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- It has been one year since the disaster at 650 Parliament. Global News reports.
- The Star looks at how, after the 650 Parliament disaster, St. James Town is coping with the loss of a tenth of its population, right here.
- A community group opposed the idea of the Ontario Line running vehicles through their neighbourhood every 90 seconds. The Star reports.
- For one man, Wayne Malley, being lost at the CNE as a child was an unforgettable adventure. The Star reports.
- Toronto Life interviews people in Cabbagetown to see what they think about their neighbourhood's safe injection site, here.
- NOW Toronto interviews six Torontonian musicians who left their city in search of affordable homes elsewhere, here.
- Global News reports on the strange story of a retired TTC streetcar found in the middle of the forest.
Last night, I came across these two toy sets, survivors of 2016's Star Trek Beyond, for sale at $C 4 each in the Dollarama at 425 Parliament Street in the heart of Cabbagetown. Should I have gotten them? Star Trek Beyond was a fun film, though it felt more like a 1990s Trek two-part episode than a fully-fledged feature film in its own right.
- This Toronto Life profile examines how Doug Ford managed to get elected premier of Ontario.
- blogTO looks at how the province of Ontario has just taken over Ontario Place, preparing to redevelop this waterfront site in what we fear will be a bad direction.
- blogTO notes how the scrapping of rent control for new units risks making housing still more unaffordable in Toronto.
- Refugees from the 650 Parliament Street disasters are now being billed for their hotel stays, Global News reports.
- NOW Toronto has this first-person essay from Pete Young talking how his cannabis business took him to the Toronto Stock Exchange.
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I would have liked to have spent more time in the Toronto Necropolis, but at this point of the year the cemetery's gates close at 5:30. I only had enough time to dip briefly into the cemetery off of Winchester Street, take a look, and dip out. I need to spend more time there: In the light of a fall twilight, this place is gorgeous.
- Lauren Pelley at CBC Toronto notes how, despite trying hard, Jennifer Keesmaat was unable to displace John Tory as the clear front-runner.
- Mark Gollom at CBC notes that John Tory may be able to find ways to work with Doug Ford, though the province will remain the dominant partner in any relationship.
- Many of the tenants displaced from 650 Parliament Street were happy to return briefly to their old homes, to retrieve belongings. The Toronto Star reports.
- blogTO shares these vintage photos of St. Clair Avenue a century ago, to all appearances just another rural road.
- Urban Toronto shared a gorgeous aerial photo of Toronto, looking south from a point in the Don Valley towards the downtown.
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On this chill afternoon one day after Hallowe'en night, it struck me as entirely appropriate to go through photos I had taken of the Toronto Necropolis one fine warm fall afternoon, bright with sunshine and green with life. The Necropolis is a solemn memorial, but it is also an enjoyable park. More people should visit, I think, to enjoy this space, with remarkable individual graves embedded in the great sweep of life that has sprung up above this commemorated death on Cabbagetown's slopes above the Don Valley.
The Necropolis Chapel is a lovely small quiet building located near the southern entrance of the Toronto Necropolis cemetery in Cabbagetown. I find it a lovely space to sit, and reflect.
Besides the architecture, on this visit I was struck by one particular memorial, purple flowers highlighting the memorial plaque of Paul Noble Bartlett, born in 1955 and died in 1988. What, I wonder, was his story? The bare bones idea of a Toronto man who died, so early, in his 30s back in the 1980s brings the HIV/AIDS epidemic to my mind, but different searches have turned up nothing apart from memorials to his parents, dead two or three decades later. What was his story? Who placed those flowers there?
Besides the architecture, on this visit I was struck by one particular memorial, purple flowers highlighting the memorial plaque of Paul Noble Bartlett, born in 1955 and died in 1988. What, I wonder, was his story? The bare bones idea of a Toronto man who died, so early, in his 30s back in the 1980s brings the HIV/AIDS epidemic to my mind, but different searches have turned up nothing apart from memorials to his parents, dead two or three decades later. What was his story? Who placed those flowers there?
I love this cheerful mural covering one whole side of a convenience store's building on Parliament.
- Doug Ford is running for mayor in 2018, hoping to continue Rob's legacy. (Doug was the more functional of the two.)
- Toronto has cracked down successfully on a property owner in Cabbagetown using their buildings for Airbnb.
- The Lower Don Trail is scheduled to reopen later this month, one year later than originally scheduled.
- The LCBO will be the authorized seller of marijuana in Ontario. I think I largely support this: regulation matters.
- With news that Toronto police is now treating the disappearance of Andrew Kinsman from his Cabbagetown a week ago as suspicious, the search for Kinsman is taking on new importance. Please, if you can help in any way, let Toronto police or his friends--anybody--know.
- The Toronto Star's Hina Alam reports on the huge crush over the Canada Day weekend to see the World's Largest Rubber Duck.
- The Parkdale Villager's Hilary Caton reports on the push to make West Queen West a protected district.
- The National Post shares the Canadian Press' poll reporting on general anxiety, including among the well-off, on affordable housing in Canada.
