20-year-old Ruth Taylor was a stenographer in the transfer department of the Toronto General Trusts, an insurance firm in the heart of downtown.
On November 4, 1935, she was working late into the night with a colleague, Mrs. Melville. A short distance away at Maple Leaf Gardens two teams of NHLers were playing a pre-season charity hockey match before a large crowd. Not a sellout, but close.
It was around 11 p.m. when Taylor left the office at Bay and Melinda streets, boarded a streetcar—either a Bay car north to College or a King car to Gerrard and Broadview—and began her regular journey home.
As usual, Taylor switched to a Carlton car that would bring her the rest of the way to her father’s home on Norwood Road, a short residential street a little west of Main and Gerrard Street East.
This night, however, the Carlton car that picked up the young office worker was a “hockey special,” one of several extra streetcars inserted into the regular schedule for the crowd leaving Maple Leaf Gardens.
There are two certainties in Toronto political debate: the Scarborough subway and taxes.
What about death, you say? Ha! No such luck. No one who has closely watched city hall over the past decade believes fighting about these topics will ever die.
And so, we reported this week, a proposal for new taxes of some form is coming back to city hall in the fall. And Subway Bowl CXXXVIII will be contested at the city council meeting starting Tuesday. There, once again, councillors will be asked to vote to either move ahead with work on the new, more expensive, less expansive extension of the Bloor-Danforth subway line to Scarborough Town Centre, or to revert to the twice-abandoned former plan for a new seven-stop LRT to the same destination.
I wrote recently about what I think is the most reasonable case to be made for the subway plan — an argument that depends on a series of other conditions for its logic. And in the end I remain unpersuaded — I think, as I have for years, that the LRT plan would probably accomplish most of the city-building and transit network goals as well or better. The case was put well in a recent op-ed by Councillors Paul Ainslie and Josh Matlow.
I won’t rehash all of those arguments on both sides here — if you care at all, it’s likely you are intimately familiar with them already, and it’s also likely you have already made your mind up which side you’re on. My opinion is that the subway option would be a mistake — and an expensive one — and that Scarborough commuters and the city’s goals would both be better served by the alternative proposal.
But my big fear about the debate Tuesday (and beyond) is not that the subway extension is approved and built. It is that nothing else that’s been proposed in addition to and alongside it will be built.
On July 12, Toronto City Council faces a mountain of transit reports. The Scarborough subway extension is the high-profile issue, but many more demand Council’s attention: The Crosstown East and West LRT extensions, the Waterfront LRT, congestion relief on the subway, SmartTrack and the role of GO Transit, and fare integration with transit systems beyond the 416.
The challenge is to move from debates about individual lines to a network view. More is involved than drawing lines on a map. Crayons and paper are cheap, but a transit network will cost billions. Does Council have the discipline to spend wisely, face the cost of its decisions, and raise the funds needed to build a network Torontonians can ride in their lifetimes?
Habitat III, the UN’s conference on cities this coming October will explore urban agriculture as a solution to food security, but here in New York City, it has shown potential for much more.
Record-high levels of inequality are being felt most prominently in the world’s cities. Even In New York City, the heart of the developed world, many urban communities have food security issues.
Since the year 2000, New York City food costs have increased by 59 percent, while the average income of working adults has only increased by 17 percent.
Forty two percent of households in the city lack the income needed to cover necessities like food, shelter, clothing, transportation, and healthcare but still earn too much to qualify for government assistance.
Last year, OneNYC was introduced, a plan specifically aligned with the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, aiming to lift 800,000 people out of poverty in a decade.
Jim Culbert was a pioneer in gay tourism. He ran the Rainbow Lodge in Vernon Bridge, P.E.I., for 22 years, advertising it as gay-friendly and painting its exterior for several years in rainbow colours — an LGBTQ community symbol of pride.
And there's no mistaking Culbert's latest venture, Green Gay Bulls, as anything but in-your-face, I-don't-care-what-you think marketing.
"I get a lot of people saying, quite a play on words!" said Culbert from his property, which sits on three acres on the edge of the Vernon River, just a few doors up from his former business.
And the neighbours?
"They thought it was fine, had a good laugh!" he chuckles. "They've known me for years now."
A Buddhist-affiliated restaurant in Prince Edward Island has been vandalized, hours after a group of local monks liberated 600 pounds of live lobsters.
Charlottetown police responded early Sunday to property damage at the Splendid Essence restaurant, including a damaged railing, uprooted flowers and smashed mailbox.
The previous day, monks from the Great Enlightenment Buddhist Institute Society in Little Sands had invited a CBC News crew to join them on a fishing boat as they released lobsters purchased on the island into the ocean off Wood Islands.
[. . .]
“Buddhist monks are motivated to practice compassion. All along they aspire to keep it low-profiled,” Venerable Dan, a monk at the institute, said in a statement. “They do not care for judging others, nor do they hope that any potential quarrel be triggered because of this.”
Geoffrey Yang, a spokesperson for the institute who had helped owner Keh-Jow Lu establish the vegetarian restaurant, did not want to speculate about whether the property damage was connected to the lobster release. He said Lu is a Buddhist follower, but is not directly associated with the monastery.
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