A Bit More Detail

• Metrolinx using paid influencers to promote the Ontario Line is certainly a choice. The Toronto Star reports.


• Union Station retiring an old mechanical system 90 years old used to control TTC vehicles is a landmark event. The Metrolinx blog reports.


• Jamie Bradburn looks at the birth of the Gardiner Expressway, here.


• Alok Mukherjee at Spacing questions why police in Toronto have stopped enforcing traffic regulations.


• Protesters charged with blocking the Bloor Viaduct during the Extinction Rebellion have had the charges dropped. Global News reports.


• Sean Marshall shared his account of his address to the Toronto Police Services board, here.


• Jamie Bradburn looks at the history behind the mid-20th century expansion of Church Street.


• NOW Toronto notes that workers at the Broadview Hotel have become unionized.


• Samantha Lui writes at NOW Toronto against the false negative stereotypes applied by so many--even briefly by Google--to Scarborough.


• CBC notes that a lawsuit surrounding benefits fraud by TTC employees has been settled, expensively.

• Jamie Bradburn was decidedly unimpressed by the Neon Museum at Junction House.


• Renovictions are a real concern for many renters in Toronto, already living on the edges of their budgets. CBC reports.


• Urban Toronto notes an interesting consolidation of two development plans into one at Yonge and Eglinton, here.


• blogTO notes how the Royal Ontario Museum is now going to offer free admission every third Monday of the month.


• Natalia Manzocco writes at NOW Toronto about how the Room With A View pop-up restaurant underneath the Gardiner Expressway ended up triggering city concerns over housing.

• After a fire last night, the homeless encampments underneath the Gardiner Expressway have been cleared. Global News reports.


• blogTO reports on a terribly depressing unit offered for rent in East York at $C 1250.


• blogTO notes that a new pedestrian sky bridge is scheduled to be built in Exhibition Place.


• Urban Toronto notes that the steel skeleton has been put in place for the new extension to Robarts Library.


• blogTO reports on moves to place Ontario Place under heritage protection, sparing it redevelopment.


• George Popper writes at Spacing against new city development protocols for Toronto neighbourhoods.


• The state of 650 Parliament Street, now slated to be reopened in August of this year, is appalling. The Toronto Star reports.

• Paul Salvatori writes at NOW Toronto about the homeless encampments beneath the Gardiner, surely a call for some meaningful action at the municipal level.


• VICE reports on how six young Torontonians dealt with the housing shortage in Toronto by buying a home together, cohabiting.


• blogTO takes a look at the ease of fare evasion on the TTC.


• Jamie Bradburn takes a look at some vintage fashion ads from Toronto in the 1980s.


• Etobicoke-born Brooke Lynn Hytes has become the first Canadian to compete on RuPaul's Drag Race, in Season 11, CP24 reports.

• blogTO highlights a fascinating new book project by Toronto writer Shari Kasman, assembling a hundred photos of the beloved Galleria Mall.


• Chris Selley notes how the promise of mayoral candidate Jennifer Keesmaat to tear down the eastern Gardiner speaks directly to her progressive supporters, over at the National Post.


• The Conversation hosts this well-reasoned article arguing that the City of Toronto must keep resisting the Ford government's intrusions.


• Steve Munro has many questions about the idea of a takeover of the TTC by the Ontario government.


• That more than three thousand people joined a lottery for less than one hundred apartments at the new Toronto Community Housing location at 110 River Street speaks to the new for affordable housing in Toronto. Global News reports.

• I am amused by these dioramas of tiny homes put together by Toronto artist Anita Bonfini. blogTO shares them.


• This Torontoist article by Erin Davis examining the threads uniting the Bentway underneath the Gardiner with the Stackt warehouse at Front and Bathurst and King Street is exciting.


• blogTO reports on the much-needed upgrade and expansion of the Perth-Dupont library to the west of my home, from narrow storefront to something larger and condo-based.


• Victoria Gibson reports on the denials of York Region police that they overlook the sale of counterfeit goods at the Pacific Mall, over at the Toronto Star.


• Ben Spurr notes the desire of Transportation Minister Kathryn McGarry to boost GO Transit use in her Cambridge riding, even though there are low rates of use there, over at the Toronto Star.

• Sean Marshall notes that businesses complaining about the effects of the transit experiment on King Street need to remember why they are in such a central location in the first place, over at his blog.


• blogTO identifies five Toronto neighbourhoods set for a higher profile in 2018.


• Alanna Rizza takes a look at some other cold snaps in the past of Toronto, over at the Toronto Star.


• Torontoist celebrates the Bentway, the new skating rink underneath the Gardiner Expressway. (Is it an answer to the High Line? I wonder.)


• Edward Keenan quite likes the humanizing effect of the Bentway on the spaces around the Gardiner Expressway, and says so at the Toronto Star.


• Janice Bradbeer at the Toronto Star tells the story of how the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy came to be, thanks to American immigrant writer Judith Merril and Rochdale.

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No Toronto neighbourhood paid for the Gardiner Expressway quite like Parkdale.

Before construction of the lakefront highway in 1958, the land south of Springhurst Avenue and the rail tracks was just like the rest of Parkdale: residential, consisting of mostly detached homes on spacious lots.

At the time, Dunn and Jameson Avenues passed over the rail tracks south to the waterfront and a tangle of smaller streets such as Laburnam and Starr Avenues, Empress Crescent, and Hawthorne Terrace intersected them.

South Parkdale was distinct enough to have its own railway station near the present-day foot of Close Avenue.

The first major road to penetrate the neighbourhood was Lake Shore Boulevard, which snaked south of Exhibition Place along the waterfront toward the Humber River in the 1920s.