When Casa Mendoza closed its doors on New Year’s Day, a chapter of the city’s waterfront history ended. The last motel/restaurant to operate along the Lake Shore Boulevard strip on Humber Bay, it was demolished last week to make way, like its former neighbours, for condos. With it go memories of a row of businesses [...]

WHERE: Albert and Cavell streets, in Mimico. WHEN: Yesterday at noon. WHAT: In tree-blessed Mimico, City workers collect leaves and send them off for composting. Explains Torontoist photographer Christopher Drost: “Residents are asked to rake their lawns to the curb and then City crews show up and push it into the road…and the machine comes [...]

Ask the average Etobicokian about the history of their former municipality and they’ll probably tell you a story like this: “See those buildings over there? Seventy years ago that land was all farms. Thirty years ago it was a gas station/car dealership. Now it’s condos/townhouses/McMansions. The end… until it gets razed for an arco or [...]

After moving into the zigzagging towers of The Masters zipped into the Markland Wood neighbourhood, this couple spent more time together enjoying nightly swims, sipping fine wines despite the stares of the medieval citizens depicted on their wallpaper, practicing their golf swings, and spending quality time in the sauna. They also took advantage of the [...]

Rob Ford holds a free party, generally known as Ford Fest, for his supporters each summer, behind his mother’s large Etobicoke home. This wasn’t particularly odd when he was a councillor—all of them hold community events from time to time—but now that he’s mayor of the entire city, one might have expected him to call [...]

Most children are born with an innate desire to write on walls. For some of us, that instinct doesn't diminish with age. "The kid in this piece represents the rebellious childlike nature that is in all of us" says Deadboy. "Everyone is born with a natural instinct to write on walls; street artists just take this to a literal level… Makes me feel like a kid again, and I love that!" While that's not his only motivation for his street creations, Deadboy also cites the corporate media taking over our cityscape and his desire to brighten the uglier aspects of our city. Sometimes it just feels great to satisfy our inner child.

With media concerns about government waste and with the rise of the “Common Sense Revolution” in Ontario, in the mid-1990s it seemed that any government service could be sold off. Just like Mayor Rob Ford and his allies at City Hall, the definitive notion promoted in various privatization schemes was that taxpayers would get more bang for their tax dollars if they didn’t have to foot the bill for services ranging from ambulances to public transit. Garbage collection has been one of the easiest services for Toronto governments to ease into sell-offs, as suburban administrators found in the '90s and as our current representatives aim to do.

Ask Torontoist features questions posed by you, and answered by our elite team of specially trained investigative experts (also known as our staff). Send your questions to ask@torontoist.com. Reader Jennifer Jones asks: I’ve only recently noticed the very small cemetery between the highways where the 427 merges with the 401, right in the middle of [...]

Photo by Amanda Factor/Torontoist. This morning, plans for a new Toronto West courthouse were officially announced, and the verdict is in: it is going to be impressive. Attorney General Chris Bentley and Etobicoke-Lakeshore MPP Laurel Broten unveiled a map of the site where the courthouse is to be built, a currently barren piece of land [...]

Get little Timmy and Cindy-Lou on the horn, stat! Health Canada has contradicted last week’s warnings from Toronto Public Health that children should reduce cell phone use, saying that the science doesn’t support the conclusion that your kids’ brains will mangled and cancerfied by cell phone heat and radiation. Well, except for this study. And [...]

Every weekday morning, bright and early, we feature a photo (or two) from a photographer in the Torontoist Flickr Pool. It’s our way of giving the many excellent photographers in our pool the attention that they deserve. Mimico creek’s big culvert BY INVENTOR_77