Today's ad features your stereotypical 1950s architectural professional: trenchcoat, tie, hat (preferably a fedora), and a fistful of building plans. The building this dapper construction supervisor is depicted next to would quickly become one of St. Clair Avenue's architectural landmarks. Pigott Construction was based in Hamilton, where company president Joseph Pigott contributed heavily to the community as a president or board member of institutions such as McMaster University and the Art Gallery of Hamilton.......

Selected quotes from "Toronto's Type and Tile Heritage" by Edward Keenan, from the November 14th issue of Eye Weekly: Joe Clark: "The trick is trying to prevent the destruction of the subway system as we know it. What are these [TTC] commissioners doing, exactly? Through malign neglect, they are beginning a 35-year process of destruction. Because if they make over Pape station so that it doesn’t match any of the other stations, if they......

The Falconer report on violence in Toronto schools talks of a "culture of fear," saying that many students bring weapons to school, and many crimes go unreported. Some of the basic recommendations to fix things include more social workers and after-school basketball, fewer suspensions, more diverse teaching staff, and gun-sniffing springer spaniels to roam the halls. Sir Edmund Hillary, the New Zealander who was the first person to reach the summit of Mount Everest,......

Last week, Toronto-based advertising agency TAXI announced 15 Below, a new project to coincide with TAXI's fifteenth anniversary that would see the company create, manufacture, and distribute 3,000 coats for homeless people across North America. Designed by TAXI's executive creative director Steve Mykolyn and designer Lida Baday (pictured), the waterproof, windproof, and plentily-pocketed coat serves as a lightweight jacket during not-too-cold weather, can fold into a backpack during decent weather, and—when you fill the......

Once upon a time, we would hear the word "dodgeball" and be swept back to a simpler time, when colours were flourescent, New Kids on the Block were popular and dodgeball was little more than an excuse to work up an adolescent sweat. It certainly wasn't a sport. Redass was a sport; dodgeball was really just a way of scoring easy marks in gym class. Then in 2004, the Ben Stiller movie Dodgeball came out,......

There were 4 more murders in Toronto on the weekend, meaning we only need 11 more to tie the all-time record of 89 set back in 1991. A spokesman for City Hall said that sure, the numbers look bad now, but crime would drop once all the thugs had killed each other. Not only more violent, but poorer too––a United Way report says that the median family income in Toronto is $10,000 lower than......

77-year-old fortune teller Sophie Evon was arrested in Calgary this week for conning—excuse us, allegedly conning—a Seattle woman out of $220,000 in 1999. Evon was arrested while working in Toronto last year, but fled to Calgary just before she was to be extradited. The Seattle woman had been seeking Evon's advice about a boyfriend that had dumped her for an old flame. Evon told her that the only way to get him back was to......

LitTO Summer Reading Pick: check out Prose Karen from Neitzsche’s Brolly. Remember LitTO’s plan to help author Natalee Caple and Jeremy Leipert win a contest to marry on the midway at the Calgary Stampede? The couple received 177, 000 online votes, and as they say at The Stampede, “got hitched,” last week. The bride and groom wore cowboy boots, and their first act as marrieds was a ride on the ferris wheel. Congratulations to......

Photos of trey anthony, Dawn Whitwell, and Gein Fence courtesy of Get Your Lit Out. Dear readers: please help give an author a chance to get married on the midway at this year’s Calgary Stampede. Really! While living in Toronto, Scarborough-raised Natalee Caple wrote many fine books, among them The Plight of Happy People in an Ordinary World (Anansi), and Mackerel Sky (Thomas Allen). We are sad we’ve lost her to Calgary, but thrilled......

I love the smell of police raid in the morning. Toronto Vice arrested 60 people in the Jane and Finch area this morning in a raid called Project Kryptic. They seized "30 kilos of cocaine, hash oil and marijuana with an estimated street value of $1 million" from the Driftwood Crips. That's actually pretty badass. Hey, buddy...we're not mad that you stole the Hershey bars, we're just concerned that they may be contaminated with......

