Every Saturday morning, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters—good and bad—that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today. Crawford Street Bridge, West Side, November 16, 1915. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1231, Item 1615 This Tuesday, May 13, Heritage Toronto will unveil the latest plaque celebrating Toronto's history to commemorate the secret bridge buried beneath the north-west corner of Trinity Bellwoods Park. The unveiling will take place at 4 p.m.......

Sarah Lazarovic—curator of the garage-based Montrose Portrait Gallery of Canada—is painting a portrait of a Torontonian every day. Each Monday, we'll feature some of those portraits here. Suggestions for subjects welcome. Clockwise from top left: - Ms. Trinity Bellwoods is in cheerful charge of the community centre reception desk. She knows everyone and is quick to mention when she hasn't see you working out in a while (wags finger, smiles encouragingly). - A baby at......

Photo by aardvark from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. Transit vehicles are being diverted and streets have been closed near Queen and Bathurst as firefighters battle a six-alarm blaze this morning. The fire broke out about 5 a.m. and spread through eight low-rise buildings on the south side of Queen, consisting of fourteen addresses between Bathurst and Portland. The destroyed block contained commercial properties Suspect Video, Duke's Cycle, National Sound, Preloved, the Jupiter head shop,......

Taking advantage of Friday's snowfall, Newmindspace called for a snowball fight in Trinity Bellwoods on Saturday afternoon. Lots of fun was had by all! Check out more pics after the jump.......

While we're on the subject of TTC maps (as we often are), we might as well include the most wildly ambitious one of all. Reader Ryan Felix sent us his subway map, which he describes as a "fantasy map of the TTC" in 2050. Felix says it was "created in hope to influence people to become pro-transit, and to give a vision that Toronto can have a world-class transit system." The lines depicted on......

With the final film line-up announced and special guests already booking flights to Toronto (legendary horror dude Uwe Boll! Direct from Germany!), the acclaimed Toronto After Dark Film Festival is set to play out its second year. Starting tomorrow night through to the 25th, the Bloor Cinema will play host to over 50 new independent and international horror/sci-fi/fantasy/action/animation and generally offbeat works from across North America, Europe and Asia. Aside from director Boll, who......

Reminder: this weekend (September 14–16) is the Queen West Art Crawl, or QWAC ("quack"), where the streets and parks of trendy West Queen West become galleries. What's going on? Well, Parkdale is hosting an exhibition of performance art and installation called Play/Grounds. You can head over to Trinity Bellwoods Park for the outdoor art show/sale or Art That Binds. Check out what's happening at the Gladstone in the evening—you wouldn't want to miss the......

In this occasional feature, two Torontoist staffers face off to debate an issue that is important to our city. We invite our readers to join in the debate in the comments section after the post. Photo by moonwire from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. Last week, as Ross Hammond and a friend were walking up Queen St. West near Trinity Bellwoods Park, they were confronted by four panhandlers demanding money. A verbal confrontation escalated and Mr.......

A lot happens in and around Toronto, but we can only write about so much in a week. Here's the best of the rest, in a new weekly feature we're calling Superfluist. Superfluist will appear every Friday night. First a monkey escaped. Then, elephants did. And now, a bear has! Animals are apparently not big fans of being captive. Weird, right?The semi-famous Enrique Inglesias was at MuchMusic.This weekend (starting tomorrow morning at 11 a.m.) is......

Reader Amanda Happé came across this sight yesterday morning: city employees carving up and taking away Trinity-Bellwoods' much-loved painted blue and white tree trunk (also known as the Universal Love Machine). Neither felled by nature or protected by nature-lovers, we've yet to find out the reason for its removal—though Amanda suggests, and we agree, that it was pretty rotten-looking. Painted tree stumps can only live for so long, ya know. Either way, we've sent......

A report released yesterday by the Conference Board of Canada raised an alarm that Canada is in the doldrums when it comes to innovation. But after discovering this poster (at right) on the bulletin board at the Valu Pet Store at College and Augusta, the suggestion our society is failing to innovate seems mistaken. This event—The Hairless Pet Picnic—sends a clear signal that as a city, we are indeed innovating and, by so doing, teetering......

Toronto is a squirrelly place. Even the mascot for our 150th anniversary was Seskwee the Sesquicentennial Squirrel. The frolicsome animal is a rodent of the family Sciuridae. There are more than 250 types of squirrel, but in Toronto two kinds dominate: the American Red squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus), and the Eastern Grey Squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis). But what about our famous Black and White Squirrels, you ask? Several species of squirrels, including the Eastern Grey, have......

Price Chopper produce got you down? Apples and oranges from outside the Portuguese pescaria not quite cutting it? Perhaps a visit to one of Toronto’s newest farmer’s markets is in order! The Trinity Bellwoods Farmer’s Market runs on Tuesday afternoons between 3 and 7 p.m., and it'll keep on running until October 30. Local Ontario farmers will set up at the northwest end of the park (near Dundas and Shaw) with bread, nuts, flowers,......

Each weekday morning, we pick a recent image from the Torontoist Flickr Pool and feature it here on the site. It's our way to give the many excellent photographers in our pool the attention they deserve! Another gorgeous day descended upon us yesterday and sent Torontonians to the streets and into parks. Tossed frisbees and bouncing soccer balls contended with lounging picnics on the grass and packed park benches in every direction. Trinity Bellwoods Park......

Submission deadlines are quickly approaching for some of this year’s most exciting weekends of outdoor artfulness and it’s time to get those applications together. The ALLEYJAUNT will return for its 5th year in alleyways, garages and green spaces in and around Trinity Bellwoods Park. Proposals are being accepted from local artists and art collectives for site-specific installations, projects that incoporate urban themes and artistic interventions. The alleyway art will be taking place August 11 and......

