When east-enders Rachel Conduit and Bruce Dawson first started searching for locations to open a new bar, they had trouble. According to Conduit, landlords just didn’t trust that another watering hole wouldn’t “destroy the building and the neighbourhood.” Now, a year into their business, The Avro has done just the opposite—they’ve built it. “When we [...]

Sandcastles are commonplace in the east end of Toronto, where they pop up and disappear with the tides along the Beach. Performance venues, however, are not as easy to come by. But a brand new space, the Red Sandcastle Theatre, is officially raising its curtain tonight in Leslieville, and it seems to have materialized along Queen Street East just as quickly as its shoreline namesakes. But its new owner and artistic director, Rosemary Doyle, hopes it will be a little more permanent.

The commissary at Highfield Road Gospel Hall must have been fresh out of mind-your-own-business last night, because nine of God’s hand-picked mouthpieces allegedly found themselves outside of the home of a Leslieville gay couple, praying for the men’s unsolicited salvation. Residents of the Dundas and Greenwood area stepped up in support of the unidentified targets, [...]

On Sunday, June 27, something disturbing happened at the intersection of Queen Street West and Spadina Avenue (which you know about in graphic detail already if you were following events as they unfolded). A crowd of hundreds of demonstrators and bystanders was penned in by riot police, then held in the street for about four [...]

Urban Planner is Torontoist’s daily guide to what’s on in Toronto, published every morning. If you have an event you’d like considered, email all of its details—as well as images, if you’ve got any—to events@torontoist.com. Photo from last year’s desiFEST by Sam Obeid from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. CULTURE: South Asian Heritage Month wraps up [...]

Photo by Bryson Gilbert from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. On the one hand, Alexander Muir, a schoolteacher and Orangeman who wrote Canada’s confederation song, “The Maple Leaf Forever,” in 1867, is a pretty important person in our country’s history, totally deserving of an extraordinarily lovely mural on Queen Street East, in Leslieville. On the other [...]

These photos, of a garden constructed atop a bus shelter on Greenwood Avenue between Gerrard and Dundas, were recently uploaded to one of the Facebook groups of the Toronto Public Space Committee‘s Guerrilla Gardeners. More after the fold. Photos by Andy Brown. Jonathan Goldsbie is a campaigner with the Toronto Public Space Committee.

The proposed big box development in Leslieville has been getting a lot of attention lately, and not because it’s a welcome addition to the retail streetscape in the east end. The land, the soon-to-be-former home of Toronto Film Studios, is currently zoned for employment purposes, which means that it’s supposed to be used to provide [...]

On Friday night at 10:30, the Toronto Public Space Committee‘s Art Attack will “descend on the streets to re-imagine bus shelters as sensational structures of snow,” converting the two ad-adorned boxes at Queen and Jones into something a little more whimsical. Transit shelters, like garbage bins, are giant heaps of private property littered throughout the [...]