A Bit More Detail

Rosie DiManno's long-form article "’I’m getting burned!’ Slaying the beast that was the Badminton and Racquet Club fire" examines just what happened at the recent devastating fire at Yonge and St. Clair, in detail.

Fire and water: The crisis and the cure.

But it took 20 hours of steadfastly blasting the latter to extinguish the roiling conflagration of the former last week at the Badminton and Racquet Club of Toronto.

Bringing the blaze to heel — preventing it from leaping to condos and businesses on the four corners of St. Clair Ave. and Yonge St. — required a collective yeoman effort over three days: 520 firefighters, 167 fire engines, pumpers and three tower trucks with articulating booms, hazardous materials unit, dozens of hoses pumping simultaneously, an excavator and countless air cylinders consumed.

And still, days later, small spot fires continued sparking back to life.

A tall chore, killing a fire; throttling it.

The Globe and Mail's Dakshana Bascaramurty reports about a devastating fire at the Badminton and Racquet Club here in Toronto, just west of Yonge and St. Clair. The pillars of smoke are rising, and transit links at St. Clair station have been cut off.

A massive six-alarm fire has caused serious damage to a 93-year-old members-only racquet club in midtown Toronto and has now spread to an adjacent building to the north.

Toronto Fire says The Badminton and Racquet Club at 25 St. Clair Ave. West and neighbouring buildings have been evacuated and there are no reported injuries. Of the approximately 160 firefighters on the scene, one captain was separated from his team and injured on site but has since been rescued and was treated by paramedics, said Capt. David Eckerman.

Capt. Eckerman says they received a call for a fire from occupants fleeing the club around 9:20 a.m.

By the time firefighters arrived, fire had ripped through the roof, the south part of which has since collapsed. The intersection of Yonge and St. Clair has been closed. The St. Clair subway station has been evacuated and subway trains, streetcars and buses that pass through the intersection have been diverted, according to the TTC.

Capt. Eckerman said the south and east walls have partly caved in and could collapse. The north wall is also “spongey,” he said.

I was exiting the northern exit of the St. Clair West subway station on Tichester Road/Heath Street when I saw a team playing on the field in late evening. A later googling brought up the below photo from 1974, revealing that even before this space became a high-end sports field for St. Michael's College School--I think--it was still used. Continuity impresses me.

At the beginning of April, I went to the Target location in the Stockyards shopping complex on St. Clair West to bear witness to the last days of the chain. I had heard of Target's arrival in Canada back in 2013, and I'd of course been following the news of the chain's collapse, but I had never actually managed to get there. I wanted to see once for myself, and what better location to go than the one not only closest to me but the one that was custom-built for its location? (The other stores, as it happens, were converted Zellers.)













These six photos belong to a set a twenty-nine that you can view in full at my Flickr page.

Walking down Spadina Road towards St. Clair Avenue West a weekday morning before work, I passed a house where the purple forget-me-nots bloomed under the shade of a tree net yet blossomed into leaves, all in a yard that was held short of the sidewalk by a retaining wall.

Spraypainted on the plywood covering up one of the doors leading to the now-defunct Bonanza Video, on 392 Spadina Road north of St. Clair, is a slogan, radioactivity warning symbol in red and text in black.

FUKUSHIMA
is
HERE;

GE's
URANIUM
SECRET

1025
LANSDOWNE



I've blogged in the past for my full-throated support of the GE-Hitachi plant at 1025 Lansdowne Avenue. Not only are there no serious safety concerns--not only is a uranium pelletization plant not a nuclear reactor--but it's not clear that it ever was a secret as its opponents claimed. (I was able to find out all about the plant by simply Googling the address, while neighbourhood residents pointed out that there were references to the plant's nature in 1984 in Toronto Life and The Globe and Mail. Some secret.) Besides, expelling presumably well-paying industrial jobs beyond the confines of Toronto is a bad idea for the city's economy.

lpetrazickis corrected me on the subject of the white-painted bike that was the subject of yesterday's morning photo post. That bike likely wasn't part of the Good Bike Project, but was rather a ghost bike memorializing a fatal accident at that location. To wit:

The cyclist killed on Wychwood Avenue this Monday has been identified by his family as Joseph Mavec, a 47-year-old man whose sense of humour and good nature earned him nicknames like “Joe Maverick” and “The Legend.”

[. . .]

Mr. Mavec was killed on Monday evening while traveling southbound on Wychwood Avenue, just south of St. Clair. The quiet stretch of street is lined with a short section of decommissioned streetcar track, which snagged Mr. Mavec’s wheel, throwing him to the pavement.

[. . .]

The group typically uses unrideable bicycles to create the memorials, but Ms. Por, who has not yet spoken to Mr. Bercarich, said she would like to see her cousin’s bike used instead. She hopes other cyclists see the memorial and remember to exercise caution on the road.

[. . .]

Even before he had been publicly identified, Mr. Mavec’s death highlighted the danger that cycling advocates say streetcar tracks pose to urban riders.

TTC spokesperson Brad Ross said there are about 31/2 kilometres of unused track in Toronto. He also said the TTC would only remove the tracks if the city was conducting major road work on Wychwood.

My apologies for the error.

Standing last Sunday on the island for eastbound streetcars on St. Clair Avenue at Dufferin Street, I saw this white-feathered pigeon calmly strutting about. Two women standing next to me threw it potato chips, quickly getting that since pigeons can't chew they'd have to crumble the chips. The pigeon seemed interested.