Storm Clouds pix

via Torontoist by Miles Storey on 6/23/08

It's been a particularly tempestuous June this year, with storms rolling in under blue skies and dropping torrents of rain on the city before dissipating or meandering eastwards. There have even been reports of tornadoes touching down in southern Ontario.

The picture above, taken yesterday from the Harbourfront Centre, shows a storm system approaching the city from the east. The funnel shape in the centre is actually heavy rain and possibly hail falling on western suburbs.

Photo by Miles Storey

Reader-based review of Harper's Defence Policy

Harper's Secrecy-First Defence Policy: A reader writes

via inkless-wells « WordPress.com Tag Feed by Paul Wells on 6/22/08

If the Prime Minister is to be discouraged from dumping major policy documents onto the Internet in the middle of the night at the end of the session six weeks after they should have been ready, the only thing that will do the trick is the knowledge that such clandestine behaviour will not spare him the journalistic scrutiny he is clearly trying to avoid. My own poor effort was not going to do do it. And I am sad to say that after a spate of early stories simply recording the fact of the late-night document dump, Harper's instinct has been confirmed by a near-total lack of journalistic scrutiny. (The Ottawa Citizen's David Pugliese, as is almost always the case, remains the honourable exception. Here is his blog post on the defence plan. I suspect more is on the way.)

So I was really grateful to get an email this morning from Inkless comment-board regular MikeG, who — puttering in his spare time on a sunny weekend — has produced the most detailed analysis of the Harper defence plan's spending projections that I have seen. He even made charts and graphs. And what they show is curious: while $490 billion sure looks like a heck of a number, it amounts to a gentle budgeted decline in Canada's defence effort, compared against major allies, over time.

I'll close by pointing out that a defence policy isn't only a policy for spending. It's a set of choices about what that money will buy. Since we're all planning to snooze on that set of choices in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, perhaps Inkless readers will care to read the policy themselves and discuss the choices the Harper government has made.

Democracy: not only can you do it yourself, I'm afraid you're pretty much going to have to. Thanks once again to MikeG.

Cambridge Solar Collector Art Performance

Event Guide: Cambridge Solar Collector Performance

via Spacing Toronto • understanding the urban landscape by Shawn Micallef on 6/20/08

WHAT: Solar Collector — A solar powered, web-connected, interactive sculpture

WHERE: 100 Maple Grove Road, Cambridge, Ontario (Google map)

WHEN: Saturday, June 21, 8:30PM

If you are in the mood for a summer solstice party with a technological twist on Saturday night, head to the lawn of the Waterloo Regional Operations Centre in Cambridge and see the command performance launch of Solar Collector, a new public art sculpture that allows people to program light patterns through a web interface. The work is by Gorbet Design Inc., the folks behind P2P (or Power to the people), the interactive artwork installed on the front of the Drake Hotel back in 2004 (see Spacing's "History of our Future" issue in 2005, p. 41). It consisted of a large bank of light switches located on the south side of Queen Street that connected to lights fixed onto the Drake's facade, allowing people to write, or draw, whatever they wanted. If you can't make the performance on Saturday, you can experience Solar Collector on any other evening as well.

In a collaboration between the community and the sun, Solar Collector gathers human expression and solar energy during the day, then brings them together each night in a performance of flowing light.

We invite you to celebrate the summer solstice at the launch of Solar Collector on June 21st. Bring an evening picnic out to the grassy lawn under the apple trees, and enjoy live music to accompany the sculpture's performance (More details here).–

Twelve aluminum shafts rise from the grassy hill in front of the Waterloo Regional Operations Centre. Their graceful shape reflects the angles of the sun through the year. The tallest shaft is perpendicular to the sun at winter solstice, when the sun is low in the sky. The flattest shaft faces the high sun at summer solstice.

Each shaft has three sets of lights, along with three solar panels. During the day, the solar panels collect the sun's energy in a battery within each shaft. At the same time, the Solar Collector website collects light compositions — patterns in light that are created by the community through a simple web interface.

Each night at dusk, a performance begins of all the compositions collected that day. The flowing waves of light are a visual reflection of the sine waves that describe the sun's movement through the sky.

