Village People

By David Topping

Photo, whose title gave this post its title, by tomms from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

When it comes to Toronto’s neighbourhoods, even well-versed out-of-towners have probably heard of Rosedale, High Park, the Annex, and the Beach. But Amesbury? Alderwood? L’Amoreaux?
All those neighbourhoods and dozens more are now being named, shaped, and reshaped by the Star, whose continually great Map of the Week blog has been building on the work of “feature writer Kenneth Kidd,” who, as web editor Patrick Cain wrote, “recently literally went back to the drawing board on the neighbourhood issue, carving up the city into 158 areas with a marker on an enormous laminated map.” Last week, the paper published a beta Google Maps version of Kidd’s carve-up, and solicited reader suggestions for both names and boundaries of individual neighbourhoods; yesterday, with some boundaries redrawn and some new regions created, they rolled out the first official version of the neighbourhood map. You can check it out on the Star‘s website, where it’s unfortunately confined to a 535 by 425–pixel box, which makes exploring the map (especially in Satellite view) a little less fun than it could be, but which will in no way reduce the pain of those living in the pockets of the city that are as of yet unnamed.