Results tagged “signs”

The Edgewater Hotel sign is gone. City officials ordered that the Parkdale landmark be removed on November 3, after nearly three years of working to convince the owner of the building to which it was attached to make necessary repairs. According to a Municipal Licensing and Standards manager, the sign had finally become so derelict that city inspectors deemed it unsafe.

Late last night the City's proposed new billboard bylaw and tax [PDF] cleared a major hurdle, unanimously passing through the Planning and Growth Management Committee on its way to a hearing before the full City Council. The meeting ran 'til about 11 p.m. and had to be moved from one of the regular committee meeting rooms to the main Council Chamber in order to accommodate fifty-plus deputants and scores of other observers. It was a pitched battle, one that has lasted through several years of debate, consultation, and resistance leading up to this moment. A tremendous victory for public space advocates, progressive councillors, and Mayor Miller, the bylaw will provide harmonized regulation of the billboard industry (the rules haven't been updated since amalgamation) and the tax will create the revenue needed to enforce those regulations.

Walking down Spadina Avenue between College and Dundas streets, you might completely miss them, so well do they blend in with the street scene. But stop by one of Chinatown's many municipal trash bins, let your eyes wander up slightly, and you might see one, attached to a utility pole, doing its best imitation of a yellow-jacket. Chinatown has some new signage, and the gist seems to be that you really must drop that bag of miscellaneous rotting crud someplace else, no matter what language you speak.

            

While walking around the city recently, we couldn't help but notice the abundance of non-Summerlicious restaurants advertising prix fixe promotions with names that reference the City's program, but carefully avoid infringing on the trademark. It made us wonder just how difficult it is for restaurants to get accepted into the 'liciouses, and how the City decides who's in and who's out.

If you happen to look up, just slightly above eye level, at hydro poles and streetlights around Toronto lately, you might notice some misplaced Trans-Canada highway signs. No, Yonge Street isn’t becoming a part of the Trans-Canada, and yes, the Spadina Expressway is still dead. These are not the work of some signage installer for the city who has gone rogue, but a project called Art + Identity created by Toronto’s own Ella Cooper.

We’ve heard a fair bit about the state of Toronto’s parks during the current municipal strike. Most tales have tended toward the negative, from fears of contamination stemming from temporary garbage depots to the unattractive aesthetic state that some green spaces have fallen into. But what if the withholding of certain services led to a positive effect on the local environment?

Clubland crawlers will notice a new visual distraction while wandering the east end of the Entertainment District this weekend. Where partiers once stopped into the northwest corner of Richmond and Duncan to dance to 1980s tunes at Whiskey Saigon, they will now be urged by a refurbished classic neon sign to dial up 1050 AM or 104.5 FM.

We've been at City Hall a fair number of times, but it wasn't until this week that we had the rather delightful experience of being met by a beatboxing duo at the front door or rocking out to OutKast in the Council Chamber. The occasion for this upending of formality? A town hall meeting, hosted by a network of organizations known collectively as the Beautiful City Alliance. The coalition is working to convince city council to direct revenue from the billboard tax it plans to introduce this summer towards art in the public sphere and is stepping up its campaign efforts as the vote on that tax approaches. The town hall, attended by some two or three hundred artists and activists, as well as several city councillors, was part informational meeting and part pep rally, with a bit of spontaneous art production thrown in for good measure.

Torontoist Flickr pool member designwallah snapped this photo of an adorable bunny in distress.

        

In two months, an unassuming house on Pape Avenue, north of Danforth, has captivated the city's (okay, mostly our) imagination. Photographer Rob Cruickshank first spotted a mysterious set of signs on February 16—one of them read, in part, "Blow up this house / you will get land / kill the witness of / 1949 of Changdu / & 1950 of Maurtisus." Chengdu is a Chinese city that became Communist at the tail end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 (the Beijing Olympics website says that was the year it was "liberated"); Mauritius is an island off the coast of Africa with a history of Chinese immigration, immigration that dropped off drastically once China restricted policies after its civil war ended—which might begin to explain the house being (as the sign beside it said) the "first black house on Pape."

For several years, those hiking or riding through Rouge Park have noticed wavy road signs marking out the park’s waterways. What once might have been treated as just another scenic stream is now easily identified as an aquatic artery like Little Rouge Creek or Little Rouge River. The idea seems to have worked well, as similar signage for the waterways in the Don River's watershed was officially unveiled by Toronto and Region Conservation and the Don Watershed Regeneration Council at a ceremony this morning at the Victoria Park Avenue crossing of Taylor Massey Creek.

The sign above, first discovered by Torontoist Flickr pool photographer Francis Mariani, warns either of a man eating a catapiler [sic] or a man-eating catapiler [sic]. Either interpretation seems reason enough to stay away from the intersection of Givins and Argyle streets, where the crude sign is crudely affixed to a pole by four pieces of clear tape, no doubt made and posted so quickly because of its creator's sheer terror. When our own Michael Chrisman investigated, he spotted "two men, who left the house in front of the sign," but found that "neither were currently eating caterpillars, or showed signs of having been eaten by a caterpillar." But according to Mariani, the area is known for trouble of just this sort. "I haven't seen the catapiler yet," he says, but "the same pole had a sign a year ago about a robot on the loose."