When the day's patterns are through, the performance moves on to a series composed collaboratively from all the patterns ever created. The length of the performance is a reflection of the weather and the seasons, as the shafts use up their energy and fade out late in the evening, one by one.

Photo by Gorbet Design Inc.

How the U.S. Got Its Canadian Copyright Bill

Ah, Lobbying - quite possibly the marketing activity with the highest ROI activity of all

How the U.S. Got Its Canadian Copyright Bill

via Michael Geist Blog by Michael Geist on 6/15/08

My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) examines the role that U.S. pressure played leading up to the introduction of Bill C-61 last week. I argue that the bill is the result of an intense public and private campaign waged by the U.S. government to pressure Canada into following its much-criticized digital copyright model. The U.S. pressure has intensified in recent years, particularly since there is a growing international trend toward greater copyright flexibility with countries such as Japan, New Zealand, and Israel either implementing or considering more flexible copyright standards.

The public campaign was obvious. U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins was outspoken on the copyright issue, characterizing Canadian copyright law as the weakest in the G7 (despite the World Economic Forum ranking it ahead of the U.S.). The U.S. Trade Representatives Office (USTR) made Canada a fixture on its Special 301 Watch list, an annual compilation of countries that the U.S. believes have sub-standard intellectual property laws. The full list contains nearly 50 countries accounting for 4.4 billion people or approximately 70 percent of the world's population. Most prominently, last year U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein and John Cornyn, along with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, escalated the rhetoric on Canadian movie piracy, leading to legislative reform that took just three weeks to complete.

The private campaign was even more important.

Sources say that emboldened by the successful campaign for anti-camcording legislation, U.S. officials upped the ante at the Security and Prosperity Partnership meeting in Montebello, Quebec last summer. Canadian officials arrived ready to talk about a series of economic concerns but were quickly rebuffed by their U.S. counterparts, who indicated that progress on other issues would depend upon action on the copyright file. Those demands were echoed earlier by the USTR, which, according to documents obtained under the Access to Information Act, made veiled threats about "thickening the border" between Canada and the U.S. if Canada refused to put copyright reform on the legislative agenda.

Faced with unrelenting U.S. pressure, the newly installed Industry Minister was presented with a mandate letter that required a copyright bill that would meet U.S. approval. The government promised copyright reform in the October 2007 Speech from the Throne and was set to follow through last December, only to pull back at the last hour in the face of mounting public concern.

In the months that followed, Prentice's next attempt to bring the copyright bill forward was stalled by internal cabinet concerns over how the bill would play out in public. The bill was then repackaged to include the new consumer-focused provisions such as the legalization of recording television shows and the new peer-to-peer download $500 damage award. The heart of the bill, however, remained largely unchanged since satisfying U.S. pressure remained priority number one. Just after 11:00 a.m. last Thursday, the U.S. got its Canadian copyright bill.

The multi-tasking virus

So true.

The multi-tasking virus

via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog by nick on 6/13/08

In an essay written for Tim Ferriss's blog, Josh Waitzkin, the former chess champion who was the subject of the book and subsequent film Waiting for Bobby Fisher, writes of his recent experience in returning to his alma mater, Columbia, and sitting in on a class taught by Dennis Dalton, "the most important college professor of my life." Dalton, writes Waitzkin,

was describing the satyagraha of Mahatma Gandhi, building the discussion around the Amritsar massacre in 1919, when British colonial soldiers opened fire on 10,000 unarmed Indian men, women and children trapped in Jallianwala Bagh Garden. For 39 years, Professor Dalton has been inspiring Columbia and Barnard students with his two semester political theory series that introduces undergrads to the ideas of Gandhi, Thoreau, Mill, Malcolm X, King, Plato, Lao Tzu. His lectures are about themes, connections between disparate minds, the powerful role of the individual in shaping our world. Dalton is a life changer, and this was one of his last lectures before retirement.

