A Bit More Detail

• Metrolinx shares a glorious map depicting traffic and trends at the different stops on its many routes.


• NOW Toronto notes how Doug Ford may yet enable carding-like practices by police.


• The criticism by an Ontario government minister of the state of Ontario Place is worrisome. The Toronto Star reports.


• Urban Toronto shares a photo of the construction at the vast Hive site downtown.


• George Popper at Spacing Toronto looks at three neighbourhoods where housing in Toronto can really densify indeed must densify, including the Bloor-Danforth corridor.

• Steve Munro takes a critical look at the idea of an uploading of southern Ontario mass transit to a broader regional board, a Superlinx.


• The Toronto Star reports on the funeral ceremony given to Dean Lisowick, victim of the Church and Wellesley serial killer.


• Toronto's ravine system and its inner harbor are on the verge of ecological collapse, with invading species of plant and animal life taking over. The Toronto Star reports that the ravines and inner harbour of Toronto are about to collapse environmentally under invasions.


• blogTO shares photos of what Danforth Avenue looked like in Toronto, starting before its big 20th century boom.


• The Art Gallery of Ontario already has a page up of its crowdfunding effort to buy one of the Yayoi Kusama Infinity Mirror rooms, here.

• Jamie Bradburn wrote earlier this week about a stroll he and his took down the Danforth.


• Edward Keenan is entirely right to note that Ford's slashing of city council's size is all but a declaration of war by his government against Toronto. The Toronto Star has it.


• Toronto MP Adam Vaughan has stated openly that, if need be, the federal government will bypass Ontario in working with Toronto. Global News reports.


• Widely-respected former Toronto city planner Jennifer Keesmaat is running as mayor in the upcoming election. I'm inclined to vote for her already. The Toronto Star reports.


• The resurgence of talk of a separate Province of Toronto is unsurprising, but frankly I think the proposal fundamentally unworkable. blogTO reports.

• Julianna Kozis has been identified as the girl 10 years old killed in Sunday's shooting. The Toronto Star reports.


• Toronto Life shares a list of twenty of the top attractions along the Danforth.


• NOW Toronto reports the concerns of community groups that the response to gun violence will further marginalize black communities, too much emphasis being placed on enforcement and not enough on supporting marginalized communities.


• Toronto City Council has just voted, by 41-4, to ban the sale of handguns and ammunition within city limits. Narcity reports.


• David Rider notes that John Tory wants the Ontario government to change the municipal government of Toronto, to give the mayor more powers, in a response to (among other things) gun violence. THe Toronto Star has it.

• Reese Fallon, one of the two people killed in the Danforth shooting, was a student hoping to go to the fall to McMaster University to study for a career in nursing. The Toronto Star reports.


• People in some Toronto neighbourhoods with high levels of gun violence welcome an expanded police presence, despite other issues. CBC reports.


• Urban Toronto notes an exciting plan to, among other things, build a Sugar Beach North on the waterfront.


• blogTO talks about Little Ethiopia, on Danforth by Greenwood. Speaking as someone familiar with his Little Ethiopia near Ossington, this area sounds fascinating.


• The Pia Bouman School in Parkdale, a leading dance academy for four decades, is hoping to avoid displacement by new construction. CBC reports.

In spring of 1966, the once thriving commercial strip along the western portion of Danforth Avenue appeared to be struggling. “The area, universally referred to as ‘The Danforth,’ was the classic Canadian shopping strip of the Nineteen Forties and early Fifties,” reported the Globe and Mail that April. “[The district featured] local merchants in small stores, block after block of them, prospering on neighbourhood pedestrian traffic.” The opening of the Bloor-Danforth subway that February, however, gave local residents easier access to downtown shops, and meant the end of the streetcar service along Danforth, which had previously delivered shoppers to the front doors of east-end businesses. Danforth-based business owners told the Globe and Mail that the subway was “taking customers away from us,” and, fearing that the neighbourhood would go into decline, circulated a petition to reinstate regular surface transit along Danforth. Within a decade, however, the Danforth had reemerged as a popular commercial strip, but as one with a considerably different look and identity.

The decades after the Second World War saw an unprecedented rise in the number of European immigrants to Canada, and to Toronto specifically. In 1960, the Globe and Mail reported that close to 500,000 European immigrants had come to the Toronto area since the war, and that “the city of Toronto, stubbornly traditional, unquestionably British, unopposedly Protestant, shook itself after the chief force of the immigration wave was spent, [and] came to the startled realization that the newcomers make up almost one third of its total population.” Toronto had maintained a small population of Greek immigrants in the first half of the 20th century, estimated at a low four-digit figure prior to the 1940s. For Greece, the decades immediately following the war were marked by considerable political instability, and by 1950, Toronto’s Greek population was estimated at 5,000, rising to 12,500 in 1960.