- The Globe and Mail's Kenny Sharpe writes about controversy at Ryerson University over the legacy of founder Egerton Ryerson.
I'm inclined to agree with Shawn Micallef's argument in the Toronto Star about the NIMBYism in opposition to a Bike Share stand in Cabbagetown.
In a Jan, 23 letter to City Councillor Pam McConnell, the Cabbagetown Heritage Conservation District Committee expressed disappointment that a Bike Share station was installed last summer within the Cabbagetown North Heritage Conservation District (HCD) without “any regard for the truly unique character” the area presents and asked it be removed.
An HCD protects an entire neighbourhood, not just a historic building. Bike Share, Toronto’s municipal bike lending program, installed a station with 14 bikes in the northwest corner of Riverdale Park, near the Winchester and Sumach Sts. intersection. The committee says the bikes interfere with the “character, rhythm and overall setting” of Cabbagetown and mentioned three listed heritage properties nearby, including the Toronto Necropolis chapel, that the bikes compromised.
Back in November, the Cabbagetown Residents Association conducted an online survey after two residents launched the first historic petards at the bikes, with complaints that stated, in part, “the park should not be dumping grounds for the latest trend from city hall.” Of the 739 who responded to the survey, 721 were in favour of the current location, with only 16 wanting the bike station removed, and two people choosing somewhere else entirely. Undaunted by the survey results, the heritage committee, made up of Cabbagetown residents, launched another volley.
Should the committee be successful in removing the Bike Share station from the park, can we expect them to then work on removing the on-street parking found throughout historic Cabbagetown? While the Bike Share station took up just one small pocket, the entire park and necropolis are surrounded by Hondas, Volkswagens and Volvos, many of them closer to the heritage properties than the bike share is.
I quite like Dave Leblanc's feature in The Globe and Mail describing efforts to revitalize the stretch of downtown Toronto where Parliament Street meets Bloor Street East.
Toronto, it is widely known, is a movie stand-in for Chicago, New York, and even Southern California (The Bridle Path has played Beverly Hills). Until recently, a long, triangular patch of land near Bloor and Parliament was a shoo-in for Detroit: a shabby Victorian stood alone in a weedy field, and, half a block away, a dead-end street sported a row of falling-down, boarded up semi-detached homes.
The area bounded by Sherbourne, Parliament, Howard and Bloor streets had been that way for two decades, give or take. In 2006, The Globe’s Alex Bozikovic wrote that the stub of Glen Rd. between the Bloor Street overpass and Howard Street was rife with hookers, drug dealers and crackheads. One home had a “large hole” in its roof; another had a tree taking root on its rotting, wet shingles. “I feel that the city has abandoned this neighbourhood,” one Glen Rd. resident told Mr. Bozikovic at the time.
It was a rare spot of neglect in an otherwise prosperous city. A few years later, however, Lanterra Developments handed heritage superheroes ERA Architects an assignment: Make something out of this.
“They wanted to do this development at the outer parts of the site, but they couldn’t really do anything with the centre just rotting,” remembers ERA’s Scott Weir, “so the first phase of this was ‘let’s make a beautiful district, whatever it takes to do that,’ so they did restoration on all of these almost un-repairable buildings.”
One of those “almost” dead buildings was the hulking, three-storey Victorian home that stood alone at 76 Howard St. After years of planning, Laurie McCulloch house movers pulled it, slowly, to its new digs at No. 28 just a few weeks ago. Hello, neighbours!
The Toronto Star's Betsy Powell reports on a grim Toronto Community Housing rooming house on Parliament Street, in the heart of Cabbagetown.
Rick Keegan uses dark humour to describe life in and outside his Cabbagetown rooming house, a fetid, bug-infested three-storey Victorian that attracts a roster of transients who gain entry by kicking in the front door.
“It went from crack to meth, and if you can believe it, I miss the crack days,” says Keegan describing the current drug of choice for visitors.
“Crack users are a little paranoid, you can get them out of the house, you just go and tell them to get lost and they go, but you try and tell that to the meth heads and they want to fight.”
Keegan, 61, says this while sitting inside a busy Tim Hortons across the street from part of a row of tall, narrow Parliament St. homes listed on the city’s Heritage Registry and owned and operated by Toronto Community Housing (TCH).
Rooming houses across the city — and what to do about them — is on the fall agenda at city hall. This month, city staff will report to executive committee on new zoning and licensing regulations for rooming houses, including 27 rooming houses operated by TCH.
Toronto has 433 licensed rooming houses. Hundreds more are unlicensed.
[BLOG] Some Thursday links
Apr. 28th, 2016 08:27 am- The Big Picture shares photos of life around the world this month.
- blogTO notes that a vacant lot on Sherbourne Street will become an urban farm, for a time.
- Centauri Dreams explores the strange oceans of Titan.
- Dangerous Minds shares some astoundingly open ads for cocaine paraphrenalia from the 1980s.
