Photos: July 2009 Archives

       

With agreements with both striking unions fully agreed on and ratified, the City's service resumption plan fully in place and workers returning to work, today—barring a disaster at Toronto City Council—will be the final day of Strike Watch, which saw Torontoist's photographers 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.

With a tentative agreement reached and the deal waiting to be ratified, we'll be glad to stop accumulating photos of accumulated trash—soon. Torontoist's photographers have been 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.

              

Emma Flannery Lawrence Healey and Richard Rosenbaum are at it again. Last summer, they constructed faces along Queen Street West by sticking googly eyes on inanimate objects; this summer, they've done the same along Bloor Street West. "We decided to do this when—about a year ago—we realized that there is literally nothing that cannot be made more hilarious with the addition of googly eyes," Healey told Torontoist. "We look either for things that look like they need eyes (certain objects, like newspaper boxes or crosswalk buttons, fit this description perfectly) or things that already have faces where we can just place the googly eyes. The thing is that once you spend enough time scouting out things that look like little faces, you start seeing them everywhere. I've been fighting off the urge to stick googly eyes on all of my belongings, the back of my cat's head, [and] the Queen on every twenty dollar bill..."

With a tentative agreement reached and the deal waiting to be ratified, we'll be glad to stop accumulating photos of accumulated trash—soon. Torontoist's photographers have been 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.

With a tentative agreement reached and the deal waiting to be ratified, we'll be glad to stop accumulating photos of accumulated trash—soon. Torontoist's photographers have been 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.

       

The Rees WaveDeck—part of Waterfront Toronto's Central Waterfront transformation project and one of four WaveDecks due to be completed along the harbourfront—opened quietly last week, without the fanfare that accompanied the opening of the Simcoe WaveDeck in June. The Rees WaveDeck lacks the exciting curves of its sibling to the west east: it dips just once, sloping gracefully towards the water in the centre. Sitting next to HTO park and facing neat rows of sailing boats and canoes, the deck feels peaceful and composed.

WHERE: Dovercourt Road, near Dundas Street West.

     

While running errands today, our Tony Makepeace (the man behind Panoramaist) captured two Loblaws—one at Queens Quay East and Jarvis Street and the other at Leslie Street and Eastern Avenue—particularly dramatically hit by today's rainstorms. If this was a novel about Loblaws, we'd totally call it pathetic fallacy, and point to the store's parent company's ambivalence-evoking acquisition of T&T Supermarket as the cause of the deluge. Since it's the real world, though, our biggest excuse for showing you these photos is that they're simply extraordinary and surreal to look at.

WHERE: Keele Street and Glenlake Avenue.

WHERE: Bremner Boulevard and Lower Simcoe Street, and Queen's Quay West and Rees Street.

WHERE: Trinity Bellwoods Park.

WHERE: Lake Shore Boulevard West and Burlington Avenue.

                            

This past weekend one of Toronto's most vibrant events, the Festival of India, was forced from its traditional venue on picturesque Centre Island by the ongoing city workers' strike. Unable to transport as many as forty thousand people across to the island, organizers relocated the festival to a car park at the foot of Yonge Street on the lakefront. The hard asphalt ground, pock marked with cracks and repairs, and the sometimes sickly sweet smell of the nearby Redpath sugar factory, both did nothing to diminish the enthusiasm of attendees.

WHERE: Yonge Street and Eglinton Avenue.

WHERE: Dundas Street West and Kensington Avenue.

                     

Toronto's Caribana parade is known the world over, drawing more than one million revellers every year for its bumper crop of imagination; it is spectacle after sparkling spectacle, accompanied by joy-inducing, waist-winding, and inhibition-loosening calypso/soca music. Of lesser fame is the Junior Carnival parade—which this year was held in the under-celebrated Jane-Finch area—but it remains fertile ground for future generations of mas masters.

WHERE: King Street West and Bay Street and Wellington Street West between York Street and Bay Street.

WHERE: Bay Street and King Street West.

WHERE: Keele Street and Sheppard Avenue West.

WHERE: Bloor Street West and Brentwood Road South.

WHERE: Queen Street West at Markham, Bathurst, and Spadina.

WHERE: Cavell Avenue, Mimico.

       

The situation in Toronto this summer is grim, but it was much worse in 1906, when Toronto faced a crippling piano workers’ strike that was so thoroughly devastating that it was commemorated in a postcard (somehow, we don’t think this year’s city workers’ strike will get the same treatment). This quirky postcard is just one of the thousands of old Toronto-themed postcards, matchbooks, and menus that can be found on John Chuckman’s Toronto postcard blog. Since 2006, Chuckman, who professes to love history, has posted more than two thousand images in five volumes. According to his website, his catalogue "may be the largest collection of Toronto postcards on the Internet." And while the collection is somewhat dulled by low-quality images (there are some great old aerial shots of Toronto that we wish were bigger) and an awkward labelling system, those are minor shortcomings in what's an otherwise fascinating reminder of Toronto's rich history.

