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.......

It’s wild outside, huh? So wild that it allows us to segue into talking about Strange Wilderness first, for some reason. It surprises us that the last Happy Madison film that we saw was (the quite sweet, really) 50 First Dates. Strange Wilderness is only of interest to us because it has quite possibly the worst trailer we’ve ever seen on TV. It’s absolutely meaningless. It explains nothing about the (surely) threadbare plot of......

Sarah Lazarovic––curator of the garage-based Montrose Portrait Gallery of Canada––is painting a portrait of a Torontonian (be they dog walkers, donut makers or Dan Levy) every day for one hundred days. Each Monday, we'll feature one of those portraits here. Popular former CNN anchor Lynne Russell moved to Toronto a few years ago and took up occasional anchoring gigs at the CBC (though according to the Teamakers, the CEEB has submerged her in Jacques Cousteau's......

After reading today's ad, Torontoist is certain of one thing—modesty was not a key element of the "Yorkville style," especially when it came to attracting dancing queens and boogie kings looking for a place to strut their stuff. The neighbourhood had a cluster of disco floors waiting for John Travolta wannabes to demonstrate their dance skills and soak in the attitude. One might have been lucky enough to see celebrities like Sonny Bono indulge......

While the word "nutcracker" might evoke some painful mental images in some, for many it's a familiar part of the holiday season. The original ballet was composed in Russia by one Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1892, and The National Ballet of Canada has been performing The Nutcracker since 1964. James Kudelka did a revamp of the choreography in 1995, and since then The National Ballet's Nutcracker has become what The Globe and Mail has......

Sure, you like YouTube, but have you ever worried about its dearth of Canadian content? No? Well, anyway, as of last night, there's now a YouTube.ca. (Kind of: its actual URL resolves to ca.youtube.com––good luck getting to YouTube.com proper anymore.) As The Globe and Mail reported today, the Canadian version of the American-run site will feature Canadian videos prominently in the site's "featured videos" and "promoted videos" sections. Whether this change signals a complete......

There used to be a sign above a video arcade that proclaimed "Yonge Street is Fun Street." Back in the 1960s and 1970s, much of that fun was to be had at the many bars and clubs that lined the street south of Gerrard––Le Coq D'Or, Steele's Tavern, Friar's Tavern, Zanzibar Tavern and so on. Depending on the venue, you could listen to music, dance the night away or catch a striptease. Today's advertiser......

Darryl’s Hard Liquor and Porn Film Festival (covered by Amanda Buckiewicz earlier this week) is at the Bloor Cinema this Saturday, October 13 at 8 p.m, but if you’re a person of milder tastes (soft liquor and corn?) this week’s festivals of interest include the Toronto Latin Film Festival, the Macedonian Film Festival, the DNA Film Festival (it’s a busy week for festivals!), and the ImagiNATIVE Film Festival, which continues to win us over......

Election day is tomorrow, which provides a good opportunity to look back at how election ads were handled in the past. Today's selections come from the 1955 campaign, which Premier Leslie Frost's Progressive Conservatives won in a landslide on June 9th (83 PC, 11 Liberal, 3 CCF, 1 "PC Independent"). The "Big Blue Machine" was firmly entrenched, remaining in power for the next 30 years. York Centre was a new riding for the 1955......

CityPulse. The New Music. Baby Blue Movies. City Lights. Fashion Television. Speaker's Corner. These programs are among the innovative shows that have aired on CityTV since it officially launched way up the dial 35 years ago this evening. CityTV had a short gestation period after the CRTC approved its license in November 1971. Key figures in the station's early ownership included president Edgar Cowan, vice-president Phyllis Switzer, lawyer Jerry Grafstein and managing director/former CBC......

When competing newspapers get face lifts, they tend to do it all at once. Following a redesign of the Toronto Star and a significant revamp of The Globe And Mail, readers of the National Post will see a different-looking paper in their hands this morning.......

As mentioned in last week's ad, the Canadian National Exhibition took a break during World War II. Once the war was over, the existing buildings were modernized to prepare for the Ex's return. "From acting as a depot through which passed thousands of young Canadians to the theatres of war," noted a Toronto Telegram editorial, "it now reverts to its role as the window through which the world may glimpse the peacetime strength and......

In a truly spectacular exhibit of vitriol, readers of The Globe and Mail have weighed-in on an article concerning beleaguered TTC chairperson Adam Giambrone’s recent announcement about the impending cuts to city transit. (The emergency meeting of the commission is set for Friday, and possible means of accommodating the new budget restrictions include a 25-cent fare hike, and the closing of the Sheppard subway line.) Two scant hours after the article appeared online, the comments......

Who's up for a trip through time? While an H.G. Wells-style contraption or fourth dimension-smashing telephone box are not available in the consumer market, there are simpler methods of going back through time. All that's required are a date and the arcane knowledge of knowing how to load a microfilm reader. Toronto has a rich newspaper history, with no fewer than three dailies at a time battling for the city's readers. This series of......

Photo of Post Porn Modernists Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens by Julian Cash. It must be nice to write a column for The Globe: you can pass judgment on artists’ work without attending to pesky trivialities like seeing their shows, and project your own insecurities and feelings of lack onto people who are actually changing the world. Herein is a review of a recent show by Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens at Buddies in......

Developers RioCan bought the parking lot at the corner of Queen Street West and Portland back in 2005. Immediately, rumours started to circulate that a big box store, like Home Depot, was going to be built at the site. At the time, The Globe and Mail reported that RioCan planned to start building in 2007. Which is now. So what's happening with the project? In August 2006, Spacing Wire reported that activists had met......

