Results tagged “bias”

Kensington Market will soon be designated a BIA (that is, a business improvement area), pending near-certain approval by City Council this winter, according to a city staff report, released on Monday. A few area business owners have mixed feelings about the impending designation, but many see it as the best way of ensuring the future of the chaotic little neighbourhood in the heart of Toronto.

Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas, you perverts.

     

Three weeks ago, Now Magazine published a first-person account of the forcible confinement and assault of regular contributor (and Pedestrian Committee member) Roger Brook. On an unspecified part of Dufferin, Brook stopped to take down one of those junk signs illegally attached to utility poles throughout the city—the kind of advertising that even right-wing city councillors get pissy about [PDF]. Despite the fact that he (and the sign) were fully within the public space, Brook was threatened and attacked by a private security guard who wrestled him to the ground, handcuffed him to a fence, and radioed the police. Private security of course has no such authority in the public space—nor had Brook done anything illegal—but silly things like laws aren't really of much interest to someone whose behaviour would warrant a feature-length investigation even if he were a cop. Brook's article gave us difficulty sleeping; we have no idea how we would handle the situation he found himself in.

Painting telephone boxes may not be anything new, but that doesn’t make these any less awesome. Local high school artists from Rosedale Heights School of the Arts, Monarch Park, and Malvern Collegiate took part in a project fronted by the Beaches BIA to paint fourteen of the usually drab brown phone boxes, bringing a little sparkle of colour to the East Toronto neighbourhood.

Remember last week, when Marc Lostracco took a look at Astral's final street furniture prototypes and promised that "Torontoist's Jonathan Goldsbie will have a more in-depth analysis of the new street furniture next week"?

When we first got a tip from Andrew Hunter that "someone has installed a new type of bike post along Yonge north of Lawrence," we were concerned that it might be the vanguard of the Coordinated Street Furniture onslaught of mass-produced uniformity. When we went down (yes, down) to visit the area, however, we were quite relieved to discover not Kramer-designed brontosaurus ribs but elegant, artfully crafted flourishes of metallic whimsy. Inspired by a similar project in which psychiatric survivors designed bike stands for the curb in front of the Parkdale Activity and Recreation Centre (PARC), the Yonge Lawrence Village BIA commissioned two of the artists behind that project, Phil Sarazen and Jack Gibney, to fashion sixteen pieces, each featuring "a different aspect of community living." Studded into each block on both sides of Yonge Street north from Lawrence to Yonge Boulevard, they succeed in being everything that Astral's street furniture is not, and should serve as an inspiration to all neighbourhoods and BIAs as to what is possible when you're willing to invest in your community rather than sell it out.

Exhibition Place has presented many new technologies since it was established in 1904, but a new pilot project outside the Automotive Building is using 40-year-old technology to lessen Toronto's energy impact: LED streetlights.

Natural resources minister Gary Lunn (left) announces a new $238 million green science fund for development of new energy techologies. Distributed over four years that's a little less than sixty million dollars a year, which will totally be all that's needed to invent fusion reactors, perfect hydrogen fuel cells and give us all the rocket-backpacks we've been waiting for our whole lives.

These little yellow notices have recently been sprouting up like mushrooms around the city. Under the Commercial Façade Improvement Program for BIAs, business owners in designated Business Improvement Areas can receive funding of up to $10,000 ($12,500 for corner lots) from the city to upgrade the front of their premises. In at least one case, the only visible change in the façade over 6 months has been the posting of the yellow sign. Other popular uses thus far include installing new signage for franchise operations. We're proud that our tax money is working hard to raise the profile of Pizza Nova in the community.