Photo by David Topping. Torontoist has a major crush on missed connections, and this one made our day: West Queen West, Drake/Beacs - m4w last weekend, at the drake. Or maybe it was the beaconsfield. You are very stylish, wearing an outfit from american apparel. it was colourful. i was skinny, wearing jeans and a t-shirt with my favourite band on it, with a vintage sweater over top. we talked for a bit, and......

No matter which generation you're from, chances are you have been influenced in one way or another by puppets. Lamb Chop, Elmo, Kermit, Casey & Finnegan, and even Ed the Sock have been huge puppet figures in popular culture. So why not relive your childhood and come on down to a puppet play this Saturday afternoon? Toronto puppeteers Kristen, Jackie, and Renee are back in town after a tour in New York City and are......

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......

We've previously written about renowned architects designing furniture, but those creative design types also like to get their fingers dirty with paint on canvas. What could be more appropriate than an art exhibit from the guy who designed the OCAD tabletop building? Starting tomorrow, modernist British architect Will Alsop will be premiering Cultural Fog in Toronto—his first North American art exhibit. Alsop says he's been inspired by city neighbourhoods, which include Riverdale, Roncesvalles and......

On Monday and Tuesday nights, the Toronto Public Space Committee will be holding its third Art Attack event. The first, in 2002, had people meet up at the Tranzac to make art and then tape it over outdoor advertisements in the Annex. Last summer, the art-making took place at the Gladstone Hotel and the ad-jamming occurred mostly in the West Queen West area (with one excursion to King and Strachan to hit the Monster......

Another work from the West Queen West Department of anoNyMouS Awesomeness. Sometime between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. on the last night of April, some fuzzy soul(s) pasted a swatch of green fun fur on the bus shelter bench in front of Woolfitt's, once again adding some love to the corner of Queen West and Abell. This isn't what they mean by the "Art and Design District", is it? Initially we were unsure if......

Like a beaten up, gunmetal grey spaceship, Jeremy Lynch's Containers has landed in West Queen West. If you're curious about where to find this quirky gem, the answer is after the jump; we wouldn't want to spoil the surprise!......

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! Flurries. A couple moments of spring now buried in another few days of snow. Torontoist longs for the days of summer and streetscapes such as the one above taken by avp17. Strolling along the bustle of West Queen West,......

A conference about culture-led regeneration in Toronto headed up by independent non-profit real-estate developer Artscape took place yesterday at the Joseph Workman theatre at the Queen Street CAMH. In recent days, the unpopular OMB ruling to demolish the historic Abell Street building and its 80 live-work studios has crystallized the dire need to improve methods of city planning for many citizens. This has left many people asking, how do we go forward and make things......

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......

Walking east on Queen St. W from Dufferin, we noticed a string of barely-perceptible lights on the once-rail-but-now-pedestrian overpass that separates Parkdale and West Queen West. At first it seems like the lights are "official," perhaps to warn absurdly low-flying planes that they were about to smack into the Queen Street Subway monument, until you realize that the lights are lots of different colours. Click on the picture above for a larger panorama.......

The always trendy Queen Street West, has upped the ante, and finally moved itself as far "West" as it can reach (and then east to Leslieville - but that's a different story). For less than 30 bucks, you can explore this hot new 'hood, and prove to your best boy and/or girl that you are hip and cultured - and those are things that can't be bought. Surprisingly enough, getting up early is crucial to......

In due time, you'll be able to fold a map of city in half, with Yonge Street as the crease, and witness the more or less symmetry in Starbucks locations on Queen Street. One Starbucks is on Queen West in Beaconsfield, site of the infamous "Drake you ho this is all your fault" tag of last year. The other is planned for Queen East in Leslieville, home of the infamous commenter Joe Clark. More......

You may find delays on Queen St West this morning. The streetcar is only just getting back to regular service after a five alarm fire raged near West Queen West. Firefighters don't suspect foul play, and no people were hurt. But the apparent centre of the blaze, a bakery, is badly damaged. And that is terrible.......

The Weisblogger is back, with Paved.ca, a new city site that tackles political 'scrumble' - Pam Coburn's unconsumated yet career-destroying affair, reviews art by Allyson Mitchell, and informs us that Malcolm Gladwell had an easy time of getting accepted to U of T. Freshly-plugged in today's Star the blaugerista is open for business, but not in Parkdale, or West Queen West, where such fancy terminology is highly discouraged.......

1. The Drake Hotel (1150 Queen St W) Wait a second...Isn't this a hip music venue that serves that nice fresh fruit salad? Yes to the music venue, and doubly so to the fresh fruit salad. But the Drake's hipster appeal is not the reason that there's a ginormous line every weekend - that's more so because of the luv-hungry 905ers go there to get lucky. Perhaps it's just the dichotomy between the Drake Underground......

1. Rotate This (620 Queen St W) As if! As if Torontoist readers didn't know that Rotate This is the best place to buy used cd's in the city. Anything that you can't find anywhere else will most likely be here, along with concert tickets and informed staff picks. Rotate This simply has all the makings of a great used record store, ie take all the attributes of your Sonic Booms and CD Replays......