Torontoist » David Topping

Bye, and Thanks

David Topping — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 20:00:00 +0000

Photo by Miles Storey/Torontoist.

Today, December 31, is my final day as Torontoist’s editor-in-chief: I start at OpenFile as their inaugural Toronto editor next week, and Hamutal Dotan, who’s long been a big part of what makes Torontoist great, starts as editor-in-chief here tomorrow.
I’ll miss Torontoist, but I’m excited for it.
Torontoist has grown dramatically in the four and a half years that I’ve been its editor; ten times as many people read it now as did then. Now, we run original reporting, photography, and illustration, alongside a feature-length history column, alongside a thing about movies that were shot in Toronto but usually pretend not to be, alongside a comic about an alien trying to figure Toronto out. Whatever we do, we try to do it either quicker, or better, or at the very least differently than anyone else in the city. We take stuff like ethics seriously, and when we make mistakes, we take those seriously, too. We try to show Toronto as it really is, and not shy away from arguing for how we think it ought to be.
As our readership has grown, our reputation has alongside it—even faster after we got saved, and became partners with the Globe and Mail. Now, we’re stronger than ever, with a big year behind us, and what I’m sure will be plenty more ahead.
More than anything else, I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve all built together—contributors, editors, publishers, and readers, too, past and present—and very honoured to have been a part of it. I love what Torontoist has been, I love what it is now, and I love what it’s still becoming. I can’t wait to see what it’ll be next.
David Topping
Editor-in-Chief, 2006–2010

Photoist: December 31, 2010

David Topping — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 10:00:00 +0000

platinum by ronnie.yip

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Torontoist’s Most-Liked Articles of 2010

David Topping — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 16:30:25 +0000

Illustration by Brian McLachlan/Torontoist.

From the G20 to the Green Room, from new Toronto slogans to old Toronto photos, from protests that took over our streets to parties that did the same, and from tearjerkers to just plain jerks, here are the articles from 2010 that you, our readers, liked best, judging by how much you all mashed the little “Like” link below each entry.

THE MOST-LIKED ARTICLES OF THE YEAR

Illustration by Chloe Cushman/Torontoist.

1 Heroes and Villains 2010
BY DAVID TOPPING (CONCEPT), DAVID TOPPING AND HAMUTAL DOTAN (EDITORS), TODD AALGAARD, NAVNEET ALANG, SARAH-JOYCE BATTERSBY, WYNDHAM BETTENCOURT-MCCARTHY, CHRISTOPHER BIRD, ANDRE BOVEE-BEGUN, JAMIE BRADBURN, ED BROWN, HAMUTAL DOTAN, STEVE FISHER, DAVID FLEISCHER, ALEX NINO GHECIU, MAX HARTSHORN, KELLI KORDUCKI, STEVE KUPFERMAN, EMILY LANDAU, LAURENCE LUI, CARLY MAGA, DEBORAH MENSAH-BONSU, PATRICK METZGER, STEPHEN MICHALOWICZ, KEVIN PLUMMER, POSTERCHILD, JOHN SEMLEY, EMILY SHEPARD, SUZANNAH SHOWLER, DAVID TOPPING, NICOLE VILLENEUVE, JOHNNIE WALKER, and RYAN WEST (writers), and CHLOE CUSHMAN, MATTHEW DALEY, ROXANNE IGNATIUS, JEREMY KAI, KYRA KENDALL, BRETT LAMB, and BRIAN MCLACHLAN (illustrators).
You know this one already: at the end of every year, Torontoist names Toronto’s very best and very worst people, places, and things from the previous twelve months. This year was our largest yet, with nearly thirty Heroes and thirty Villains, each chosen by a different Torontoist contributor and each brought to heroic or villainous life by our illustrators. (We even won a Canadian Online Publishing Award for last year’s.) If you’re reading this before January 1, you can vote now for who or what you think the Superhero and Supervillain of the year oughta be.

Photo by Nick Kozak/Torontoist.

