Site of the former Empress Hotel at 335 Yonge Street, after the fire that destroyed it. Photo by Christopher Drost/Torontoist. Last month, the polite term for the cause of the fire that razed Toronto’s Empress Hotel was “demolition by neglect.” Last Monday, Toronto police confirmed what many people were really thinking: the fire was arson. [...]

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 [...]

Priceless postcards in the Whodunit? preview gallery. “Can I get eight hundred, eight hundred. Nine hundred. One thousand, thank you.” At an auction, it takes seconds for a painting to go from one artist’s personal vision to a collector’s item. “Eight hundred… Eight hundred… It feels great to bid sir, it feels great to bid. [...]

Springsteen at Tuesday’s gala. Photo by Sam Javanrouh/Torontoist. Might the Boss grace Toronto music fans with one of his legendary, spontaneous club shows? The odds are long—but they’re not nothing. Rocker Jesse Malin is performing at the Horsehoe Tavern tonight. Springsteen’s dropped in on Malin shows to play previously, and the ‘Shoe’s website has been [...]

At left: back-to-back tweets from Kelly Grant and @rebelmayor on August 24. At right: back-to-back tweets again, on September 7. Today, for the second time in three weeks, Kelly Grant (the Globe‘s City Hall Bureau Chief) and @rebelmayor (William Lyon Mackenzie, Toronto’s first mayor, who in spite of being long-dead is running in the upcoming [...]

Streeter collects only the finest overheard conversations. Hear something? Send it to streeter@torontoist.com. Overheard on a Thursday morning at Queen and Yonge by Val Dodge, as two pedestrians cross the street. Pedestrian #1: Bike lanes interfere with cars. Pedestrian #2: Isn’t it the other way around?

Did Leonard Cohen leave this graffiti on the seventeenth floor of the King Edward Hotel? Photo by Andrew Louis/Torontoist. When Toronto flung its doors open this spring, the King Edward Hotel allowed the public to take a gander through its once-grand rooftop Crystal Ballroom, closed for regular use since the late 1950s due to changed [...]

Torontoist has something of a penchant for tracking down practitioners of random acts of good-samaritanship. Today, out of the depths of Craigslist, we bring you an anonymous* do-gooder who bought a stolen† bike with the hopes of returning it to its rightful owner. Torontoist: So what happened when this person tried to sell you the [...]

There are lots of bad videos from Toronto streets during the G20. This, though, might be the best. It’s just seventeen seconds long, but here’s what happens: in the midst of Saturday’s violence, a man holds his black hoodie up to his face and walks through the smashed window of the Bell store on Yonge [...]