Historicist: "The city that nobody loves"
Vandalist: My Dog's Name Is "Shadow"
Skin Deep
Weekend Planner: November 21–22, 2009
Elsewhere in the Ist-a-Verse
Photo by Val Dodge/Torontoist.
Wanted: a good home for a down-on-its-luck newspaper box for a defunct newspaper. It's been living on the streets for five months and deserves to reside inside a warm house with a loving family during the coming winter.
When Dose ceased print publication in May 2006 (it continues to live online), all of its newspaper distribution boxes were swept off the streets and, we assume, junked or recycled. Except one. Shortly after Canwest abandoned hope that young people would ever read newspapers—even super-hip free ones—a salvaged Dose box appeared on the rear deck of a house near Broadview and Danforth, having been scooped up by a lucky staffer or fan. The box remained visible to passersby for years as a monument to a failed experiment in giving stuff away.
And that's where it remained until this spring, when the distinctive box was unceremoniously dumped at the curb with a load of trash one evening early in June. You can guess the story: who among us hasn't held on to a peculiar memento for so long that you look at it one day and wonder why that big hunk of clutter is taking up so much valuable space? The Dose box was a victim of changing taste in deck decor, a lack of nostalgia, or—worse—simple cold-hearted abandonment.
But a strange thing happened on the way to the dump. The plucky newspaper box wasn't collected with the garbage that week. Nor did a scavenger scoop it up. For three weeks, it stayed fast at the curb in front of its former home. And then it vanished. Or so it seemed. But instead of disappearing, it merely moved a couple of blocks away to the corner of Broadview and Pretoria. And there it's sat since June, remarkably unabused and in surprisingly good condition. It hasn't even been covered with graffiti or filled with garbage in its five months of abandonment on the street, a notable achievement considering the condition and contents of many Eye and Now boxes every Wednesday.
And still it sits patiently by the curb, as if awaiting its daily load of newspapers for eager commuters. Won't you give it a good home?
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My wife and I walked past this box 2 days ago, and having just moved back to Canada, hoped to pick up a free paper to see what's what. To no avail for obvious reasons ....
Tuds, you don't want to read Dose; it's a product of the National Post. That alone is a good reason why it died.
Technically, Dose was a product of Canwest Publishing, which has lots of publications in addition to the flagship Post. Dose and the Post were drastically different.
The garbage trucks aren't picking it up because they probably think it's a functioning newspaper box.
I once tried throwing away an old galvanized garbage can by leaving it on the curb in front of my house to be collected. What a waste of time that was. I ended up having to crush it and put it in a garbage bag before I could get rid of it.
It would make for a pretty cool beer fridge...
Speaking of failed experiments in giving stuff away, why are we reading (and commenting on, oh the irony) something barely worthy of a Tweet?
You found my Boxy! I worked for Dose (still do, actually) and I rescued that sucker from Yonge St the day the paper folded. We had three fun-filled, glorious years together, during which he sat on my patio, serving as a flower planter, a beer cooler, a conversation starter and - during a few particularly wild parties - a handstand platform. But sadly, I moved to a non-newspaper box-friendly place and was forced to leave poor Boxy behind. I'm thrilled to see he lives on! To the next person who adopts him: please treat him well, and be careful when attempting to balance atop him with one hand. He teeters to the left.
On St. Clair Ave at Alberta there is a learning annex box that has been sitting there for three years since they went bust. They moved it to put in the new streetcar tracks, moved it again to pave the road, put it back in front of Blockbuster, and now it is still there. Roadways come and go, but newspaper boxes are forever. Somewhere in town you can probably find a Telegram box.
Someone ought to chain that alongside some other active news boxes. And beat vandals at their own game by scrawling TRUTH on the glass in permanent marker. And plant some flowers inside.
Shortly before the announcement that Dose was done for, I'd planned on documenting just how wonderful the boxes looked after months of postering and scraping and buffing had worn off much of the paint. Before I could start, the boxes were gone...