Photo by khalijkhazar from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. One of the city's most popular annual events, Doors Open Toronto, returns this weekend for a ninth edition, welcoming the public for free into 150 important, historic, and just plain interesting buildings across the city. It would be virtually impossible for one person to take in all of the participating sites in one weekend, so it's best to pace yourself and visit a cluster of buildings......

Architecture in Toronto has been getting a lot of attention lately. Some of the coverage has even been positive. The Toronto Archives and the Friends of the Archives of Ontario are capitalizing on the trend, presenting a lecture series (PDF) in coming weeks to be hosted by the Star's architecture critic and urban affairs columnist, Christopher Hume. The series kicks off this Thursday, February 21 at 7 p.m. at the Toronto Archives building at......

February is Black History Month. To celebrate, the City of Toronto Archives is hosting an evening with Dr. Karolyn Smardz Frost on February 5. She is the winner of the 2007 Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction for I’ve Got a Home in Gloryland: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad, which tells the story of two slaves who escaped to Canada in 1833. In an illustrated presentation entitled Fugitive Sources: Finding Clues to our......

Last week, Maple Leaf Gardens quietly turned 76. When the Gardens was sold to Loblaw in 2004, it appeared that the grocery store chain would fast-track the historic building into a supermarket. Now the projected summer 2007 construction date has come and gone, and nothing has changed since Torontoist covered the Gardens' 75th anniversary. We worried that the Gardens would be neglected while Loblaw dealt with its financial woes and ailing restructuring of existing......

For his entry to Touch Up Toronto, Alden R. Cudanin sent us this photo of the south side of College just east of Bathurst from about 1920, doctored to include the now-ubiquitous iPod ads. Of course, back then, in addition to billboard advertising, Apple also targeted the ever-growing praxinoscope-owning demographic, their ads featuring shadowed men and women dancing the Charleston to the latest Gershwin (or, occasionally, Daft Punk) joint. Original photo from the City......

Are you a fan of municipal development and urban planning? Do you read Spacing (or at least say you do)? Then you should endeavor to visit A Visual Legacy: The City of Toronto’s Use of Photography, 1856-1997, an exhibition of images from the City of Toronto Archives. The exhibit holds appeal to planners and history geeks alike simply because all images were taken specifically for administrative purposes, meaning that these shots aren’t pretty enough......

Looking for that authentic theatre experience in the comfort of your own home? Forget shelling out thousands of dollars on a new high-definition television. As part of ongoing renovations, the folks at the Danforth Music Hall are selling their seats. “They’re fantastic seats,” says the Music Hall’s box-office sentinel Trevor Dunseith. “But they’re a bunch of different styles.” New seats, which will give the interior of the hall a more uniform look, have already......

Parents watch their kids toboggan in High Park on Christmas Day, 1910. Photo courtesy of William James/The Toronto Archives. That little weather icon above our logo is starting to get pretty depressing. With 8 days left until Christmas, there's still no snow on the ground, and with the exception of the few centimeters that we had just over a week ago that quickly melted, there's barely been a speck in the sky since last......

We bet few of you have been to the Toronto Archives. We didn’t even know where it was until last night, when we attended theToronto Book Awards. But stepping into the foyer to be greeted by a room covered in photos and maps of our city’s history, it struck us at just how fitting it is to hold the ceremony here -- books honoured for their fluent portraits of Toronto stories in a building that......

There are dozens of reasons why city council's attempts to place an almost outright ban on postering is just plain misguided. What's surprising is that this isn't the first time that the city has tried to clamp down on visual clutter. The City of Toronto Archives, in their exhibit "Signs of Urban Life," make it crystal clear that the "eye sores" of posters, sandwich boards and every other type of ad is nothing new and......