A Bit More Detail

Dismebarking Monday evening at Dundas station, I was surprised to see this sign announcing the impending installation of Wi-Fi there. The TTC has been offering wireless Internet for a year at its St. George and Yonge-Bloor locations on the Bloor line, and service has just been added to the Bay station that lies between the two. Dundas, though, is several stations south of the Bloor line, several stations south of Yonge-Bloor. Will Wi-Fi be added to more of the stops on this line, on a shortened time schedule, too?

The Toronto Chinese Baptist Church is a striking building located just west of the Art Gallery of Ontario, at Dundas and Beverly. The asymmetry of the front is actualy a selling point for me.

This civil defense siren, slightly relocated east to its current location at Dundas and Shaw, just across Dundas from the northwestern corner of Trinity Bellwoods Park, is one of the last sirens remaining and a noteworthy artifact of the Cold War. In 2007, the Toronto Star published an article by Leslie Scrivener about it and the few others left.

"It's a neat thing to look at," says Claire Bryden, referring to the air raid siren near the corner of Dundas St. W. and Shaw St., a remnant of Toronto's age of atomic anxiety. The sturdy, horn-shaped siren rests on a rusting column on the property of Bellwoods Centres for Community Living.

Few of these Cold War relics, which would alert the population to an imminent nuclear attack, remain in Toronto. One siren resides atop the York Quay Centre at Harbourfront. Others, like the one on Ward's Island, disappear when buildings get new roofs.

Today, no one claims ownership of the surviving sirens. Call the City of Toronto and they refer you to the province. Call the province and they refer you to the Department of National Defence. Call the Department of National Defence and they refer you to ... the city.

But Claire Bryden is happy to take possession of the one at Dundas and Shaw. Bryden is executive-director of the Bellwoods Centres, which provide homes for people with physical disabilities. The air raid siren, overlooked for decades, suddenly became of interest during construction of a new building. Because it was in the middle of the Bellwoods Park House property, which straddles old Garrison Creek (now flowing through an underground culvert), the siren had to be moved or removed altogether. A new public path, part of a Discovery Walk daytime urban trail from Fort York to Christie Pits, will go through the property right where the siren was.

What to do with the towering artifact? "Rather than throw it away, we decided it's a piece of historical memorabilia," says Bryden, who recalls air-raid-siren practice in her childhood. "It gives character, and we don't see too many around."

Taken in April 2012, looking west from the streetcar.

These two pretty women were standing by the foot of the escalator leading to the bottom-most floor of 10 Dundas East, the multi-story shopping and entertainment complex on the northeast corner of Yonge and Dundas, handing out flyers advertising a month's free use of the complex's gym. The people descending weren't interested, alas.

Spraypainted on an electrical box on the southwestern corner of University and Dundas, the simple question doesn't even need to be that specific. What doesn't need to be done? (Why the cheese, I wonder.)

Here, the No Frills grocery store on the southwest corner of Dundas and Lansdowne is seen just before 1 am.

At the end of last night's Wanderjahre around downtown Toronto with Andrew, we stopped at Yonge-Dundas Square (next to the Eaton Centre) where the paved space and adjoining streets were packed with people. This picture shows the blue-and-white lights lining the standing metal structure separating the square from Dundas Street. The whole city was aglow last night ...

Torontoist's David Topping is scathing about the public space of Yonge-Dundas Square, just to the north of Toronto Eaton Centre shopping mall. More specifically, he's quite critical of Toronto Life Square, a building that was under construction for at least four years--more precisely, was a mass of scaffolding for four years--before its completion last year, and somewhat happy and/or unsurprised that its finances are quite bad. Quite.

Toronto Life Square—the massively unattractive ogre on the north-east corner of Yonge and Dundas, which houses not only a Future Shop, Google's local offices, and an AMC that uncomfortably doubles as Ryerson classrooms, but also a vast and ever-growing pool of all of our tears—is "broke," according to the Globe and Mail. What's more: Toronto Life, who scooped up the naming rights in 2007, "has been locked in a months-long legal dispute to remove its name from the project." (Perhaps the magazine finally realized the irony of suggesting that the building that loomed over Dundas Square added anything to Toronto life.)