Late last week, the CRTC ordered CTVglobemedia to sell off the five Citytv properties it acquired in its purchase of CHUM Ltd., because CTV already operates over-the-air stations in those markets (Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, and Winnipeg). This morning it was announced that Rogers Media would be purchasing those stations for $375 million, because it's apparently not a problem for them to have more than one over-the-air station in a given market. This afternoon,......

Torontoist apologizes for erroneously predicting The End of The Internet (alas, we are still here) back in April, but organizer Louis Calabro insists that The End is truly nigh tonight. We think he might really mean it this time. If headliner Christian Bök can’t do it, no poet can. Christian is the author of two outstanding poetry collections from Coach House Books: the 'pataphysical encyclopedia, Crystallography, and the best-selling Griffin award-winning Eunoia, which employs only......

Nelly Furtado wins five Junos. Clearly, we will respect her if we get it. In other news, Jim Cuddy won the Juno for best adult alternative album, which means he did the best job of taking actual alternative music, dropping it to quarter-speed and setting it to acoustic guitar. Toronto is number fifteen! In the annual Mercer Human Resource Consulting review of best cities in Canada the world to live in, that is. Every Canadian......

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Canada Council for the Arts, the organization wants us to get involved in their "50 for 50" Arts Challenge. Canadians are invited to meet the challenge by engaging in 50 arts-related activities over the course of the year. Do not fret if you’ve neglected the arts since Jan 1 due to laziness and winter hibernation; there's still ample time to reach the goal in the 45 weeks that......

For the long-suffering fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs, the year 1967 has become synonymous with past glories and forty years of failure. On Saturday night, the surviving members of the last Leaf team to win the Stanley Cup were reunited at the Air Canada Centre for the first time since that storied championship. An Alex Trebek-narrated video tribute began the proceedings, in what turned out to be a relatively simple, modest, and perhaps......

Last night at the launch of SCENE, Cineplex and Scotiabank's new reward point program, most buzz overheard by Torontoist was about the marquee outside. What was once The Paramount is now the Scotiabank Theatre. Following the lead of our new opera house and almost every arena in professional sports, Cineplex Entertainment has entered into a five-year deal with Scotiabank to rebrand theatres in Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver. Some attendees at last night's......

Former Toronto police chief and current OPP commissioner Julian Fantino is being sued for allegedly using a Police Services board case to maliciously advance his own career. The suit accuses Fantino of multiple skullduggeries, including wiretapping the chair of the Police Services Board. Now, I know what you're thinking - "but Julian Fantino was such a nice police chief. Except for the corruption scandals and the racial profiling and the homophobia." TTC considering leasing out......

A couple of Sunday night events to kick-off or end your week, depending on how you see it. Gypsy Eyes, who is all over the place this week, hosts Last Call Poets at the Cadillac Lounge – 1296 Queen W. – tonight at 8pm. Admission is $7. Depending on how long Last Call Poets runs, you may be able to make it over to the Gladstone – 1214 Queen W. – for Haunted Fishtank poetry......

How many of you have given up your seat on the TTC lately? What about holding a door open for a stranger with bags of groceries? Or given directions to a stranger? Well some of us must have because Reader's Digest recently tapped us as the third most polite city in the world (ok, it was actually just 35 cities). New York took the top prize and those orderly Swiss bankers in Zurich took second......

Taking a page out of the Walmart book, Shoppers Drug Mart wants to overtake independently-owned drug stores to expand stores and last year's $1.7-billion sales profits. Sound too evil to be true? Shoppers' CEO Glenn Murphy puts it this way: "When they're ready - and this is not being forced upon them by our business - independents are given the choice to either join us as a business or when they're ready to retire and......