But it was the audience's reaction that left an even greater impression on Waitzkin:

Over the course of a riveting 75-minute discussion of the birth of Gandhian non-violent activism, I found myself becoming increasingly distressed as I watched students cruising Facebook, checking out the NY Times, editing photo collections, texting, reading People Magazine, shopping for jeans, dresses, sweaters, and shoes on Ebay, Urban Outfitters and J. Crew, reorganizing their social calendars, emailing on Gmail and AOL, playing solitaire, doing homework for other classes, chatting on AIM, and buying tickets on Expedia (I made a list because of my disbelief). From my perspective in the back of the room, while Dalton vividly described desperate Indian mothers throwing their children into a deep well to escape the barrage of bullets, I noticed that a girl in front of me was putting her credit card information into Urban Outfitters.com. She had finally found her shoes!

When the class was over I rode the train home heartbroken, composing a letter to the students, which Dalton distributed the next day. Then I started investigating. Unfortunately, what I observed was not an isolated incident. Classrooms across America have been overrun by the multi-tasking virus. Teachers are bereft. This is the year that Facebook has taken residence in the national classroom. Students defend this trend by citing their generation's enhanced ability to multi-task. Unfortunately, the human mind cannot, in fact, multi-task without drastically reducing the quality of our processing.

That minds wander is not news - "wandering" may well be the default setting for our brains - but the scale of it today does seem to be something new and remarkable.

The anachronistic Brewers Retail

The anachronistic Brewers Retail

via Wellington Financial Blog - News, Views & Purviews by Mark McQueen on 6/13/08

As InBev launches a US$46 billion hostile bid for Anheuser-Busch, the iconic Bud may no longer be sporting an American flag. That's something we long became comfortable with here in Canada, as Labatt, Molson and Sleeman have all been acquired by foreign-based brewers. ...

But unlike the U.S., these foreign acquisitions have had a particular impact in Ontario. The former Brewers Retail (now The Beer Store), you see, is owned by the very foreign firms that also own the former Labatt, Molson and Sleeman franchises. What this means is quite straightforward: the owners of The Beer Store do what's best for their brands, and the rest of the world is at the back of the bus.

To whit, when it was discovered that "walk in cooler" beer stores (Yonge and Summerhill, for example) were increasing sales of small brands such as Brick, Mill Street and Moosehead, among others, the owners switched gears. Enough with that floormap. Most new stores are now "handy pickup" type outlets (Yonge and Lawrence, for example). Most of what you see now is a sea of beer produced by the same people that own the store. Conventiently inside the front door of the handy pickup outlets are the cases of the big three (Canadian, Coors Light, Blue, Bud and Sleeman). If you want to pick something else, feel free to ask a rep. But the delightful packaging of independent brewers is largely hidden from view, just like 20 years ago when the forbidden fruit rolled out from behind a wall on metal rollers. With this change in store setup, guess what happened to the sales of independent brewers? Right back down again. The oligarchy preserved their marketshare grip, all in the name of customer convenience. At least the convenience of the customers who buy the owner's particular brand of beer.

Which begs the question, why won't the Ontario government give local brewers the same opportunity to succeed as local vintners? The fact that our beer distribution system is owned by foreigners is not entirely different than the fact that Cognos or Dofasco have gone the same route.

What is different about this situation, however, is the impact the oligarchy has on the ability for the two dozen Ontario microbrewers to flourish. Lakeport, Creemore, Upper Canada and Sleeman all had varying degrees of success, and all started out extremely small. There is a chance that Mill Street or Wellington Brewery, for example, could replicate that success.

Let's give the next generation of Brew Masters a chance, and allow them to sell their beer at grocery stores. At least for a start.

Mapping Toronto's campers

Map of the week: Where the campers are

via Map of the Week by Toronto Star on 6/11/08

This week's map (link) is much simpler than last week's, and to a certain extent inspired by the weekend's heat wave: the percentage of the population in the GTA that received a provincial park camping permit last year, by postal area.

Durham Region is strongly represented.

Pickering, Ajax, Whitby and especially Oshawa are full of campers, it turns out, as is the Yonge St. corridor between Richmond Hill and Newmarket. There are also outdoorsy neighbourhoods downtown, where the Ontario park system is popular in High Park, the Beaches, the U of T area and the Islands.