One of the first things aspiring journalists learn is to keep themselves out of the story, if not completely, then as much as possible. "No one cares about you," is how one editor once put it. But with only a small portion of questions posed and stories heard actually making it to print, journalists are often full of great anecdotes and hilarious insights that never get a proper audience. Also, they often like to......

We love The Patterns Trilogy. If we had more parties at our apartment, we’d have it running on our television or projected onto a wall, looping endlessly. Well, if we could be sure it wouldn’t hypnotize our guests (and ourselves) into a sublime stupefaction. Therefore, Trilogy of Trilogies, one of tonight’s Worldwide Short Film Festival programmes (playing at 7:15 p.m. at the Cumberland), which features The Patterns Trilogy along with The Saskatchewan Trilogy, is......

Following in the footsteps of The Globe and Mail, which launched a redesign on April 23, that good ol' battleaxe Toronto Star arrived on the newsstand this morning with its own facelift (free today at most local retailers). And we actually like it.......

This week, the biggest news in movies is that Warner Bros. has decided to stop all advance promotional screenings of its films in Canada, in attempt to stem the flow of pirated movies from Canada. Yo ho ho! Unfortunately, they’ve likely decided that Canada is a hotbed of disgusting movie pirates on some pretty wonky data. Though apparently there’s no law against recording movies in a theatre onto a camcorder in Canada, which is kind......

FYI: the cherry blossoms in High Park are finally bloomin'. Toronto-resident Matthew Vienneau is using the powers of the internet to help find his sister Nicole, who has been missing in Syria for the last 37 days. Matthew is calling upon anyone with friends or family in Syria to help him find her whereabouts, and has a blog dedicated to the mission. Talk about paranoid: army contractors from the U.S. Department of Defense filed......

So you wake up, make a cup of coffee, go outside to grab the newspaper in your PJs and suddenly notice that your regular copy of The Globe and Mail has been replaced with a more different copy of The Globe and Mail. One with ugly black divider bars scattered across the front page and at least a couple inches lost from the broadsheet. You notice an alarming increase of sans serif fonts. Is......

June Callwood, the journalist and social activist dubbed by the CBC as "Canada's Conscience," succumbed to cancer this morning at 82. Callwood is entrenched in Toronto's history as one of our most important and powerful social crusaders. She co-founded AIDS hospice Casey House (named for her late son) and more than fifty other social organizations, including the Canadian Civil Liberties Foundation, PEN Canada and Yorkville's Digger House youth hostel. Raised amidst early family instability and......

A happy National Poetry Month to you! Established eight years ago by The League of Canadian Poets, National Poetry Month brings together schools, publishers, booksellers, literary organizations, libraries, and poets across the country to celebrate poetry. In April, you might trip over poems in some of the oddest places. Today, the festivities kicked off over breakfast at Toronto Reference Library’s Beaton Auditorium. With a morning of short readings hosted by The Globe and Mail’s Books......

Each week, Torontoist chooses the most interesting cases from the Toronto Police Service crime blotter. All charges are alleged until proven under law. When the police weren't busy trying to manage opening and closing the Gardiner a bunch of times after the Great CN Tower Ice Incident of 2007, they had their hands full with some skeezy characters this week. • The Fraud Squad is in full-effect these days with yet another charity fraud arrest.......

When it launched in April of 2003 by real estate developer Christopher Bratty, Toronto-based men's magazine Toro was a critical darling. The glossy won two Folio Awards for design almost immediately, followed with four National Magazine Awards in 2004 (48 NMA nominations in total), then accolades for investigative journalism and fashion photography. Today, news arrives that Toro will immediately suspend publication, with the March 2007 issue scheduled for release on February 20 remaining undistributed. Publisher......

Photo of Owen Pallett by chichibebelolo on Flickr. Photo of Steve Kado by Shakeer on Flickr. The Harbourfront Centre presented the first edition of “Inside the Musician’s Studio” as part of its View Points series on Thursday evening. Modeled after “Inside the Actor’s Studio,” the event was hosted by Carl Wilson (The Globe and Mail, Zoilus). Guests were Blocks Recording Club founder Steve Kado and Polaris Prize winner (and Blocks artist) Owen Pallett, aka......

It’s fitting that Maggie MacDonald is one of four self-appointed prime ministers of the Republic of Safety. She’s a political and creative force, using art as her weapon of choice. Her current bands, The Hidden Cameras and the aforementioned Republic of Safety, are musical meeting points for sex and politics. She’s exhibited her visual art and had her comics published in The Globe and Mail and Lola magazine. When she was just 20, MacDonald ran......

When Torontoist joined forces with blogTO, Reading Toronto, and Spacing and asked our readers for feedback on the TTC's website at the beginning of this month, we had absolutely no idea that we would get such an enormous response. We'd like to thank you all again for participating, and we've taken each and every one of the ideas that we received to heart. Now, it's time to move forward. The Editors and Publishers of......

The urban sprawl in Toronto is a continual point of debate on Torontoist (see, for instance, our interview with Brad Lamb), but tomorrow you will get a chance to share your opinions on the matter outside of our sullied comment threads. On Monday, 7pm to 9pm at the Parkdale branch of the Toronto Public Library, fourth year students from Ryerson University will present their study of gentrification in Parkdale, followed by a moderated panel......