Pape Avenue's most intriguing poet (or non-poet, as the case may be) is back at it, recently adding the above cardboard sign to his collection of handwritten glory.

Several questions come to mind upon reading the above poem found taped to the window of an east-end home. First, what happened between the author and his wife to solicit this rage-filled verse? Second, are "water skin" and "green head" meant to be insults? And lastly, what do donuts and a family of pigeons have to do with anything?

Businesses along Dundas Street West are channelling the visual language of the American president for a local protest poster campaign.

From time to time, the landmark store on the southwest corner of Bloor and Bathurst will turn on its famous storefront sign and wash the street in the effulgence of its twenty-three thousand bulbs. It’s a captivating sight.

     

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.

The temporarily closed performing arts venue at the southeast corner of Yonge and Front has undergone a number of name changes since opening more than half a century ago. Which identity do you prefer—O'Keefe, Hummingbird, or Sony? We can take a pretty good guess at which one the Toronto Parking Authority likes the most, based on signage found at the Yonge Street end of the massive Green P structure on the south side of The Esplanade.

The last time we saw a cyclist's note to her neighbours, it was all love, happiness, and kittens. But hope in humanity is so two years ago.

In July 2006, City Council approved a staff report recommending names for the new streets created as part of the redeveloped Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) property at 1001 Queen Street West [PDF]; one of these was White Squirrel Way, in reference "to the rare white squirrels that nest in the vicinity."

Last week, further to news reported on Illegal Signs, we briefly noted the Ontario Superior Court's refusal to grant Strategic Media a temporary exemption from certain provisions of the City of Toronto's sign bylaw. If granted, Strategic Media (and most likely all other advertisers) would have been allowed to suspend compliance with these provisions until a court resolved the ongoing claim [PDF] over whether these provisions are valid.

In what IllegalSigns.ca's Rami Tabello is calling a "complete victory for Toronto," the Ontario Superior Court of Justice has ruled that outdoor ad company Strategic Media, among other offenses, "over the last year or so...began erecting signs without obtaining permits." Not that great of a strategy, really! In spite of Strategic's not-yet-resolved constitutional challenge to the City's sign by-law (which we explored the legality of in May), the court ruled that the City can begin removing Strategic's many illegal billboards across Toronto. Councillor Howard Moscoe, who we like more and more every day, told the Post that "we will go out and take them down and charge them on the tax bill if they don’t take them down themselves."

According to its website, Mount Pleasant Road Baptist Church promises to share with its parishioners, via John 10:10, "a delight that God is in the business of bringing order, beauty and joy to people who have suffered from the chaos of this world." Joy, or at least a mischievous sense of humour, is evident on a sign hanging on the Belsize Drive side of the church, where officials could have placed a standard "no parking" sign.

Sometimes you have to spell out what would seem to be self-evident. This sign on the door of a store on Spadina Avenue just north of Oxford Street once again raises the question of whether the automated public washrooms Toronto is reportedly getting beginning next year, as part of Astral Media’s advertising-driven "street furniture" plan, will be anywhere near enough. The follow-up question has to be: even if there was a pay-toilet right on the corner, would the pisser and/or puker bother fumbling for a loonie to gain access or save the money and go ahead and defile the doorway, anyway?

When some people see an erroneous street sign, they call the city to have it fixed. Others will glance for a moment, pop their eyes, and then move along without a second thought. In the case of a faulty curve sign recently erected on Wicksteed Avenue in the industrial section of Leaside, one observer vented their frustration on the sign itself.

Signs should communicate quickly, efficiently, and effectively. Traffic signs are standardized, eliminating all guesswork, allowing motorists to glean the required information in as little time as possible, so they can focus on the road. Images further this concept and, when executed properly, relay more information in a fraction of the time. For example, it takes longer to describe "four oily gents in loincloths and leather with chains hanging in an otherwise drab environment" than it does to simply show you a photo. Mind, it would take less time still, to have just said it was a picture of Manowar, but indulge us, folks.

       

These skiing-related signs appeared yesterday along Macdonnell Avenue in Parkdale, between Queen Street and Garden Avenue. This doesn't seem to be an installation with any purpose or meaning, and there's no particular irony in this residential setting. It's amusing but random. Is there a wider message?

Torontonians, in their very own passive-aggressive way, love doing two things above all else: writing public notices and sticking it to The Man. So naturally, after the city started mulling over the idea of actually enforcing the anti-garbage-picking provisions in its waste collection by-law (section 844-20 in this PDF), it didn't take long for some homeowners to disagree. On Hopedale Avenue in East York, one recycling family has attached a sign to its blue bin authorizing scavengers to remove any reusable containers. When we peeked into the bin early on collection day, not a beer or wine bottle was to be seen. Either the scavengers were scrupulously efficient or the homeowner is just teasing them.

Torontonians' reputation—both across the country and at home—as being unfriendly is undeserved. Most of us really do try to be helpful, even when we're venting our rage and writing up our best passive-aggressive notes.