The GTA's most enthusiastic campers can be found in M8X, in the Bloor St. W. and the Humber area of the former city of Etobicoke, where 4.4% of the population was issued a park permit last year.

The Ministry of Natural Resources issued almost 271,000 park permits last year, of which about 74,000 went to GTA residents. About 14,000 park users came from Quebec, and 4,500 from Manitoba. Over 16,000 came from the U.S., the largest groups from New York and Michigan.

Nerd box:

This week, we're displaying most of the suburban (but not rural) communities in the GTA. There are a total of 177 postal areas displayed, with just over 2,000 individual points. With this big a map, we're pushing the limits of how many polygons GoogleMaps can display. (The issue isn't the number of polygons so much as the points it takes to display them, which is why the maps are roughly drawn.). It may take 10-15 seconds to load

Branded

Branded

via Torontoist by Cate Simpson on 5/29/08

How many brands does it take to get you through the day? Jane, a pseudonymous Torontonian ad executive, sought to discover just that. She posted the results on her blog, Dear Jane Sample, in what Ad Broad later dubbed a "Brand Timeline Portrait."

It turns out that "portrait" is a surprisingly accurate description of what she ended up with. From Jane's Brand Timeline Portrait, we discover that Jane is a woman who flosses, who has a cat, who turns on her TV before she leaves for work in the morning. Jane is a woman who lives in Toronto and takes public transit to work, who drinks beer on a Friday night before going home, smoking up and getting down. There's been some debate in the comments thread of her post over whether the LG logo followed by several Durexes indicates that she used her phone to make a booty call soon after 10 p.m. Fortunately, the BTP still leaves some details to the imagination.

In the manner of those LiveJournal memes nobody can resist filling out (the ones that ask you what you had for breakfast and what you keep on your nightstand), the Brand Timeline Portrait has spread all over the internet. "I knew it would be a good blog post, but nothing prepared me for it going viral," Jane told Torontoist. "I love how something so simple can cross the language barriers, and it has really started some interesting discussions around brands."

As an advertising account executive, Jane was perhaps predictably untroubled by the implications of her day in brands. "As a marketer, it just shows that these brands have done a good job of marketing themselves." In this way, the Brand Timeline Portrait is a kind of confessional. You can pretend that you're beyond the pull of advertising, but there it is in full colour: every big corporation you've allowed into your life and your daily routines. And it's hard to resist the appeal to put it all out in the open.

If, like us, you're going to run off and assemble your Brand Timeline Portrait right this instant, here are Jane's simple instructions: 1. Go to Google Image; 2. Type in brandname+logo; 3. Capture, resize (if you don't have any imaging software, you can use this site instead), and save.

Well Past Time

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this (food) wall!

via Spacing Toronto • understanding the urban landscape by Shawn Micallef on 5/29/08

Street food is in the news again, and it's annoying. It's annoying because it has been so bungled up and delayed that it has invited the ridicule and scorn from the usual shrill and right-wing-populist corners of the city (making it far too easy for them), and lives up to whatever Soviet-style imagery they want to evoke. It's more annoying because we find ourselves agreeing with these folks. Back in February, Dylan Reid had the following to say here on Spacing Toronto:

It's not often I find myself in complete agreement with Denzil Minnan-Wong, but the way city council has managed to unnecessarily complicate what should have been a slam-dunk, the expansion of Toronto's street food beyond sausages, has put me in that unusual position.

I have long felt, like I'm sure most of our readers, that a diverse city like Toronto should have far more food available on the street than sausages (even if there are several kinds). So I was strongly supportive when councillor John Filion started a campaign last year to loosen the provincial regulations and enable a wider variety of food to be sold from stalls in Toronto.

It doesn't seem that it should be complicated. The province loosened the regulations last year, so all Toronto needed to do was to start licensing carts that sold stuff other than sausages. People in Toronto have been thinking about how this might be done for years, and given the wide range of cultures and inventiveness of our citizens, no doubt Torontonians would have come up with a wide variety of interesting proposals.