2 G20 Live, Timelines, and Dispatches
BY DAVID TOPPING AND HAMUTAL DOTAN (EDITORS), Wyndham Bettencourt-McCarthy, Christopher Bird, Hamutal Dotan, Kelli Korducki, Steve Kupferman, Deborah Mensah-Bonsu, Stephen Michalowicz, Peter Saltsman, Emily Shepard, Suzannah Showler, David Topping (writers), and Remi Carreiro, Michael Chrisman, Christopher Drost, Nick Kozak, Andrew Louis, Nancy Paiva, and Ryan Walker (photographers).
It was almost funny before it happened, but by the time the fence was up and the Eternal Flame of Hope was snuffed out, the G20 was already looking rather grim. Then, the weekend came. Throughout it, Torontoist collected updates and photos and videos sent from our writers and photographers on the ground, alongside reports from Christopher Bird and Christopher Drost, who were both accredited for us. Hey, did we mention that one of our own reporters got hit by a cop?

3 A Better Toronto Slogan
BY DAVID TOPPING (CONCEPT), DAVID TOPPING AND KAREN AAGAARD (ORGANIZERS), MARC LOSTRACCO (DESIGNER), AND REMI CARREIRO, HARRY CHOI, MICHAEL CHRISMAN, LODOE-LAURA HAINES-WANGDA, AND SUSAN KORDALEWSKI (PHOTOGRAPHERS).
We invited you, our readers, to submit what you thought Toronto’s slogan should be—”one that represents and shows off the city as it really is,” as we put it back in July. Our judges got more than one thousand to choose from, and narrowed those down to just ten finalists, which we turned into fake tourism posters, leaving behind a few great also-rans. The eventual winning slogan, “Fall in XO with TO,” was so good that the City of Toronto had already thought of something a lot like it.

Photo by Michael Chrisman/Torontoist.

4 Banksy Comes to Toronto
BY DAVID TOPPING AND NICK MOUNT (WRITERS), AND MICHAEL CHRISMAN AND NICK KOZAK (PHOTOGRAPHERS).
When Banksy showed up in Toronto, Torontoist breathlessly reported on the seven pieces he left behind, then stayed with them as taggers did away with them, birds were plopped atop of them, and innocent local street artists got caught up in the frenzy. While Nick Mount thought about what it all meant, we showed you where to find the seven. Then, months later, we checked in on them all one last time and thought some more about what it all meant.

Created by Marc Lostracco/Torontoist.

5 Make Your Own Rob Ford Funny
BY JAMIE BRADBURN, JOEL CHARLEBOIS, DAVID FLEISCHER, KEN HUNT, JEREMY KAI, MARC LOSTRACCO, STEPHEN MICHALOWICZ, JOHN SEMLEY, RYAN WEST, AND TORONTOIST’S READERS (PHOTOSHOP-ERS), AND DAVID TOPPING (CURATOR).
Credit where credit’s due: Star photographer Rene Johnston got a great photo of Rob Ford, his umbrella thrown by the wind off to his left side, his right foot ever so lightly lifted off the ground. Torontoist and our readers took it from there, editing our would-be mayor into everything from West Side Story to the Pride Parade (above). So popular was our collection of stupid Rob Ford pictures that even Karen Philby, a tweeter who was actually a puppet for Ford’s campaign, tried to get us to pick on George Smitherman, the candidate she was pretending to support. (“Yikes, can’t wait to see what the folks at @torontoist do to this awkward photo of @g_smitherman.”) We were just teasing, Mr. Mayor.

Photo by Joel Charlebois/Torontoist.

6 Lights Out for the Green Room?, Inside the Closed-Down Green Room, and How the Green Room Got Closed For Good.
BY DAVID TOPPING (WRITER), AND JOEL CHARLBOIS AND ANDREW LOUIS (PHOTOGRAPHERS).
There are sixteen thousand restaurants, bars, cafés, food trucks—you name it—in Toronto, and the Green Room was the very worst of the lot, according to Toronto Public Health. Torontoist looked at the shady Annex dive, its mysterious owner, its rat- and cockroach-filled health record, and the hearing that’d force the restaurant to stay shut for good.

