The Broadview Hotel, until recently home to one of Toronto’s last licensed strip clubs, was itself stripped of its temporary drapes on Wednesday when scaffolding on the corner of Broadview and Queen streets came down and the newly-renovated boutique hotel showed its buffed skin for an assembled audience.
The ERA Architects-designed project, which is being led by Streetcar Developments, will eventually be home to a 57-room boutique hotel, restaurants and bars operated by the team behind Enoteca Ascari, along with event spaces. While the exterior and mechanical aspects of the renovation are now largely complete, the hotel’s interior will not be completed and ready for opening until the spring of 2017.
“I don’t know how many times people said, ‘When’s something going to happen with Jilly’s?’” Ward 30 councillor Paula Fletcher said before the unveiling. Through various iterations, the 125-year-old building has long been the architectural anchor of the Riverside neighbourhood, but over that time its use rarely matched up with its position.
“So many people have wanted to restore Jilly’s to its beautiful glory,” Fletcher said.
Carl Sagan’s Voyager Golden Record may be the most limited release album of all time. It’s certainly the most well-traveled. The iconic record, which NASA developed to represent humankind to alien civilizations, was printed onto gold-plated copper and launched into space aboard Voyager 1 back in 1977. Today, it’s nearly 13 billion miles away from Earth. A second record is on a similar trajectory aboard Voyager 2. There are ten more on display at various NASA institutions. But that’s it. Apparently, even Sagan, who chaired the committee that created the record, couldn’t get a copy. The record was never made available to the general public.
Until now, thanks to a Kickstarter-funded reissue of the historic album. In a stunning recreation of the original, David Pescovitz, a research director at Institute for the Future and co-editor of Boing Boing, teamed up with Timothy Daly, a manager at Amoeba Music in San Francisco, and Lawrence Azerrad, a graphic designer who has created album packages for Wilco, Miles Davis, and Sting to produce a 40th Anniversary edition vinyl box set of the Voyager Golden Record.
“It’s the ultimate album package of the ultimate album packaging,” Pescovitz says. “The awesome intersection of science and art and design that’s meant to instill a sense of wonder and spark the imagination.”
Pescovitz’s grad school advisor, science writer Timothy Ferris, produced the original Golden Record, and will be in the recording studio for the remastering. To get ready for that, Pescovitz has been tracking down licensing and obtaining the rights to all the original audio, which includes everything from Bach to Chuck Berry, a Navajo Night chant to whale vocalizations, and greetings in 55 languages.
If Prime Minister Theresa May gets her way on immigration, Victor Villar says he might just leave London.
The 31-year-old Mexican portfolio analytics consultant is among the many foreigners in the City who are reeling from the government’s proposal to force companies to reveal how many non-British workers they hire as a way to push them to put natives first.
"If things get worse because they approve some anti-immigrant policies in parliament, I would definitely consider a job in the U.S. or somewhere else,” Villar, who has lived in the capital for 2 1/2 years, said in an interview. May’s plan is “like shooting yourself in your own foot because many people who come to work here are skilled workers with graduate degrees."
Home Secretary Amber Rudd this week proposed to punish banks and landlords who fail to make checks on foreigners doing business with them. It’s part of the government’s strategy to address public concerns about immigration that were laid bare by the U.K.’s vote to quit the European Union.
A YouGov poll on Wednesday of 5,875 adults found that 59 percent of people support those policies, showing that Rudd and May are in tune with voters. That is of little comfort to the swathes of foreign-born Londoners, many of whom have become naturalized British citizens. For some, there are parallels with pre-World War II Germany.
On the surface, the property markets in Singapore and Hong Kong have much in common. The two Asian financial hubs have both moved to rein in runaway home prices in recent years as they sought to make housing more affordable.
Yet, consider how home values in the cities have diverged. Singapore has been successful in damping buyer demand with curbs (prices slumped by the most in seven years last month), while restrictions have had little impact on Hong Kong’s gravity-defying market, which is rebounding after a short-lived dip.
Hong Kong’s resurgent property market poses a headache for Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying, who’s been touting his success cooling property prices ahead of a March vote to determine the city’s leadership for the next five years. Leung has introduced a raft of measures to cool the housing market since 2012 and his record may weigh on China’s decision to keep backing him.
Leung, who hasn’t said whether he’ll seek a second term, has struggled with low popularity through his tenure, including mass democracy protests in 2014 fueled in part by the city’s yawning wealth gap. He received an approval rating of less than 39 percent last month, compared with a high of almost 57 percent before taking office, according to the University of Hong Kong Public Opinion Programme.
Public transit riders in the San Francisco Bay Area often find subways so congested that they take trains in the opposite direction so when they get off and swing around, they’ll have a seat to beat the horde of people travelling during rush hour.