It doesn’t take long before the bubblegum beauty of Julian Calleros’s recent mixed-media portrait series, called The half of one self’s, gives way to a web of personal meaning. Adorned with patchwork, embroidery, bright pinks and reds, the portraits put some of the artist’s closest relationships on center stage. His mother, boyfriend, grandmother and a couple of his closest friends appear surrounded by a range of symbols that suggest the existence of an intimately personal......

For the last two years, Newmindspace have been planning their first massive park event. For those two years, they have resisted the call of grass, believing that parks are prisons for fun: designated "fun zones", the only public places where people are really allowed to play. For those two years, Newmindspace have waited patiently for the snow to have a massive snowball fight. Any backyard activity multiplied by one hundred can be deliriously fun......

In our last report on Drum Circle, Toronto's weekly celebration of drum and dance, one commenter lamented, "Its going to be a looooong [sic] winter without it...:(" Fear not, faithful reader, for the beat goes on. Attentive readers may remember that the dreadlocks, wooden beads, glowstick poi and djembe drums that have come to characterize the event were causing grief for a pair of older residents near Trinity Bellwoods, claiming the event held in......

If you think the holiday season's message of giving and charity and love is temporary, think again. Local bands have come together to produce the Friends of Bellwoods Compilation, which will raise funds for the Daily Bread Food Bank. Ex-Death From Above 1979's Sebastien Grainger, The Paramedics (starring Bry Webb of the Constantines), Ohbijou and The D'Urbervilles will be playing the CD release party this Friday at Tranzac, where you can also pick up......

Torontonians are, to say the least, an opinionated bunch. So instead of a simple "Best Of" list to cap 2006 off, the Torontoist staffers have racked their brains about everything (books, songs, restaurants, people, places, stores, newspapers, politicians, musicians, and a lot more) to bring you their choices for the very best and the very worst of our city this past year. It's Torontoist Love/Hate 2006, and you can find a new one every......

We're experimenting with a new daily photo posting. Each weekday morning, we'll pick a recent image from the Torontoist Flickr Pool and feature it here on the site. It's our way to give the many excellent photographers in our pool the attention they deserve! We laughed and laughed at first sighting of Torontogal's candid street image -- our city's finest checking parking tickets on horseback. It's such an awesome capture. It contains all the elements......

Tomorrow night at 7:01 pm is the start of a 12-hour, all-night extravaganza called Nuit Blanche. Everyone we talked to seems to know that it's happening (thanks to cover stories in Now, Eye and the Toronto Star), but when pressed, few of those asked were clear on exactly what Nuit Blanche was, nor exactly what they're supposed to do. We thought Torontoist should step in and clear things up. In a nutshell: There are......

Walk, bike, or take transit, just leave your car out of it. Tomorrow is Car Free Day. The City has sort of turned around on not doing anything last year and this year a chunk of Yonge Street (Dundas to Shuter, around Dundas Sq.) will be car free for a couple of hours. But everyone knows that the day wouldn't be complete without the fine folks at Streets are For People doing something. This......

Art! Alleyways! Don’t it sound fantasmo? This year’s Alley Jaunt is taking place this weekend (Saturday AND Sunday) in the alleyways of the area surrounding Trinity Bellwoods Park (11am til 6pm). The Jaunt will feature art installations, performances, and other wonderfully marvellous artiness inside of garages, outside of garages, and around garages in alleyways. Paul McClure, Jennifer Bulthuis, and Lise Beaudry are the creators of Alley Jaunt and they’ve got extra curators (Claire Eckert, Anne......

The fine folks over at Magic Pony are having a Blythe Beauty Weekend Extravaganza. It kicked off yesterday with an awesome Blythe Reunion party, where we sampled some very tasty cupcakes and continues today where they will be holding some customization workshops. Magic Pony is at 694 Queen Street West between Bathurst and Trinity Bellwoods Park.......

Who needs an excuse to visit a pretty new bookstore? Type, the new bookstore near Trinity Bellwoods which we've mentioned before on this blog is having a very appropriate art show. Nano - Nano is the graduation show from OCAD’s “Nano-publishing: Independent Publications” program taught by Torontoist pal Shannon Gerard. The works explore the cultural place of the book, everything from threatened, obsolete artifact to beautiful art form. The opening of the show will......

We here at Torontoist support live independent music wherever and whenever it's being played (well almost). We feel incredibly blessed to live in a city with so many cheap and bookable live venues and great bands to fill those said venues. So when we heard that the poor kids in Brantford might be losing the Ford Plant, one of that town's better spaces, we were a bit dismayed. In a bit of scene solidarity a......

Gentrification finally, finally wrought a bookstore. With the addition of Type, the stretch of Queen West across from Trinity Bellwoods Park officially moves into the lead as the quaintest little block in the West. No longer just a place to buy cushions and tin trinkets, you can now snag yourself a book to get sticky with croissant fingers as you spend your summer Saturdays reading in the park. Specializing in "the nicest editions of everything,"......

Unlike Hazel McCallion who will descend like the angel of death on callous litterbuggers, our mayor prefers a softer, nicer approach to littering. Including this Friday's 20-Minute Toronto Makeover. At 2:00 pm tommorow the Mayor is asking Torontonians of all stripes to clean up their community for 20 minutes. Torontoist would do this everyday if the mayor agrees to wear a cape tommorow during his cleanup. To make things more interesting the Royal Society of......

As part of Toronto’s Live With Culture initiative, an all-night party to celebrate contemporary art is scheduled to start this year on September 30 at 7:00pm and end on October 1 at 7:00am. The event is called the Scotiabank Nuit Blanche and is modeled after an annual Parisian festival that began in October of 2002 and has already spread to other cities such as Brussels, Rome, and Madrid. Private and public buildings will be......