              

This past Sunday on the Harbourfront Sirius Stage, B-boy and B-girl crews from all across Canada faced off for the final rounds in the sixth annual Pop, Lock, and Load competition. Crews bounced, broke, jumped, spun, and twisted to the great beats of DJ Serious as veteran breaker Benzo—of award-winning crew Bag of Trix—played host. Rude Bwoy Posse took home the fifteen-hundred-dollar cash prize.

WHERE: King Street West and Bay Street.

                               

The South African War Memorial in the middle of University Avenue was the unusual venue for this year's Newmindspace Bubble Battle. The location was transformed from a stately, somewhat imposing monument, topped by a winged figure overlooking the intersection with Queen Street to a lively space, ringing with laughter and sparkling with bubbles.

WHERE: Queen Street West and Triller Avenue.

WHERE: Queen Street West and Augusta Avenue.

WHERE: Dufferin Street and Alma Avenue.

Out of sight, out of mind: the parking lots by Sir Casimir Gzowski Park and Sunnyside Park—the City's two temporary waste drop-off sites just off Lake Shore Boulevard West—have undergone a slight remodelling over the past few days, just in time for this weekend's nearby Honda Indy. The blue fences that enclosed the garbage being dumped at the site, hastily installed two weeks ago, are now all draped in calming translucent blue, a cheap and hasty Band-Aid that, as far as we've been able to figure out, no other dump sites in the city have gotten. Torontoist photographer Christopher Drost caught photos of the newly completed coverings on Thursday; an employee would neither confirm nor deny that the draping was put up for the car show this weekend, but, according to Drost, "said it made it look nicer for those driving along Lake Shore and the highway." Sort of?

WHERE: 100 Jameson Avenue and 29 Spencer Avenue.

       

The devoted and the merely curious gathered outside MuchMusic on Queen Street West yesterday—as so many gathered around the world in similar spots—to watch the memorial for Michael Jackson in Los Angeles. One of the biggest television events of the decade, some news organizations compared it to the funeral of Princess Diana in 1997. Many people watched the ceremony online, as well, driving internet traffic up by as much as 33%. But as big a web event as the memorial was—with news organizations coordinating with social media to integrate, for example, streaming video with Facebook updates on CNN—the Barack Obama's inauguration in January posted bigger numbers.

WHERE: Dundas Street West and Spadina Avenue.

When we wrote on Monday about a cute sign made on behalf of the city's rat population, thanking Mayor Miller and the striking unions for the proliferation of garbage around the city, we wrote that the artist whose signature was at the foot of the image, "madame HAIR," seemed to be, "sadly, human." She is! After seeing her work on Torontoist, she emailed us to tell us the big news: more of her rats are coming.

WHERE: Islington Station (Islington Avenue and Bloor Street West).

WHERE: Bay Street and Richmond Street West.

As the city workers' strike lurches into its third week, there's been a lot of talk about who is and isn't benefiting from it. Suffering? The reputations of David Miller, the striking unions, and their members; some, but not all, residents; some, but not all, neighbourhoods; our collective fear that tourists will think us unclean; and the expanses of concrete currently doing time as temporary dumping grounds. Doing just swell? Private garbage pick-up companies; the City's wallet (well, maybe?); people who like photos of garbage; people who like over-reacting to said garbage, and, oh, rats.

WHERE: Eglinton Avenue East and Kennedy Road.

WHERE: Queen Street West and Bathurst Street.

              

For the second time in a few days, Dundas Square was again home for fans and mourners of Michael Jackson. Unlike the impromptu dance party that landed at the intersection of Dundas and Yonge on Friday, last night's event—a tribute to Jackson and his music that was also billed as a Canada Day celebration, hastily organized by The Manifesto Festival—was prepared a bit more in advance and lasted three hours, concluding just before 11 p.m. with a moment of silence for Jackson.

       

As the city celebrated Canada Day yesterday, a small group of Christie Pits neighbourhood residents—disgruntled by the City's policy of using parks as temporary dump sites during the city workers' strike—took their grievance to City Hall in a protest organized by Friends of Christie Pits. Residents' groups around the city have been confronting people coming to drop off their garbage at park sites.

WHERE: Dundas Street West and Rusholme Road.

There's a speed bump on Crawford Street, not long before the one-way road cuts through the northernmost edge of Trinity Bellwoods Park. After drivers lurch over the bump, explains Martin Reis, they often pick up speed fast, accelerating towards Dundas, through and past a small crossing that joins the isolated north-west tip of Trinity Bellwoods with the park as a whole, a crossing frequented by slow-moving seniors headed for nearby residences.

WHERE: Queen Street East and Greenwood.