Results tagged “streetfurniture”

Last week, Live Green Toronto, the City of Toronto’s website for eco-friendly living, launched a new transit shelter advertising campaign with a unique twist: passersby can flip a giant switch that turns the ad on or off. The ad’s text encourages readers to "switch this poster off," and to switch on Live Green’s website for information about saving energy and living green. The ad was designed by Agency59, a Toronto-based advertising agency, and installed by Astral Media, the company behind Toronto's street furniture. While it’s undeniably clever, the execution is a little flawed.

Over the past seventeen days we've seen Toronto's poor, untended trash bins in some pretty appalling states. So why is this one, located across the road from Main Street Station, so spotless?

Today's mini-celebration at the corner of Queen Street East and Lee Avenue was a historical event three years in the making. In early 2006, the Beaches BIA proposed the idea of branded street signs. Plans for new street signs citywide were put on hold while the city tried to secure a contract for street furniture, and they remained on hold until late 2008. Meanwhile, area residents were asked to vote on what name would appear on the signs: the Beaches or the Beach. Out of 2,113 eligible votes, 58% preferred "the Beach"—a somewhat surprising choice, since the neighbourhood seems to be most popularly known as "the Beaches." Glenn Cochrane, journalist and author of The Beach, spoke to this in his brief speech to the crowd today. "A few years ago, there would have been an uprising over the choosing of this new name over the other name, which I'm not going to mention because I don't want to start anything."

Astral Media Outdoor uses Geotargeting Exclusive Solution—a proprietary GIS program mashing up consumer data from Generation5 and cartographic software from MapInfo—in order to allow "you to concentrate advertising faces exactly where your target customers are found. By combining socio-demographic data with the habits of the target group, it builds a consumer profile that is accurate to the postal code level. It then maps the data for precision market targeting." (Did you know that "The Toronto's Asian Community" feels that they are "too tolerant of products and services that do not meet [their] expectations"?)

You know what's hilarious? Ads that make fun of suicide. Why, they're right up there with the ones that make light of rape.

Advertising company Astral Media Outdoor bid successfully for the right to provide Toronto with new street furniture almost two years ago. Their contract calls for them to supply, among other things, new trash bins to replace the city's existing ones (both the Eucan-provided "silver bins" and the several varieties of plastic city-owned receptacles). The Astral bins debuted last year during an exhibition at city hall. Now, they're starting to appear on downtown streets for general use. Torontoist has spotted the bins as far north as Yonge and Davisville, as far west as Little Italy, and as far south as King and Bathurst, where two of the new cans now sit near the southeast and northwest corners of the intersection.

                    

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains of 2008--the people, places, and things that we've either fallen head over heels in love with or developed uncontrollable rage towards over the past twelve months, with one hero and one villain selected by each participating staff member. On Christmas Day: the heroes. On Boxing Day: the villains. And next week, cast your vote to determine the Superhero and Supervillain of the year.

When we tried out the bench prototype at the street furniture unveiling at City Hall in June, it was one of the few items we were pretty much okay with. But because Astral Media can't do anything right (when it comes to street furniture and billboards, anyway—their other divisions seem to be functioning relatively well), they've managed to screw this up, too.

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?

Photo by JesseK-G from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

On Monday morning, Astral Media unveiled prototypes of its new line of "street furniture" at City Hall. On Wednesday, we took a look at the garbage bins. On Thursday, the advertising pillars. Yesterday, the transit shelters. Today, everything else. (Also check out Karen von Hahn's disparagement of the street furniture in the Globe.)

On Monday morning, Astral Media unveiled prototypes of its new line of "street furniture" at City Hall. On Wednesday, we took a look at the garbage bins. On Thursday, we looked at the advertising pillars. This morning, the transit shelters. (Be sure also to read Christopher Hume's review, which makes our less-than-kind assessments look like raves.)

On Monday morning, Astral Media unveiled prototypes of its new line of "street furniture" at City Hall. Torontoist was going to review all of the items at once but decided that some merited their own posts. Yesterday, we took a look at the garbage bins. Today we look at the advertising pillars. Friday, the transit shelters, and on Saturday everything else. (Be sure to read Spacing's coverage, too.)

In the opening voiceover for his Oscar-winning animated short Ryan, Chris Landreth explains, "I live in Toronto, a city in Canada where I see way too many shades of grey for my own good health." This line occurred to us as we attended the official unveiling of Toronto's new "street furniture" at City Hall Monday morning, a celebration of the all-new shades of grey about to trickle onto our streets.

At an event yesterday to show off Toronto's new street furniture, David Miller praised the exclusive deal with Astral Media. The contract includes a measly 1,000 new bicycle posts, because God knows we don't want to encourage cycling in downtown Toronto. The contract also includes new public toilet installations which are billed as being "self-cleaning," to which Torontoist can only issue a collective "shyeeeeah, right."

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.

One year ago today, City Council's Executive Committee approved [PDF] the awarding of the street furniture contract—for the purposes of designing, building, owning, and maintaining bus shelters, garbage bins, ad pillars, and more for a period of twenty years in exchange for advertising rights—to Astral Media Outdoor, despite the fact that the company had absolutely no experience with "street furniture" and maintains dozens of illegal billboards in defiance of City Council.