In the Star yesterday the Preston-Manning-of-Toronto-Danforth, Case Ootes, complains that "we have to micromanage everything," and for once, we agree. Today, Royson James does not look this gift horse in the mouth, and lays into the folly:

What a great idea. Why is the city bent on messing it up?

Councillor John Filion should be commended for trying to add spice and variety to Toronto's street food fare. Put a little jerk in the chicken, add some bite to the dog, and toss in some salads for the vegans and crepes for the sophisticates.But oh, how they've wrapped and trapped the spring rolls in red tape and bureaucracy at city hall.

You'd have thought this to be a simple matter: Change provincial laws that prohibit the sale of anything but pre-cooked meat; establish testing and inspections; announce the new regime; watch enterprising vendors enter the marketplace. And Torontonians are smiling in their samosas and crying in their hot curry.

But no, too easy. The meddlers had to engineer it into delay and confusion. First, the city wanted to borrow $700,000 to buy 35 carts and lease them out for $450 a month. Why not just set the cart standards and leave it to the private sector to provide and sell? Because the city wants to block "conglomerates" from taking over this new venture.

The solution is easy. Forget about this centralized cart-leasing scheme. Issue permits to individual human beings, and then let them decided what kind of cart they will use. Establish some general cart guidelines, but that's it ("no towering neon signs," that sort of thing). Maybe some of them will tap into Toronto's vast design talent and get a unique, locally built cart. Then let them serve whatever they want. Then send around Toronto's great food inspectors, who enforce some of the world's toughest food hygiene laws, and see if they're up to code, just like we do with restaurants in this city. If they're clean, they would have lineups of austerity-weary customers immediately.

There would be no delay in getting new kinds of food on the street because the creative entrepreneurial spirit in Toronto can move at the speed of light — all that creative city stuff we keep hearing about — but only if we let it happen. Toronto would be better off if the bureaucracy simply made sure it was done right, just by enforcing rules already in place, and meddling no further.

Wild Toronto: Chimney Swift

Wild Toronto: Chimney Swift

via Torontoist by Rosemary Mosco on 5/22/08

Wild Toronto is a bi-weekly comic strip about the animals and plants that make a living in our city. Rosemary Mosco makes the comics, and would love to hear your suggestions (in the comments!) on wildlife to be profiled.

Yup, it's a big box, all right

Coming to Leslieville

Yup, it's a big box, all right

via Posted Toronto by Peter Kuitenbrouwer on 5/22/08

Smart!Centres, based in Vaughan, is Canada's busiest retail developer; its "big-box" shopping malls have become commonplace on the outskirts of most Canadian cities. The company has run into opposition in Leslieville of late with its plan for a 700,000 square-foot project, with parking for on Eastern Avenue. The city turned them down, and the company's appeal to the Ontario Municipal Board began on Wednesday.
As part of its intense lobbying efforts to win support for its plan, Smart!Centres has bought advertising in many local newspapers showing sketches of its proposed Eastern project, with three-storey red brick buildings and pedestrians and cyclists out front. The company introduced those sketches during its opening statement at the hearing yesterday. The other day, Tom Smith, the company's vice-president of development, argued in the National Post that, "Smart!Centres has done a lot of traditional greenfield 905 big box retail. We are changing the company from within."
But, should the company win its appeal at the OMB, will the project it builds reflect its sketches? The office of Councillor Paula Fletcher (Toronto-Danforth) the other day forwarded a sketch Smart!Centres produced for a project, including a Wal-Mart, at Bathurst and Centre streets in its very own Vaughan, along with a photograph of what actually got built. Absent, in the mostly finished project, are the cobblestones walkways, grass, plazas in front of the stores, lamp posts, and awnings from the sketches. There are a few spindly trees. Councillor Paula Fletcher comments, "The pedestrian features seem to have been lost from the concept drawings to the real thing." Brendan O'Callaghan, the lawyer leading the city's fight at the OMB, says that the Smart!Centre sketches, in the Leslieville case, are irrelevant. "This hearing is not about trying to make a Smart!Centre look like a business campus," he said. The city, he said, wants a "modern business campus for knowledge industries" at the site, along the lines of Liberty Village.

