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5 Comments

news

White Squirrels Can’t Trump

By Jonathan Goldsbie

20090214WhiteSquall.jpg
Photos by Jonathan Goldsbie/Torontoist


In July 2006, City Council approved a staff report recommending names for the new streets created as part of the redeveloped Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) property at 1001 Queen Street West [PDF]; one of these was White Squirrel Way, in reference “to the rare white squirrels that nest in the vicinity.”
As the parkette at the corner of Queen and White Squirrel is itself about to get a name [PDF], now might also be a good time to fix the misspelling on the street sign; such typos happen occasionally, Jack Lakey recently explained, because workers at the City’s sign shop have to manually input the names into the computer system that does the lettering. We, however, prefer to imagine that this was a deliberate subtle homage to Ridley Scott’s forgotten late-90s output and look forward to the letters “G” and “I” popping up on Jane in the near future.

Comments

  • http://undefined mister j

    Reminds me of a story I heard about the streets in James Bay, an area of Victoria BC I lived in for a while. Most places in BC put their streets in alphabetical order. A street planner had set up the names of the streets in this order and then sent a ‘junior’ worker to put up the signs. But the worker just put the signs up in the order that he took them out of the truck! His random order stuck and those are still the names of the streets!

  • http://undefined mister j

    Sorry, that map doesn’t show James Bay. Try this

  • http://undefined David Toronto

    Why isn’t a street named after John Howard? After all, he was the designer of the asylum.
    Those north-south streets could be renamed as Lower xxxxxxx St., being the southerly extensions the streets they connect to.
    While I’m at it, why not give the other east-west street the name Richmond? It does follow the alignment of Richmond and even though it is discontinuous it shouldn’t be any impediment to carrying on the name.
    Ontario Street is also discontinuous and that’s not a problem, is it?

  • http://www.publicspace.ca Jonathan Goldsbie

    The short answer, David, is that they try really hard to pick street names that could not possibly result in confusion for emergency dispatchers and responders.

  • http://undefined dudeTO

    Howard Park was named after John Howard.