BY: Elly Dowson and Christine Liber LOCATION: The laneway between Kenwood Avenue and Wychwood Avenue, near St. Clair and Bathurst. PHOTOS BY: Christine Liber FIELD NOTES: While we at Torontoist appreciate all the quirks of the urban canvas that bring our city to life, we understand not all graffiti is to everyone’s tastes. When Elly [...]

In early June we reported on the end of History as Theatre, the detailed, 4,300 square foot mural commissioned by the Toronto Sun for the Front Street side of its building to mark Toronto’s bicentennial in 1993. The mural was taken down by the building’s new owners, First Gulf Development Corporation, as part of renovations [...]

Top photo courtesy of wikiTO; bottom photo by Jason Kucherawy. SPOTTED BY: Jason Kucherawy WHERE: The Front Street side of the Toronto Sun building at 333 King Street East. WHEN: Saturday June 4, in the late afternoon; photo taken the following day. WHAT: To mark Toronto’s bicentennial in 1993, the Toronto Sun had commissioned a [...]

The premise of graffiti art is that it’s not supposed to be there. Its appeal comes from being unsolicited and out of place, which is what makes the art form, at times, so unexpectedly beautiful. It’s also what makes graffiti, by definition, illegal. Toronto’s graffiti bylaw [PDF] defines the illegal art form exactly in these [...]

Ta-dah! The new Lee’s Palace mural is finally complete. November 24, 2009 will forever be known as the day the monsters died. It was then that the iconic illustrations that festooned the front of Lee’s Palace for seventeen years were torn down to make way for a Big Fat Burrito moving in to the storefront. [...]

They’re creepy, they’re crazy, they’re raucous, and slightly raunchy. But what’s best about the mischievous monsters that festooned the façade of Lee’s Palace is: they’re baaaaack. Throughout the past seventeen years, the mural of multicoloured mayhem became emblematic for the iconic concert hall where bands like The Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana made their Toronto debuts, [...]

Photos by Olivia Chow, used with permission. On the second-last Sunday in May, Jack Layton and Olivia Chow picked up some cans of spray paint and some acrylic paint, strolled into a laneway in the Annex, and spent the day marking their territory—on the big aqua wall of their own home, previously littered with tags. [...]

Take these sunken eyes and learn to see. all your life you have waited for this moment to be free… Streets are for People—in conjunction with Newmindspace and nine other groups of urban merrymakers—is holding a number of events this Thursday night: a parade that starts from Central Tech, a Critical Mass ride that kicks [...]