Old Golf Course Park?

Old Golf Course Park?

via Spacing Toronto • understanding the urban landscape by Josh Hume on 5/21/08

A new public park is planned as part of the Toronto Community Housing Corporation's residential development that will soon rise on the land directly east of Fort York. Construction is slated to begin in June, 2009, and though the park component will not be completed until at least 2011, planners, developers and heritage groups have already started to discuss potential names for the park.

Most of the names being considered point to the historical significance of the site, as only in its most recent incarnation was this a fallow and undistinguished tract of land, (aside from its brief tenure as a nine-hole golf course). Originally, it was part of Toronto's shoreline, and the very spot where Garrison Creek met Lake Ontario. It was the location of the original Fort York structures burned down by American forces in 1813 and later the site of the recently unearthed Queen's Wharf as well as numerous early railway structures.

The working title is Mouth of the Creek Park, but candidates for a permanent name include Blockhouse Park, Queen's Wharf Park, Lost Creek Park, and even Garrison Creek Park - which is odd since there is already a Garrison Creek Park at Ossington and Dupont.

BCE Atrium - Minaturized

daily dose of imagery's view of mini BCE

Street Stories: Neville Park Boulevard

Street Stories: Neville Park Boulevard

via Spacing Toronto • understanding the urban landscape by Todd Harrison on 5/19/08

For many Torontonians, Neville Park means "Yes, I'm going all the way — unless I short-turn at Connaught or Kingston Road."

Thanks to its long-standing status as the eastern terminus of the 501 streetcar (and, by extension, its place on the rollsign of streetcars heading for the Beach end of the city's longest route), Neville Park Boulevard is a name that's likely familiar to ten times more Torontonians than have actually walked the street itself.

Frances Jane Neville was the daughter of former Toronto mayor George Monro. After Monro died, his heirs leased some of the substantial family estate in the city's east end to the Toronto Railway Company, for the purposes of opening an amusement park. Munro Park (the misspelling stuck — it's now a street name in the area) operated along the waterfront near the foot of what's now Neville Park Boulevard for a decade around the turn of the 20th century. It closed in 1906, the same year as nearby Victoria Park — which was located where the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant sits today.

(more…)

Low Ceiling over Toronto

PhotoTO: Low Ceiling

via Torontoist by Miles Storey on 5/15/08

We've seen some amazing images of Toronto blanketed by fog and clouds, and this extraordinary capture of the CN Tower just peaking out from low lying clouds, by Ron Gallagher, is no exception.

Tiny, Perfect Royal York

The Daily Photoist: May 14, 2008

via Torontoist by David Topping on 5/14/08

Every weekday morning, bright and early, we feature a photo (or two) from a photographer in the Torontoist Flickr Pool. It's our way of giving the many excellent photographers in our pool the attention that they deserve.

Mini Hotel

BY WVS

Bike Rack Whimsy

Lawrence of A-rack-ia

via Torontoist by Jonathan Goldsbie on 5/13/08

When we first got a tip from Andrew Hunter that "someone has installed a new type of bike post along Yonge north of Lawrence," we were concerned that it might be the vanguard of the Coordinated Street Furniture onslaught of mass-produced uniformity. When we went down (yes, down) to visit the area, however, we were quite relieved to discover not Kramer-designed brontosaurus ribs but elegant, artfully crafted flourishes of metallic whimsy. Inspired by a similar project in which psychiatric survivors designed bike stands for the curb in front of the Parkdale Activity and Recreation Centre (PARC), the Yonge Lawrence Village BIA commissioned two of the artists behind that project, Phil Sarazen and Jack Gibney, to fashion sixteen pieces, each featuring "a different aspect of community living." Studded into each block on both sides of Yonge Street north from Lawrence to Yonge Boulevard, they succeed in being everything that Astral's street furniture is not and should serve as an inspiration to all neighbourhoods and BIAs as to what is possible when you're willing to invest in your community rather than sell it out.

Photos of eight more after the jump. And, yes, the wheels on the above can be spun.