7 With Reservations, George Smitherman for Mayor
Torontoist made two endorsements on the weekend before the municipal election: one for voting reform, especially ranked ballots, and the other, reluctantly, for George Smitherman. We don’t remember what happened next.

8 Here Is a Video of a Pigeon Riding the Subway
BY DAVID TOPPING
You’re welcome.

9 Jack Layton Wants to Make Sure You See Him Celebrating That Goal!
BY DAVID TOPPING (WRITER) AND CHRISTOPHER DROST (VIDEO).
You’re welcome, again.

Photo by D.A. Cooper/Torontoist.

10 How TOSAT Took Over Toronto’s Street Ad Space, and Artists and Activists Perform a Large-Scale Guerilla Street Advertising Hack
BY STEVE KUPFERMAN (WRITER) AND D.A. COOPER (PHOTOGRAPHER).
On one August day, a group calling themselves the Toronto Street Advertising Takeover replaced dozens of ads with art, and we got the scoop.

11 U of T Plans to School its Languages and Literatures; In Spite of Concerns, U of T Keeps Flirting With SLLUT; and U of T Ditches SLLUT, But Doesn’t Plan for Better Planning
BY SUZANNAH SHOWLER (WRITER), REMI CARREIRO AND LODOE-LAURA HAINES WANGDA (PHOTOGRAPHERS), AND CHLOE CUSHMAN (ILLUSTRATOR).
The University of Toronto’s ill-advised School of Languages and Literatures—which would have amalgamated a number of departments into one, changed a few programs to the point where they were unrecognizable, and killed others altogether—was wildly unpopular, to put it mildly. It took all of four months for the U of T community to see to its death.

12 Will Munro, by Bruce LaBruce
“The loss of Will hits so many of us so hard because he was a warrior…someone who was offended by the very idea of being boring and conventional. In his own words, he always said he wanted to see ‘a lot of freak flags flying in Toronto.’ And his, I say with the utmost admiration, was one of the freakiest.” Bruce LaBruce remembers Will Munro, who died of cancer in May.

13 Bell Tolls For Politely Tackled G20 Looter, and Roger Reis Works for Bank of Montreal, and Also Tackles G20 Looters
BY DAVID TOPPING (WRITER) AND MILES STOREY (PHOTOGRAPHER)
At first, no one knew his name: there was just a video to go on, of a man wrestling a would-be cellphone thief to the ground at the height of G20 looting, throwing in a “Don’t steal!” for good measure. Then, we found the guy we’d later name a hero: Roger Reis. Even better? He worked for the Bank of Montreal.

Created by Alden Cudanin.

14 Putting Now and Then Back Together Again
BY DAVID TOPPING
Meticulously reshooting an old photo of Toronto, and juxtaposing the two shots alongside one-another to show the dramatic differences between the two? Old news. Alden Cudanin puts the new photo inside the old. We featured fourteen of his greatest creations in January; since, he’s started a regular column on Spacing, where you can see even more.

15 The Urbanaut
BY REY ORTEGA
TTC collector George Robitaille, who was photographed sleeping at McCowan Station back in January, died in November. In February, Gleebax, our much-admired Urbanaut, lovingly tucked him in.

16 A Different Historical Perspective, and More Then and Now Photos from Erik Mauer
BY STEPHEN MICHALOWICZ
Like Alden Cudanin, Erik Mauer came up with an impressive way to push old and new together: he held the old photos up in front of what the settings they depicted look like today.

17 Brian Burke Honours Late Son With Pride
BY MARC LOSTRACCO
Brian Burke, the President and General Manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs, marched this year in the Pride Parade—though not, as he’d planned, with his son Brendan, who came out of the closet in 2009, and died in February of this year.