Toronto is the next Dubai like Maurizio Bevilacqua is the next Prime Minister. But this little artist's rendition of the imagined amalgamation of the Toronto and Dubai skylines was cute enough to post. If any Canadian city is to enjoy Dubai-like prosperity though, with the glass hotels and such everywhere, it'd probably be Calgary. And that isn't too much of a stretch: by 2025, statistics say Canada will be a leading oil-producing country and......

Reports of a student flashing a handgun forced a shutdown of three east end schools yesterday afternoon. The weapon turned out to be a pellet gun. This was the second incident at Victoria Park Collegiate in the last month. Three students were arrested. A terrible bus-car crash last night has killed one woman and injured two others. Rescuers had to use the jaws of life to free the trapped passengers. The TTC driver was not......

John Lorinc's new book, the New City comes at a very strange time. It's hard to contend with the fact that demographically Canada has become a nation of cities. Almost 80% of us live in urban areas and the robustness of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary and all of the smaller cities in this country are the real reason why the Liberal government was able to get the eight straight budget surpluses they kept rattling on......

Things are going great for previous Torontoist interview subject Howard Akler. His debut novel the City Man has been getting rave reviews and was recently nominated in the first-time authors category for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize (Caribbean and Canada Region). Akler joins a list which includes long-time poet and writer, but first-time novelist George Elliot Clarke and Calgary author Jacqueline Honnet. The winner of the regional prize goes on to compete against other fine books......

Torontoist has been a big fan of the Murmur project since it started. We're even bigger fans of the silky voice that we get when we call the number (it's the voice of James Roussel, the third and often forgotten member of Murmur). The idea behind Murmur is elegant and simple, using your cellphone you can listen to site-specific stories recorded by ordinary and not so ordinary Torontonians. The project has gotten the Murmur......

OMGOMGOMG! Canadian Idol is finally over! Lovely half-Asian singing sensation from Calgary, Melissa O’Neil, beat Newfie CanRocker Rex Goudie in a hideously long finale. Torontoist thinks Melissa deserves the trophy, much more so than prematurely balding, nerdy-waiter Ryan Malcolm (ew) of Season One and Kalan Porter, who is the Canadian >Clay Aiken. So, we heartily agree with the judges that Melissa is the best Idol ever. Dear Melissa, may you prosper! Aside, does anyone else......

As part of the Campaign for Real Beauty, Dove has launched a terrific new photography exhibit entitled “Beyond Compare,” profiling the beauty of women around the world. This exhibit recently opened at the Toronto Eaton Centre and will run until August 14. During September and October the show will travel to Montreal, Winnipeg and Calgary. This free exhibit was developed when Dove asked 58 female photographers for their interpretation of beauty. Dove’s online gallery includes......

Even Torontoist, not normally one for football, had to laugh about yesterday's Argos-Stampede game in Calgary. It was your everyday CFL affair until Argonauts Robert Baker (pictured) and kicker Neil Prefontaine got involved in a little bruhaha on the sidelines. Prefontaine gave Baker a quick "how-do-you-do," which Baker responed with a close-up look at his knuckles. Maybe TSN can describe the event a little better: Baker and Prefontaine got into a heated argument on the......

Call off the boycott, brothers and sisters. According to the Globe and Mail, Famous Players has dropped the same-sex marriage ads from their theatres. The "issue-driven" adverts have been pulled from 79 theatres after threats were made to the Players staff. Though the ads have ceased, the Calgary-based Canadian Family Action Coalition still wants to see balance in movie theatres, and is demanding Famous Players run an anti-same-sex marriage ad. Meanwhile, Sponge-Bob Square Pants......

Deep in the bowels of downtown, safe from the gale force winds and pelting rain/slush/snow, far from the street sludge of winter and the general unpleasantness of outside, lies a path. Or wait, a PATH. To some corporate types or commuters or general cold-haters, this is their sidewalk, their portal if you will, and they already know it connects a lot of the major business buildings and various other important locations within a 6-10......