Ladies and Gentlemen of Toronto(ist), This posting is to notify you that, as part of bike month, Streets Are For People cordially invites you to a smashing game of polo à la bike, tomorrow evening at 6:30 p.m in Trinity Bellwoods Park. That's right folks, a game of mallets, balls, and two-wheeled horses by the gazebo in the park. Suggested attire is fancy, yet fun—so we say, ladies, lace up your corsets, but eschew......

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......

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......

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......

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......

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.......

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......

What a neat idea, and one that we're only catching onto on this, its third, go round. A weekend conversion of alleyways to art spaces, courtesy of AlleyJaunt. All this weekend alleys along the edges of Trinity Bellwoods Park will be "transformed into art exhibits, installations, performance, and film/video venues." Forty artists will be exhibiting their wares, and Sunday evening will feature a 9 pm screening of short films and videos. Heaquarters are at......

Happy Holidays. TOist recommends a plan of sledding, leftover turkey and sledding. And leftover turkey. Of course, you could also hole up inside, playing with your new Ipod/Tickle Me Elmo/What have you as the snow falls this December. Though we're set to get 5cm of snow, the temperature will also hover in the minus teens for the next two days, until it gets warmer around Tuesday. Of course, while here at home we're having the......