All photos by Jonathan Goldsbie.

Re-discovering Toronto's lost bridge

Re-discovering Toronto's lost bridge

via Posted Toronto by Rob Roberts on 5/12/08

Ever wondered why central Toronto is so flat? Answer: because people flattened it!
At 4 p.m. tomorrow in Trinity-Bellwoods Park, Deputy Mayor Joe Pantalone will perform a long-overdue task: unveil a plaque to the Crawford Street Bridge, one of the seven lost wonders of Toronto.
The bridge, built in 1915, spans a ravine of the late, great Garrison Creek, so named because, from its headwaters north of St. Clair Avenue, it gurgled past the soldiers stationed at Fort York, en route to flowing into Lake Ontario.
According to the plaque, "by the 1880s, the creek was so polluted that it was gradually channeled underground into a brick sewer, built through here in 1885."
City fathers (and mothers) bricked in the creek but left the ravine, and in 1915 one R.C. Harris — yes, the famed Commissioner of Works who built the water filtration plant and Bloor Street Viaduct and was immortalized in the Michael Ondaatje book -- cut his teeth at this very spot, engineering a triple-span bridge to get Crawford Street up to Dundas Street (triple-span refers to the arches, resting on posts, which hold up the bridge deck.)
The bridge, though, received an indecent burial just 45 years later, when excavators digging out the Bloor Street subway line just filled the ravine up with dirt. Gary Miedema, who heads the plaque project at Heritage Toronto, notes, "Trinity-Bellwoods was an immigrant community that would have been relatively voiceless."
Lately, the area has been finding its voice.
"So dumb," Ed Dosman, a professor of international studies at York University, says of the bridge-burying.
Mr. Dosman in his spare time works with the Garrison Creek Linkage Project, which has already done marvelous work using copper letters sunk in cement to label Garrison Creek along much of its length. Here at the Crawford Bridge, they've stuck plaques in cement depicting the fish who once swam here: northern pike, bowfin, white sucker, largemouth bass, brown bullhead, pumpkinseed and rock bass.
But Mr. Dosman won't be content until backhoes undo the mistakes of the past, and unearth the bridge, our own local Téotihuacan.
"I have no doubt that in the next generation the bridge will be dug out," he says. "We could have potentially a water feature in Trinity-Bellwoods park along the lines of Lafontaine Park in Montreal. In Chicago or Seattle this would have been done a long time ago, but we're broke."
In his dream, a one kilometre stretch of restored creek flows from Dundas to Queen Street, passing under the bridge and through the remaining ravine in Trinity-Bellwoods park, which today is a popular toboganning spot in winter.
Mr. Pantalone, Toronto's "tree advocate," says, however, that it's not just about the money.
"We'd have to kill I don't know how many trees to ressurect the old bridge," he said. "Future generations may deem that a project worth doing."
Indeed, I'm fascinated walking here to see the dozens of 40-year-old maple and ash trees thriving in the 1960s fill around the bridge. You can see the former line of the ravine from the much older trees at the edges of the park.
On the plus side, the filled-in ravine around the bridge is now home, on Tuesdays, to the Trinity-Bellwoods farmer's market, which opens for the season tomorrow. I love that market, except that vendors and shoppers trample and kill the grass in the park. Here's my idea: close the bridge stretch of Crawford on Tuesday afternoons, let the vendors set up there, and call it the Crawford Bridge Market, which would celebrate the bridge's memory, and save the grass.

Crawford Street Bridge, West Side, November 16, 1915. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1231, Item 1615
Photo of Crawford Street this afternoon by Peter Redman, National Post

Gas Prices and Real Estate

Gas Prices and Real Estate

via Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed by pk on 5/12/08

Interesting piece picked up by The Oil Drum on the relationship between gas prices and real estate in Australia. It summarizes a study of the effect on commuting costs when considering various communities progressively further outside the urban/suburban/exurban horizon west of Sydney.

Here is the effect in the $2/litre scenario, with red representing the highest percentage of income going to fuel consumption, etc.:

Granted, this is based on a few assumptions, not least of which being that a commuter-centric culture will continue to prevail in a high-price oil world. That is a debatable point.Nevertheless, interesting stuff, as is the underlying paper. Can barely imagine what this would look like here in car-dependent, freeway-riddled southern California.