Ridership is surging, Bay Area Rapid Transit spokeswoman Alicia Trost said, to the point where the transit organization has begun bribing riders with cash to avoid taking the subway during rush hour.
“The number of riders we’re having right now…it’s like when the (San Francisco) Giants win and there’s a World Series parade.”
To combat an average of 430,000 weekday trips and a 30 per cent increase in ridership since 2010, BART has introduced a points-based perks system which offers its riders cash payouts if they avoid the daily 7:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. rush hour.
During a six-month trial, riders will be given one point per mile travelled on the subway. They need to travel 1,000 miles to earn US$1. Trips one hour before the rush hour and one hour after earn riders between three and six points per mile. The more commuters ride, the more they can advance through different rewards categories and begin to earn more points. Fares are paid with electronic payment cards and points are also tracked using the technology. At the end of the month, the points can be cashed out or gambled in a “Spin to Win” game with prizes of up to US$100.
People naturally think of downtown Toronto or even North York city centre when they think about where the jobs are.
But a report from the Neptis Foundation, a non-profit, non-partisan research group, released Thursday, shows that one of the fastest growing employment zones is the area surrounding Pearson airport – which geographically is six times bigger than the downtown core.
Jobs include those who are directly employed at the airport to affiliated jobs in warehousing and transportation, as well as manufacturing and construction.
Surprisingly, there are more than 60,000 jobs just in finance and business services in the area. Some of the big employers include Pratt & Whitney, Hewlett Packard, Bell, Rogers and BlackBerry.
Known as the airport megazone, with an estimated 297,990 jobs in 2011, up 22,550 from 2001, it is second only to Toronto’s downtown zone with 464,650 jobs in 2011.
But unlike downtown, due to its location, most people drive their own vehicles to get to work.
A 22-storey mural splashed with images of Gordon Lightfoot, Ronnie Hawkins and Oscar Peterson is taking appreciation for Yonge Street’s musical past to new heights.
The first stage of the piece featuring the faces of nine icons was unveiled today, but the 70-metre mural near Yonge and Gerrard streets is expected to be complete in November.
Organizers hope the mural, being painted by artist Adrian Hayles with the help of a lift, will be visible from as far away as Bloor Street. They say it is meant to capture Yonge Street’s heyday in the ‘50s and ‘60s when music lovers flocked to Sam the Record Man’s famed store and stars like B.B. King and Muddy Waters played in clubs along the strip.
Since that time a bit of “historical amnesia” has set in, said Marc Garner, the executive director of the Downtown Yonge BIA, the organization behind the mural. “That’s why we needed to do this to pay homage to the past performers who made Yonge the Canadian icon music street what it was.”
The International Space Station is going to be a familiar sight in Toronto skies over the next two weeks, as it makes as many as 17 visible passes above the city between tonight and October 18. During many of these fly-overs, it will be one of the brightest objects in the sky.
Having the ISS pass overhead isn't entirely rare, but having so many opportunities to see it fly overhead is certainly a treat, especially at the magnitude of brightness that's been predicted. For tonight's pass, which will take place in the northwestern sky, the space station will be just a little dimmer than the brightest star in the Earth's sky, Sirius.
On other passes to come over the next 12 days, it will be far brighter. Sirius has an apparent magnitude of −1.47, while the ISS will appear as bright as −2.8 on October 15. The lower the number on the apparent magnitude scale, the brighter an object is. For reference, the maximum brightness of Mars is −2.91.
Nuit Blanche might seem like a distant memory already, particularly for those who've spent the last 48 hours recovering from the all-night affair, but if you've seen all the stunning photos from this year's event and are sad that you you chose to stay home, there's still hope!
This year's most popular exhibitions are still on display. Director X's Death of the Sun, Floria Sigismondi's mesmerizing Pneuma, and Philip Beesley's Ocean will remain at City Hall until October 10. There hasn't been much attention given to this extended programming, which is down from year's past, but it's actually an amazing chance to see the work without the massive crowds of the big night.
Yesterday evening, for instance, a crowd of about 100 people took in the theatrics around Nathan Phillips Square. It was a cinch to get perfect viewing angles and to zone out and take it all in.
On Saturday, October 8, come bask in the Sun with Director X from 7 pm to midnight at his #nbTO16 project Death of the Sun. This is a special opportunity to meet the artist behind this monumental project! Speak to him direct to find out more about his very personal project and get a selfie.
Schedule:
Friday, October 7: 7 pm to midnight
Saturday, October 8: 7 pm to 2 am
Sunday, October 9: 10:30 pm to 2 am
Monday, October 10: 7 pm* to midnight
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