Torontoist notes some neglected public art by Fort York under the Gardiner.


• Window on Eurasia notes core/periphery divisions in Moscow's population.

[NEWS] Some Saturday links

• Bloomberg notes California's dependence on oil imports, looks at how Libya's internal divisions limit oil exports, observes the devastation of Fort McMurray, reports on EU-Turkish disputes on visa-free travel, observes the problems of Belarus' banks, and reports on Kenya's closure of Somali refugee camps.


• Bloomberg View talks about how the Venezuelan military should be kept out of business.


• Daily Xtra notes the internal struggle in the Conservative Party to accept same-sex marriage.


• The National Post notes an arson attack against Canada's only sex reassignment clinic.


• New Scientist reports on a suggestion that life might have begun on Earth at a very early date.


• The New York Times notes the impact that the marriage of the American consul-general in Shanghai to a Taiwanese man has had on China.


• Open Democracy describes the worsening situation in Turkish Kurdistan.


• Wired notes that Huawei was too eager to copy everything about the iPhone, even screws which aren't very good.

[URBAN NOTE] "Jane Up North": Shawn Micallef on Jane Jacobs in Toronto

Shawn Micallef's Curbed article looks at the import of Jane Jacobs locally.

The Eaton Centre is one of Toronto’s most visited attractions, a downtown mall that runs the length of a superblock between two subway stations. The massive, glass-vaulted space is modeled after the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, but instead of a neo-classical aesthetic, the massive building was space shuttle cool when it was plunked down into the urban fabric in 1977. An ongoing renovation has meant ever-present construction material, covered in a slick marketing campaign called #ToTheCity, with pictures of urbanites doing urban things like riding bikes and standing on street corners, with inspirational, urban-minded quotes scattered throughout. For many months, on what will be the Canadian Nordstrom flagship store, was a Jane Jacobs quote: "Cities can provide something for everybody when they are created by everybody."

Jacobs’s quote was next to one from hometown hero Drake, "When I think of myself, I think of Toronto." Neither the Drake nor the Jacobs quote required context or an explanation of either source's pedigree. It’s unlikely a retail management company anywhere else in North America would assume that Jacobs wouldn’t require a line of biography. But Jacobs is the patron saint of urban-minded Toronto, a benevolent specter watching the evolution of the city she called home for the second half of her life.

Jane Jacobs’s name appearing in Toronto is not unique nor a surprise, but finding it at the mall defies local conventional wisdom. The mall? Ewww. Urbanista Toronto is rife with the sentiment that the Eaton Centre is a place to be avoided at all costs. Inauthentic, crass, and boorish, it’s for people who’ve not yet been enlightened to a better urban way of life, one of cozy neighborhood strips with cafes and cupcake stores. Conventional urban wisdom here might suggest a much more appropriate place for a Jane Jacobs quote is a few kilometers west at a building well known in arts and culture circles in Toronto: 401 Richmond. A massive former factory that produced lithography on tinware products, its various sections were built between 1899 and 1923, but today it’s filled with arts organizations, galleries, studios, magazine offices, artist unions, designers, podcasters, and even one fellow who still fashions pieces of guerrilla art out of copper and other bits of metal and attaches them to utility poles around the city. Jane Jacobs quotes and pictures are here, too, part of an exhibition on her life and work that has been permanently installed inside, but her connection to this building is even deeper.

In fact, 401, which the Zeidler family purchased in 1994, is an illustration of Jacobs’s arguments about urbanism and a piece of her legacy in Toronto. Eberhard Zeidler, the patriarch, was the architect who designed the Eaton Centre. When the Zeidlers purchased 401, the old steampunk neighborhood around it, once the heart of Toronto’s schmatte trade, was dead. "There was one restaurant in the area, just a greasy spoon. Now there has to be like 20 or 30 in that section there," says Margie Zeidler, Eberhard’s daughter and the driving force behind what would become the vital building beloved by so much of Toronto today. Today that 1994 landscape is unimaginable and the building is at the heart of one of the most intense areas of development in North America, with condo towers sprouting where there were once acres of parking lots and buildings left fallow after deindustrialization.

[URBAN NOTE] "Prime Minister Justin Trudeau earmarks up to $840M for Toronto transit"

CBC notes some very good news for funding of Toronto transit.

Signal upgrades on the Bloor-Danforth subway line, new buses on the city's highly travelled bus routes, and repairs and upgrades that will make the city's transit system fully accessible are just some of the projects the TTC will fund with the up to $840 million that's on the way from the federal government.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was in Toronto Friday to announce the funding, which will come from the $3.4 billion in transit money announced in March's federal budget.

Trudeau said that while the money "won't solve every funding challenge the TTC is facing," the announcement is unique in three ways:

■ Toronto will receive the money this year.

■ The federal government will fund up to 50 per cent of the cost of approved projects.

■ How the money will be spent is up to the city, not Ottawa.

[URBAN NOTE] "Quebec Sees Montreal Light-Rail Project Financing Deal This Year"

Bloomberg's Frederic Tomesco notes Québec's new light rail project.

Quebec expects financing for a proposed C$5.5 billion ($4.3 billion) light-rail system linking downtown Montreal to several suburbs and the city’s airport to be finalized this year, Transport Minister Jacques Daoust said.

Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec is seeking permission to build the 67-kilometer (42-mile) light-rail network, provided the federal and provincial governments both chip in. Canada’s second-largest public pension-fund manager said last month it’s willing to invest C$3 billion, leaving C$2.5 billion for governmental contribution.

“An agreement on the financing should come quickly,” Daoust told reporters Friday at a Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal conference. “We need an answer by the fall.”

