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Strike Watch: Day Twenty-Four

By Torontoist

As the city accumulates garbage throughout the ongoing city workers’ strike, we’ll be accumulating photos. Torontoist’s photographers are checking in on garbage and recycling bins around the city throughout the strike, an attempt to follow the tangible effects of the strike and complement our other coverage.
2009_07_15strikewatch_2.jpg 2009_07_15strikewatch_3.jpg

2009_07_15strikewatch_4.jpg
Photos by Miles Storey/Torontoist.


WHERE: Queen Street West at Markham, Bathurst, and Spadina.
WHEN: 6:19, 6:30, and 6:40 a.m. today.

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Comments

  • http://undefined accozzaglia

    Hrm. On that first shot, I wonder how many more water bottles could have fit into the bag by actually flattening them first? Oh, wait: that’s too hard to do, I guess.

  • http://undefined torontothegreat

    I just want this to end :(

  • http://undefined rek

    The garbage can on my deck is nearly half full, when will this madness end!?

  • http://undefined montauk

    The accumulation of garbage is really the least significant effect of this strike; I really don’t get why everyone’s so obsessed with it, Torontoist included.

  • http://www.torontoist.com David Topping

    It’s the most tangible, noticeable effect—if not the greatest or most significant—and it’s the one that directly affects the most people.

  • http://undefined montauk

    With all due respect, that seems like a copout to me.
    As picture-perfect those big piles of trash are, I don’t think it’s necessarily best practice to prioritize issues by visibility instead of severity. I get why Torontoist’s focus is primarily garbage-centric, but come on, man, it’s been twenty-three days and not a single feature on how Torontonians are coping with all the scaled-back or cancelled services? I mean, limited street outreach? No case workers available for social services? No family health appointments for pregnant women? No needle exchange? No city-run sexual health clinics? No city-run recreation programs and childcare? These have significantly more “tangible, noticeable” effects on the Torontonians who need them than the questionable suffering induced by overflowing public trash receptacles or the inconvenience incurred from taking your trash to a dump site. Obviously you can’t do a running photoseries depicting frazzled single mothers or panicky poor people or whatever, but you have to admit, the coverage thus far has been a little lacking.

  • http://undefined friend68

    Here here! I’d rather see Smitherman getting his volunteers to raise money to help those families who can’t afford to pay for their emergency daycare.

  • http://www.torontoist.com David Topping

    (Hitting the “reply” link here to try to keep the thread in context.)
    Originally, our plan wasn’t to have Strike Watch be what it is now; it was originally supposed to be an interesting, timelapse-y photo project tracking just one pair of bins. That changed when the bins we wanted to track started to get consistently emptied, and we had to either pull the plug on the whole thing, or change gears. Strike Watch is necessarily mostly surface, and we can absolutely do more than we’re doing now, I agree. (There were a number of other strike-related articles that never took off as planned or as we wanted them to.) And we do have a few articles in the works now. Unfortunately, there’ll be no “running photoseries depicting frazzled single mothers or panicky poor people,” though God knows we’ve tried.

  • http://undefined montauk

    Aww. You had me at “I agree”, Sir Topping. It’s cool that there’s more in the works, now I shall refresh the site eighty times a minute until they appear. *waits patiently, clicks refresh*
    *clicks refresh*
    *clicks refresh*
    *clicks refresh*

  • mister j

    I took a walk down St. Clair today from Spadina to Oakwood to check how the construction is coming along and couldn’t help but notice the garbage on the corner of Oakwood and St. Clair! It’s kinda the most ‘construction-y’ of the strip right now, so maybe that’s why people are piling their garbage there?

  • http://undefined Tlönista

    If I had a press pass, I’d hit up Toronto Downtown Social Services, which is operating during the strike. I don’t know whether any of the staff members have time to sit down for an interview, though.

  • Christopher Drost

    funny you should mention oakwood. take a drive/walk/ttc along eglinton from duff east to oakwood. last sunday morning it was like a post-rave circa ’98 with couches, a mattress + garbage and leaflets all over the place.