18 The Party Don’t Start Till She Walks In
BY DAVID TOPPING
Avery Timm is a tweenager from Sarnia who happens to have been born with a rare form of dwarfism. That hasn’t stopped her from making earnest, charming YouTube videos—including what is without a doubt the best “TiK ToK” lip-sync of the last year.

19 Welcome to Rob Ford’s Toronto
BY TODD AALGAARD
What Toronto could expect once Rob Ford was mayor—published on the morning after his big, divisive win.

Photo by Michael Chrisman/Torontoist.

20 Unseen City: The Shaw Street School
BY STEVE KUPFERMAN (WRITER) AND MICHAEL CHRISMAN (PHOTOGRAPHER).
Unseen City spent the year exploring the 311 Toronto Call Centre and the G20 Temporary Detention Centre and Canada’s most powerful computer and the Reference Library. Its very first edition was a glimpse inside the Shaw Street School—built in 1914, shut down by the Toronto District School Board in 2000, and now being repurposed by ArtScape into an “art community centre.”

Photo by Ryan Walker/Torontoist.

21 Toronto Before, During, and After Men’s Hockey Gold
BY CHRISTOPHER DROST, NICK KOZAK, NANCY PAIVA, RYAN WALKER, AND TORONTOIST’S READERS (PHOTOGRAPHERS), AND DAVID TOPPING (CURATOR).
When Canada’s men’s hockey team took gold in Vancouver—in overtime against the United States, no less—Toronto all but exploded. At Yonge-Dundas Square, at the base of the CN Tower, along Yonge Street, inside a Dundas West bar, and on Front Street, Torontoist’s photographers were there, as Toronto waited longingly for gold and then, finally, celebrated their country’s triumph.

22 Let Us Prey
BY MARC LOSTRACCO
When a congregation from the Highfield Road Gospel Hall ventured out into Leslieville to preach the good word, Leslieville wasn’t having any of it.

22 Rosie DiManno Weighs In on the Ground Zero Mosque, for Some Reason
BY CHRISTOPHER BIRD
What with all her recent ass-kicking, you could almost forget that Rosie DiManno can still be totally nutty.

24 Did Police Break the Law During the G20?
BY ROBIN RIX
The answer at the time, of course, was “quite possibly.” The answer, since: almost certainly.

24 In Search of Toronto’s Geographic Centre
BY STEPHEN MICHALOWICZ
We’ve tried to find the heart of Toronto before; this time, we found its geographic centre—33 Wanless Crescent, in Lawrence Park.

HONOURABLE MENTION

— Torontoist’s Politics Hub
BY HAMUTAL DOTAN (CONCEPT/EDITOR), DESMOND COLE, HAMUTAL DOTAN, AND EMILY SHEPARD (WRITERS), AYNGELINA BROGAN, JOEL CHARLEBOIS, MICHAEL CHRISMAN, CHRISTOPHER DROST, NICK KOZAK, ANDREW LOUIS, MILES STOREY, AND TORONTOIST’S READERS (PHOTOGRAPHERS), NICK MAHON, KEN HUNT, AND DAVID TOPPING (DEVELOPERS), AND MARC LOSTRACCO (DESIGNER). SPECIAL THANKS TO DAVE MESLIN.
Launched in time for the municipal election, Torontoist’s politics hub broke the city down into its forty-four wards, and explored and explained each one, a project unmatched in scope or ambition anywhere else. There were no articles—just pages, with no “Like” links to be found—but the project was one of the most well-received things we’ve ever done. The hub hasn’t worn out its usefulness now that the election’s over, either, so get exploring.

Heroes and Villains 2010: Last Day To Pick Your Superheroes and Supervillains

David Topping — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 14:00:00 +0000

You’ve voted for Toronto’s Superhero and Supervillain of the year, right? If you haven’t, polls close at midnight tonight—Thursday, December 30—with the big winners and big losers announced just in time for the new year.