Under the timeline put forward by the Caisse, construction will probably begin in the spring of next year, with service at the end of 2020. Quebec is prepared to put up half of the C$2.5 billion sought by the Caisse, and wants the federal government to match the amount, Daoust said.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto overtakes Vancouver as country’s cannabis capital"

The Globe and Mail's Mike Hager reports from Vancouver about how Toronto has surpassed the British Columbian metropolis as a leading centre for cannabis. I've seen a dispensary on Bloor near Ossington, in my neighbourhood, so I can believe it.

Toronto has unseated Vancouver as Canada’s de facto cannabis capital due to an ongoing explosion in illegal dispensaries, while officials begin shutting down dozens of shops in the West Coast city to enforce a landmark new bylaw.

The owner of a cannabis consulting firm who has been tracking the meteoric growth of the illicit sector following last fall’s election win by the federal Liberals, who have promised to legalize the drug, says Toronto’s wide-open market is now supporting more than 100 pot shops.

This expansion comes as Vancouver has shut down 22 dispensaries out of its roughly 100 locations in the past week, and city staff say they will continue their crackdown over the coming weeks. About two dozen are expected to remain open while they clear regulatory hurdles to obtain a coveted new class of business licence.

Harrison Jordan, a second-year student at Toronto’s Osgoode Hall Law School and owner of The Big Toke, said he has mapped 114 dispensaries now operating – or opening very soon – across a region where only a handful of tucked-away businesses were operating a year ago.

Newer, more brazen, storefronts are increasingly branching out into quiet residential neighbourhoods, but most, he said, are clustered into four main areas: The Danforth, The Junction, Queen Street West and their original hub of Kensington Market. (He has included eight locations in the suburban areas of Etobicoke, Mississauga, Richmond Hill, Scarborough and Vaughan.)

[URBAN NOTE] "Dangerous – but affordable – fire-trap apartments a risk to Toronto tenants"

This, described in The Globe and Mail by John Lorinc, is terrifying. Affordable housing, and safe housing, is such a need in this city.

Dingy fire-trap apartments have long existed in every large city, but an inquest this spring in Whitby into the deaths of three young people living in just such a dwelling has raised tough and pressing questions about the risks facing those forced to the margins of a housing sector characterized by crazy real-estate prices, skyrocketing rents, a dearth of affordable units and an influx of low-income residents.

“What we know is that it’s a huge issue and one that politicians avoid,” said Wellesley Institute housing expert Michael Shapcott.

Later this spring, however, Toronto City Council will be vetting staff proposals to broaden the regulation of rooming houses in an effort to bring tens of thousands of illegal units into better compliance with fire, building safety and public-health rules.

It’s going to be a tough slog, simply because of the numbers. No one really knows how many illegal units are hidden across the city.

[. . .]

[S]uch apartments have claimed numerous lives, including the owner of an illegal North York rooming house, who died during a fire last November, and the basement tenant in a Scarborough semi-detached engulfed in late December. In that case, according to media reports, two pets died and another occupant was critically injured.

[PHOTO] Two links on Toronto's Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival

James Adams at The Globe and Mail lists different prominent photographers' thoughts on the top exhibits in this year's Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival. An example:

Paul Roth, director, Ryerson Image Centre (RIC), Gordon Parks: Collected Works (2012)

1.) Looking: Then and Now by Barbara Astman, Corkin Gallery. Work by a pioneering postmodernist, one of the brilliant cohort of experimental photographers who emerged from the Rochester, N.Y., scene during the sixties, seventies and eighties. I’m excited to see the spectrum of this innovative career in Corkin’s big, beautiful space.

2.) Over a Distance Between One and Many (at Koffler Gallery) and Further Clarities and Convolutions (billboards on Lansdowne Avenue at Dundas West and College Street), Raymond Boisjoly. The RIC is including an earlier Boisjoly in an upcoming exhibition called The Edge of the Earth: Climate Change in Photography and Video, so I’m curious to see some more recent work. Restlessly experimental with materials and techniques, Boisjoly is one of the most interesting artists working with the medium today.

Meanwhile, at Spacing Toronto Ilana Altman and Melanie Fasche interview Bonnie Rubenstein, long-time director at the festival, about its history and development.

Ilana Altman: The Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival is embarking on a major milestone – its twentieth anniversary — how did the festival begin and how has the festival evolved over the last twenty years?

Bonnie Rubenstein: CONTACT was founded in 1996 by four gallerists – Stephen Bulger, Linda Book, Judith Tatar and Darren Alexander. At the time, there were large photo events occurring internationally – Le Mois de la Photo in Montreal, Houston FotoFest, Les Rencontres d’Arles, but few galleries were showing photography in Toronto. They decided to found a festival here as a means to celebrate the medium, educate the public and create an economy for artists. The idea, from the beginning, was that it would be democratic, that anyone could participate. They anticipated having a couple dozen partners presenting exhibitions and events related to photography, and to their surprise there was enormous interest from the beginning. In the first year of the festival, 1997, there were over 50 participating venues.

I started at CONTACT in 2002, three months before the festival was due to open for the year, so it was a tough initiation. Five years into the festival the budget was very limited and there were only two of us working full-time; yet participation had increased dramatically—over 130 venues–so logistically it was quite challenging.

Twenty years on we still maintain the democratic aspect of the festival through our open call to participate, and we will always encourage open exhibitions. It is really important to us to engage the whole community – students, emerging artists, all kinds of people active with the medium and its many different forms, as well as established artists and galleries. In 2004 we added the category of featured exhibitions, which are submissions selected by a jury, based on the quality of the artist’s work, the presentation, and the curatorial concept. In 2006 we co-presented our first major international exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and since then have continued to develop primary exhibitions at major museums and not-for-profit spaces. This year there are twenty throughout the GTA.

I will be doing a lot of touring this year.