- The Dragon's Tales links to a study suggesting that it was the Chicxulub impact, not the Deccan Traps volcanic eruptions, which were extinction-triggering.
- Joe. My. God. notes the governor of South Carolina's statement that his political opponents orchestrated the reaction to anti-trans legislation to ensure he would not get re-elected.
- Language Hat reports on an Igbo journalist explaining why he, and many of his people, do not speak their ancestral language.
- The Map Room Blog maps patterns of rail travel in Europe.
- Michael Steeleworthy is critical, and rightly so, of the massive announced cutbacks to Newfoundland and Labrador's library service.
- Torontoist notes the Toronto Hard Candy gym's cutting of its links with Madonna.
- Transit Toronto notes the TTC is looking for volunteer ambassadors.
- Window on Eurasia notes that population growth in Russia is concentrated in largely non-Russian regions.
Tags:
- africa,
- agriculture,
- atlantic canada,
- blogs,
- cabbagetown,
- demographics,
- disasters,
- earth,
- ethnic conflict,
- evolution,
- glbt issues,
- history,
- language,
- libraries,
- links,
- madonna,
- newfoundland,
- newfoundland and labrador,
- nigeria,
- photos,
- politics,
- popular culture,
- rail,
- russia,
- sherbourne street,
- toronto,
- ttc,
- ukraine,
- united states,
- west africa
The Ben Wicks Pub on 424 Parliament Street, named after the British-born cartoonist of the same name, has been closed for almost three years. The wall painting advertising it on the wall north of the pub's former location, drawn in Ben Wicks' style on the wall north, does remain.
In a great Torontoist photo essay, written by Edward Brown and with photos by Harry Choi, the site takes a look at a remarkable institution, the community Christmas tree lot at Spruce and Parliament.
In 1952 Louis St. Laurent was PM, Toronto got its first television station, Leafs games aired on Hockey Night in Canada for the first time and Gerry McDermott, an ambitious 20-year-old apprentice electrician, began selling Christmas trees at the corner of Spruce and Parliament Streets.
St. Laurent died and the Gardens became a grocery store but McDermott’s unadorned tree lot continues selling Fraser firs on the same Cabbagetown street corner, a neighbourhood institution for over 60 years.
A year into renting sidewalk space from the Power supermarket at 449 Parliament St. Gerry’s younger brother Dale and their father Elmer joined Gerry in his fledging venture. Responsibilities were assigned. Gerry and Dale preferred the operational side of business, growing, pruning and harvesting trees. Elmer tried his hand at sales. To Gerry’s delight his father, blessed with the gift of gab, was a natural salesman.
Elmer returned to the tree lot every December until 1996 when he died at the age of 91.
In the early days the McDermott lot sold a wide selection of trees including spruce, Scotch pine and juniper grown on the family’s 6,000 acre tree nursery north of Bracebridge. Early success led to additional lots around Toronto, in North York and Mississauga. Eventually the acreage was sold and all but one of the lots shuttered. The last remaining lot in Cabbagetown sells only Fraser firs harvested from a nursery north of Barrie.
[BLOG] Some Monday links
Nov. 16th, 2015 04:02 pm- The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly writes about the things important to her.
- Crooked Timber's Chris Bertram shares a quietly beautiful picture of a Paris cafΘ late at night.
- The Dragon's Gaze notes a paper suggesting that atmospheric haze on exoplanets might be a biosignature.
- The Dragon's Tales notes that the Earth appears not to have gotten its water from comets, and examines the geology of Mars' massive Hellas crater.
- Far Outliers notes initial Soviet goals in Afghanistan and looks at Soviet reluctance to get involved.
- Joe. My. God. notes panic in the Republican Party establishment over a possible victory of Carson or Trump.
- Language Hat notes some online resources on Beowulf and the Hittite language.
- pollotenchegg maps the distribution of ethnic Germans in Ukraine in 1926.
- Torontoist notes an architecturally sensitive data centre on Cabbagetown's Parliament Street.
- Towleroad notes Ukraine's passage of a LGBT employment non-discrimination bill.
- Window on Eurasia notes Putin's attempt at forming an anti-globalist coalition and notes Russian opinions about Western passivity.
Tags:
- afghanistan,
- architecture,
- astronomy,
- blogs,
- cabbagetown,
- clash of ideologies,
- cold war,
- demographics,
- diasporas,
- earth,
- extraterrestrial life,
- former soviet union,
- france,
- germany,
- globalization,
- history,
- links,
- maps,
- mars,
- non blog,
- oceans,
- photos,
- politics,
- russia,
- space science,
- terrorism,
- ukraine,
- united states,
- war,
- writing
Tuesday evening, I left home too late to do a full tour of the Don Valley, north from Queen Street East.I should be used to the diminution of the evening in fall by now, I know, but I didn't quite. I rather travel by foot up through Riverdale side streets to first Dundas then Gerrard, cutting west across the Don river and the Don Valley Parkway before ending up in Riverdale Park.
More to come from another exploration tomorrow.
More to come from another exploration tomorrow.