Photoist: December 30, 2010

David Topping — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 10:00:00 +0000

Old Bank Facade… by mmmighty_atom

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Photoist: December 29, 2010

David Topping — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 10:00:00 +0000

kvdrt 20 by U.rtica

FROM TORONTOIST’S FLICKR POOL

Photoist: December 24, 2010

David Topping — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 10:00:00 +0000

Holiday Beacon by achow

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Remembering Andrew

David Topping — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 16:00:00 +0000

In May, in London, England, Andrew Mackenzie Hull died in a bike accident. In November, he came back to Toronto.
Stretching across the city, from Queen and Beaconsfield to Spadina and Bloor to the Leslie Street Spit, are one thousand identical posters of Hull—black ink on white paper, a life-sized portrait drawn and shaded by a ballpoint pen. From construction hoarding plywood and long-abandoned windows, he stares straight out, and if you hold his gaze, it starts to look as though he might be about to smile, though it’s hard to tell for sure. Below where the drawing ends, just before his open collar would have closed, is the word “Andrew,” handwritten with that same ballpoint pen. That’s it: a face, and a name.

The posters were made by Shaan Syed, an artist and Hull’s long-time partner. Hull, a filmmaker among other things, had been finishing a thriller called Siren in London, where the two lived together, when he died. But for both of them, Syed explains, Toronto was home. “Despite growing up elsewhere in Canada, when people here ask me where I’m from, I say Toronto as it’s where I first established a strong community in Canada. For Andrew”—who was born in Oshawa, went to school in Lakefield and then Ottawa, and lived and worked after that everywhere from Tunisia to Dessau, Germany—”it was the same.”
Starting in November, Syed spent nearly every night, sunset to sunrise, putting the posters of Andrew’s face up, sometimes with friends and sometimes with the help of a pick-up truck, but usually by himself, by foot. By the time he stopped, it was three weeks later, and December.

“As an artist it seemed a natural way for me to pay tribute to Andrew, but also to raise questions around ideas of absence versus presence,” Syed told Torontoist. “The project is indeed a direct tribute to Andrew and a performance or exercise in public grieving, yet the tribute is so much more as well. It’s a tribute to a punk DIY mentality, to a questioning of advertising and the image. It’s a rejection of clarity, information, and answers, and an embracing of ambiguity and the idea of not knowing.” (That’s regardless, he explains later, of whether some people now know who the “Andrew” is, and who put his face around Toronto.) “It’s an experiment in memory, time, and permanence. It’s an examination of geography and gentrification, vandalism and beautification. It’s a celebration of city textures and derelict back alleys. In all of this, for me it is a tribute. ”
Another close, longtime friend of Hull’s, who asked that his name not be published, isn’t sure yet how to feel about the posters. The project, he said, “brings the pain of his death at surprising moments and in public view where’s it’s difficult to mourn and remember him.”
But, he added, Andrew may well have liked the posters just the same.
“Andrew did love to be counter-cultural,” the friend said. “We used to love to break into construction sites and explore publicly unknown bits of cities long before ‘infiltration’ became popularized…the whole mystery of the posters might have been something Andrew would enjoy.”
That, and the friend added, “Andrew was devilishly handsome and had no false modesty.” (In an obituary that they wrote in the Globe, Andrew’s mother, sister, and a close friend described Andrew as “almost impossibly handsome.”) “The posters may have even played off Andrew’s vanity,” the friend continued, “which is really not such a bad thing.”

Syed, now back in London, collected photos of the posters during the daytime after he put them up, “as they aged—either they were ripped down, graffitied, or postered over.” He’s making a book documenting them; he did something similar for another friend, Jane, in 2001.
“I like that the project is unstable, changing, and impermanent, and that I don’t have control over it beyond the initial pasting. In a way, it’s a test of resilience.”
“The Andrew Project,” Syed says, “only ends when people forget about the image.” It’s hard, now, to imagine that they could.
Photos by Michael Chrisman/Torontoist. BlogTO and Metro Morning have both also reported on the posters recently.