The Toronto establishment soon noticed the city’s emerging cosmopolitan identity. In the 1960s, the mainstream Toronto press began highlighting the city’s newly prominent immigrant groups and reporting on some of the challenges and community supports (or lack thereof) that existed for the city’s changing population.

As part of a 1967 series sharing accounts of individual Toronto immigrants’ stories, the Telegram profiled Peter Skretas, who had emigrated from Thessaly at age 19, eight years earlier. Skretas had begun work in Toronto as a busboy, and then as a waiter at Barberian’s Steak House, all in the hopes of earning money to help support his family’s grocery store back home. Skretas, the Telegram reported, had managed to send $8,000 home in five years, but his plans soon changed. After learning the restaurant trade, Skretas opened a steak house of his own in Etobicoke, and helped bring two of his siblings to Canada, explaining to the Telegram that he now felt at home in Toronto and no longer planned to return to Greece.

Research by numerous writers indicates that Peter Skretas’ story represents a typical experience for many Greek immigrants in Toronto at this time. In a 1973 research paper, Konstantine Konstantinou observed that many of Toronto’s Greek immigrants in the 1960s were rural-born young men with limited English, and with a “plan of staying for a few years only.” Both Konstantinou and several Toronto journalists also noted the very high proportion of Greek immigrants who entered the restaurant industry. In his 1980 book, The Canadian Odyssey: The Greek Experience in Canada, Peter D. Chimbos notes that “an immigrant could enter the [restaurant] business with a small investment, no academic training, and little knowledge of the English or French language. In was an enterprise where the ambitious, talkative, and hospitable Greek had the opportunity to interact with his patrons, work hard to satisfy them, and become economically successful.”

Bike lanes could be coming to eight of Toronto’s busiest streets if the city’s new 10-year cycling plan pans out.

The plan, released in a city report Monday, identifies 525 km of new bike lanes, cycle tracks, trails and other routes that, if built, would create the kind of connected network Toronto’s bike advocates have long pushed for.

The majority of that infrastructure, some 280 km, would be in the form of painted or physically separated bike lanes on busy streets, while 190 km of it would be cycling routes on quieter roads. The remaining 55 km would be “sidewalk-level boulevard trails” running alongside major thoroughfares. The plan would cost an estimated $153.5 million over the next decade.

“Over a 10-year period we would roughly look at doubling the amount of cycling routes in the city,” said Stephen Buckley, the city’s general manager of transportation services. He said that to date the city’s planning of its bike network has been disjointed, and his goal was to “develop a full network that we could get behind.”

The guiding principles are connecting existing cycling routes, expanding the network, and improving infrastructure already in place, Buckley said.

Perhaps the most striking feature is a proposal to study bike infrastructure on eight major corridors, including Bloor St./Dupont St. from Dundas St. to Sherbourne St.; Danforth Ave. from Broadview Ave. to Kingston Rd.; and Yonge St. all the way from Steeles to Front St., almost the full length of the city.

The subway is part of the daily grind for many of us, but Jess Dobkin and the fine folks at the Artists’ Newsstand in Chester station aim to add some fun and celebration to our commutes.

To that end, they’re throwing a 50th birthday party for the Bloor-Danforth line, which opened on February 25, 1966, starting at 4 pm on Thursday, February 25, in the space in front of their revitalized former Gateway newsstand.

Theatre artist Moe Angelos, whose historical research uncovered the anniversary, kicks off the event at 4 pm with a performance. Newsstand founder Dobkin says that the timing is designed to catch the early rush hour of young people coming home from school, many of them fans of the newsstand. Dainty Box does a family-friendly burlesque performance to the music of the Supremes at 6:30 pm, and DJ Nik Red spins sounds of the 60s, including black power anthems. Artist Jackie Lee transforms the kiosk into a piñata, and there’ll be birthday cake and balloons.

In addition to focusing on the subway’s construction, the event also explores what was newsworthy in 1966, including the Vietnam War, the rise of second-wave feminism and the founding of the Black Panther Party.

The project has transformed the stall in the east-end station, which sat empty for six year, into a hybrid performance space/gallery/alternative press and artist books outlet that also functions in the usual way as a source for snacks and magazines. The programming is sensitive to the needs of TTC users and the surrounding community. Performances usually last around 15 minutes, since there is no seating, and Dobkin reports no problems with the TTC. She relished the mix of intentional and accidental audience members, recalling a service interruption on the line last fall that brought hundreds of commuters spilling into the station during an artist talk on the history of newsstands.