The appearance of yet another traffic camera in the city is hardly remarkable. But it is a little unusual when that camera is watching traffic on the Don River just south of Pottery Road. Although it was used extensively for transportation in its almost-forgotten past, the Don is not exactly known for its 21st-century traffic jams and accidents. The camera, installed about a year ago beside a gauge house that monitors river levels and......

If only keeping thieves at bay could be that easy. Remember the '80s and '90s, when car radio theft was all the rage? People etched parts with identifying marks and put "no radio" stickers on their car windows to warn thieves away from a fruitless exercise. Attempting to curb increasingly bold metal thieves, Hydro One started following the lead of frustrated car owners last year, putting up these signs at some of their substations.......

Frequent northbound travellers on the Bayview Extension have probably noticed the "Pottery Road" street sign pointing to a glorified supermarket driveway at the top of the hill, just south of Moore Avenue. Some may even have wondered how it relates to the more familiar street of the same name almost 1.5 kilometers to the south, winding up the valley wall to Broadview Avenue. The answer to this puzzle is that the two Pottery Roads......

Throughout vast swaths of the South, no veranda is complete without an old codger kicking back with some hooch and making passersby uncomfortable. Riverdale, where this front porch denizen passes the days, seems to be just close enough to the Mason-Dixon line to qualify. A local resident insisted that this handrafted handyman, equal parts kitschy and creepy, moves with the weeks and the seasons, assuming different positions every once in a while to ease......

While most people hid inside during yesterday's deep freeze, the few who chanced the icy sidewalk of the Overlea bridge near Don Mills Road received a little smile if they happened to look down: some overly cheerful person had stomped out a big happy face between the cross-country ski tracks in the Don Valley 30 metres below the bridge. Although we can't condone overt cheerfulness—especially when the wind chill is minus a jillion—we'll admit......

What's the most fun you can have in the days following a big snowstorm? Unlike many winter sports, snowshoeing is relatively inexpensive and requires little in the way of specialized equipment. Other than the snowshoes themselves—a decent pair costs less than a good pair of skates—you need only some warm layers of clothing, a sense of adventure, and as much time as your legs can stand. It really couldn't be any easier to learn,......

Most people wouldn't associate Toronto with abandoned roads, but a few of them dot the city if you know where to look. One of the better examples is this surviving portion of old Don Mills Road as it climbs north out of the Don Valley. The current Don Mills Road is to the right in the picture above. The original road was realigned and widened in the 1950s to connect the new community of......

The next time you're walking along the wooded trails near the marsh in E.T. Seton Park, you may find a weathered sign overlooking a wet meadow. Still barely legible, it reads: Trees in this area were planted by the Outing Club of East York in honour of Charles Sauriol who was instrumental in the preservation of this valley August 1980 The Outing Club of East York's Diane Vieira told us that in its early......

A few weeks ago, we wondered about the presence of electricity meters placed randomly around the city, measuring power consumption for, well, something or other. We'd grown so perplexed by these meters that we felt compelled to ask Toronto Hydro for more information. The utility went beyond the call of duty by actually sending a supervisor out to examine one of the mystery locations we'd identified. He reported back that the meter on Overlea......

Our modern urban infrastructure is so pervasive that most of it goes virtually unnoticed. But every once in a while, something appears just out of place enough to make you stop and wonder what it's doing there. For example, an electricity meter strapped to a light pole directly above a pedestrian "push to cross" button, its familiar flat disk spinning slowly and recording usage of, um, what exactly? Since first puzzling over that meter......

While trying on clothes in the fitting room of a well-known department store two weeks ago, we were a little vexed by a common oversight: the lack of a cushion or dish in which to stash the pins as we removed them from the neatly packaged dress shirts. The attendant was overly apologetic and vowed to take action after we brought the deficiency to her attention. Imagine our surprise upon visiting the same fitting......

As the early days of autumn bring cooler temperatures and colourful displays of nature, many city folk long to get onto some of the GTA's best hiking trails. If you think that a solitary drive out to the Bruce Trail is your only option, think again. If you can't or simply don't want to drive for an hour or longer just so you can be at one with nature, many local clubs—including the Toronto Bruce......

From the "Who knew it was such a rampant problem?" department comes the warning painted inside this dump truck. Surely it makes much more sense when the dumper is horizontal and the truck is in a quiet parking lot at the end of a long day of work. It's easy to imagine the worker who got tired of cleaning the urine-soaked asphalt out of the corner of the truck every Friday afternoon and didn't......

On Monday, the TTC unveiled a survey that, in lieu of other public consultation, would be used to help the organization determine what cuts it may need to make this year. (For more on the TTC's potential budget shortfall, see our interview with Adam Giambrone, the TTC's documentation included with the survey, and Steve Munro's excellent summary of the situation.) The problem is, the survey really isn't that great: it's too vague, too incomplete,......

We publish a lot of articles here on Torontoist, and sometimes it's hard to keep up with all of them. Populist is a weekly recap intended for the casual Torontoist reader, featuring some of the coolest, most interesting, most commented, and most recommended posts from the past week on Torontoist. Populist will appear every Sunday night. This week on Torontoist featured bleepin' boobs, Brass Rail burn-outs, coulrophobia, Guitar Girls, Giambrones, and Alsop architecture. Here are......

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 mystery is afoot in Riverdale. The residents of Cambridge Avenue near Broadview & Danforth have grown familiar in recent years with the roaming gangs of monkeys—a dozen at last count—that dangle from the utility wires above the street. They move about only under cover of darkness, stealthily assuming new positions every few nights. By day, they prefer to remain motionless, silently watching passersby far below. Aping the inclusive character of their neighbourhood, the......

Peter Riedel could hardly have chosen a better location to ply his trade. We've seen rock balancers in the eastern beaches, in the western beaches, and even at the Ex, but this is the first time we've seen one working the Humber River. Literally in the river. The Humber cascades over a low waterfall in Étienne Brûlé Park before bubbling just a few centimetres deep across a short stretch of river rock. The only......

Torontoist sure does after a visit to the Magic Building on Sumach Street, south of Queen. The pediment over the doorway is graced by what may be both the sexiest and creepiest cowboy hat-wearing gargoyle we've ever seen. Or is that a witch's hat? Either way, she's marginally less inviting than Father Time at the old Don Jail and one-of-a-kind in Toronto. Okay, we know that she's not technically a gargoyle, but it's the......

Tucked into the northeast corner of Scarborough near the Zoo, Toronto's only vehicle-carrying suspension bridge straddles the Rouge River. A small handful of other suspension bridges dot the city, but carry only pedestrians and cyclists. Transportation Services was taken by surprise upon our first inquiry and couldn't immediately confirm that this was a true suspension bridge. But John Bryson, Structures and Expressways Manager for the city, verified that it is indeed a "suspension bridge......

The old sales pavilion and welcome centre at the superfluouslyy-lettered Minto Skyy condo on Broadview went for a brief flight of fancyy this morning before settling into its new home at the opposite end of the construction site. One passerbyy was heard to wonder whether Minto was taking the realism of its model suite to new heights, hoisting it into the skyy to show potential buyers the view from the upper floors. Another remarked......