rfmcdonald | [PHOTO] Sixteen photos of the Pillars Picnic (#pillarspicnic, #keepthepillarsTO)

I got late Sunday night to the Pillars Picnic, delayed by an unexpected partial shutdown of the Yonge subway line and by a necessary stop at the Black Eagle for burger and friends. The Pillars Picnic had been advertised in a NOW Toronto article, as a musical bidding farewell to the pillars in a patch of waste ground at Queens Quay and York Street in Harbourfront. The plans of the city of Toronto to build a Claude Cormier-designed park here for this burgeoning condo neighbourhood meant that these pillars, legacies of a York Street on-ramp for the Gardiner, were to go. I personally like the pillars--they evoke for me, in miniature, the modernist Stonehenge Confederation Bridge assembly yard in Amherst Point on Prince Edward Island--and supported the campaign to keep them. That campaign failed, sadly, but at least there was the concert.

(The artists performing when I arrived were Ivy Mairi backed by Matthew Bailey. They put on an excellent set.)