Irony of Toronto's planning dep't

Letter from Yonge-Dundas Square: Designing for the public

via Posted Toronto by Barry Hertz on 5/9/08

It seemed like a good idea: Take a picture of Gary Wright, Toronto's new chief planner, in Yonge-Dundas Square, a project he planned in 1996. But as soon as the National Post photographer began to work, a security guard appeared with Sara Peel, the square's "event co-ordinator," and told us to stop."Anybody who is doing anything needs a permit," the guard said, adding the folks from Dr. Oetker were soon to start handing out free pizza.Told the story, Councillor Adam Vaughan
(Trinity-Spadina), who sits on council's planning committee, jokes, "He is a victim of his own planning."

It wasn't supposed to be like this; Mr. Wright intended to create a new public square. As he told me, while sitting in the square, "We're not a city known for squares or public spaces. It's a very commercial downtown in Toronto. There's not a culture of public squares." What we have is a private square, run by a board of management that rents it for corporate events.

The planner chased from his own square; it's a perfect metaphor for the challenges facing fast-growing Toronto. While developers erect condo towers, some five times higher than zoning permits, where are the improvements in the public realm? Sidewalks are too narrow for all the new pedestrians, passengers squeeze into overcrowded buses, subways and streetcars, and new parks downtown are rare.

James McKellar, a professor of real property at York University's Schulich School of Business, argues that great cities are judged not by new private buildings but by public development, of such things as parks, transit, sidewalks and public schools. In building the public realm, he says, "Toronto has no idea of what it is doing."Of particular concern, in this context, is the announcement that Mr. Wright will only stay as chief planner for two years, until his retirement in 2010. "The man will have no power," Mr. McKellar says. "He's a lame duck."

On the plus side, Mr. Wright is a nice guy. A friendly, bearded father-figure, he has spent 33 years in Toronto's planning department. He takes over from Ted Tyndorf, the chief planner who died of cancer in February. Mr. Tyndorf held the job for four years.Mr. Wright, who lives in the Beach, notes that he has a busy job. The city gets 600 to 700 applications for rezonings, official plan amendments and site plan approvals each year, on top of about 3,200 applications to the committee of adjustment. To handle this, Mr. Wright has a staff of 346.It sounds like a lot of people, but according to Mr. Vaughan's count, Toronto today has fewer planning staff for a city of 2.6 million than it did before amalgamation for a city of about 650,000. "It's as if we jettisoned the whole planning departments of Scarborough, East York, York and Etobicoke," he says.

"Our planning sucks by all accounts. The planners are demoralized. Our reputation for great planning is something that we built in the 1970s, coasted on in the 1980s, and destroyed in the 1990s." Mr. Wright is more upbeat, citing community activists as inspiring him, including Active 18, a Queen Street West group wanting to control development across from the Drake Hotel. ''We didn't always have a successful working relationship, but it got better at the end. We look forward to working with communities like that." He is also keen on new design review panels that will review projects near St. Lawrence Market, at Humber Bay Shores, in North York and in Scarborough.

But Howard Cohen, a former Toronto planner who now builds condos with his firm, Context Developments, told a panel at the University of Toronto last week (according to a report in the city newsmagazine Novae Res Urbis): "We have a planning department that is dispirited, demoralized and totally intimidated by community groups and council."A number of people describe Toronto's planning department as a troubled place, whose senior planners, feeling disempowered, have left, leaving juniors who have little experience. Meanwhile, empowered councillors cut random deals with developers, forcing them to hand out transit passes with new condos or give money to local picnics. Mr. McKellar suggests that, to clean up the mess, Toronto needs a global search for a new head of plannning, someone on the scale of Vancouver's Larry Beasley, who became a household name while bringing planning innovation to that city. That's not what Toronto is going to get. "If we wish to maintain the status quo in the planning department," says Councillor Karen Stintz (Eglinton Lawrence), "then Gary Wright will be very good in that role."