Photoist: December 23, 2010

David Topping — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 10:00:00 +0000

Stanley’s Smoke & Grocery by Metrix X

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Extra, Extra: Holiday Shoppers, Holiday Headlines, and Holiday Depression

David Topping — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 20:00:00 +0000

Every weekday’s end, Extra, Extra collects just about everything you ought to care about or ought not miss.

Photo by johnferri from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

If you liked Tuesday’s Photoist, of a mall bench, and the people who took turns sitting on it—it’s more captivating than it sounds—there’s a whole set of photos on Flickr from photographer John Ferri.
Good things come in threes; bad-news headlines are no exception. Here, then, are December’s best: “RCMP say there’s not enough evidence to charge Justin Bieber,” “Pregnant woman rescued from storm after dog locks her out of car,” and now, “Toronto Santa Claus parade sued after man hit in face with candy bar.”
Don’t read it unless you’re ready to: Toronto Life‘s heart-shattering profile of Robert Munsch, a man who we’ll love for ever and like for always, is online now.
Ho! Ho! Ho! Canada Deux is a two-part, free-for-download compilation of Canadian Christmas songs, with artists from Basia Bulat to By Divine Right—and a good many songs recorded just for the mix, too. [via Ryan North] Here’s the first Ho! Ho! Ho! Canada.
And Patrick Cain, of course, mapped that bicycle count report thing, showing the relative sizes of the packs of cyclists who come into the downtown at different entry points.

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Torontoist Has A New Commenting System, So Let’s Disqus It

David Topping — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 13:00:00 +0000

You probably noticed that, over the weekend, Torontoist got a brand new commenting system. (That was after a week of comments barely working, and several months before that of comments working intermittently.) Now, Disqus is powering your comments—you can see it below any and every Torontoist entry, including ones from way back in our archives. You probably have questions.

What’s better about Disqus?
You can find out a lot more about Disqus here, but a few things to start:
Commenting is easier. Faster—almost instantaneous. If you’ve commented on Torontoist before, you should notice a big difference in everything from how long it takes you to log in to comment, to how long it takes for your comment to be successfully submitted.
You can comment using your Facebook and Twitter, too, if you want to. You don’t have to. If you create a Disqus login (rather than piggybacking off your Facebook and Twitter account), you’ll be able to use it throughout the internet—NOW and Aux.TV, to give two examples, both use Disqus for their comments.
You can do more with comments, like “Like” them, as well as sort them by how well-liked they are. (There’s a button below each reply to either reply to or “Like” that comment, and a drop-down menu above all of the comments that lets you re-order them how you’d like to.)
You can watch comments flow in real time, without having to refresh the page, if you turn “real-time updating” on, and then sit and stare at your screen for a while.

Why’d Torontoist switch to it now?
Gothamist, that company that runs the network of city blogs that Torontoist is affiliated with—they provide our hosting and backend support—made the switch to Disqus across all their sites this weekend. (Some, like Chicagoist, had already been using it for a month.) In a note published on many of those sites on Tuesday, Gothamist publisher Jake Dobkin explained that, in addition to the benefits of Disqus, “we’ve also become concerned about holding commenter login information, which could potentially be misused if we were ever hacked.” It’s happened elsewhere

How do I merge my Disqus account with my previous Torontoist commenting account?
If you’re a long-time commenter, you probably want your commenting history to stay intact. And we know that, above the comments of any entry right now, it says you can merge your previous Torontoist account with your new Disqus one to do exactly that. But actually, you can’t—yet. “You’ll be able to claim your older comments pretty soon,” explains Dobkin. “You’ll see a message in Disqus, and we’ll let you know when they’re ready for merging.”

I like it/hate it.
Good! Tell us in our comments below, or better yet, tell Gothamist about it. You can submit feedback directly to them in a form over here. Tell ‘em Torontoist sent you.

I just want to comment on Torontoist again. What do I do now?
Well, for starters, you could always argue about our choices for Toronto’s Heroes and Villains of the year. You love arguing, right?!

Photoist: December 22, 2010

David Topping — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 10:00:00 +0000

Wiped by eudaimon

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