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Newsstand: March 11, 2010
Illustration by Roxanne Ignatius/Torontoist.
You really need to see the plans for Waterfront Toronto’s Underpass Park to believe them. The park is to be the centrepiece of the thirty-two-hectare West Don Lands development, a sustainable, pedestrian-friendly neighbourhood currently in the planning stages, which faces one small complication in that a set of elevated roads plow right through the middle of it. To join the two halves, the project planners held a design competition to transform the dead underpass area into a cheerful commons. In case the results don’t speak for themselves, here’s the Star‘s Christopher Hume insisting that “this is exactly the kind of thinking the city needs to lift itself into the future.” You say you want it now? Sorry, you’ll just have to wait ’til 2015 like the rest of us.
With little fanfare, Toronto Life snuck two new blogs onto its plate yesterday. The Hype pitches itself as “a critical guide to TV, movies, events, theatre and music,” while The Informer says it targets the “discerning mediavore,” which is all well and good, and seems like a good fit with their established blogs. Their newcomers to the lineup join sibling blogs The Dish (formerly The Daily Dish, but for some reason they decided a name change was overdue) and The Goods. All four are aggregated in Toronto Life‘s omniblog The Wire, which also devoured the archives of Philip Preville’s inimitable City State, one of Toronto Life‘s ill-fated earlier experiments with blogging.
After setting the imagination of Toronto’s media establishment on fire with an evasive promise about an important announcement, it turns out that all Mayor David Miller wanted to say was that the city found a hundred million dollars over the past month. Okay, so that, and the accompanying cut in next year’s proposed taxes, are legitimately big news, and Miller ensured they would be greeted by swarms of journalists who’d been primed for a dramatic revelation, like Miller deciding to re-enter the race for mayor, say, or dynamite the moon.
As though in a sad sidenote to Miller’s Amazingly Anticlimactic Speech, Councillor Adam Giambrone’s (Ward 18, Davenport) candidacy for mayor formally ended that same morning, when the city processed the necessary paperwork to remove him from the ballot. Giambrone announced that he was ending his campaign on February 10. We don’t have to give you any background on that, right? Eyes are now on whether Giambrone will run for his old council spot, or move on.
Police are searching for a man who set fire to a North York nightclub right in front of surveillance cameras. The footage of the arson shows the man calmly pouring gasoline all over the club’s patio shortly after a “Pisces birthday bash” event had wrapped up and the club had been cleared. The arsonist in the video ignites a huge fireball that spreads almost immediately across the floor as the man quickly flees.
And the Toronto District School Board won’t ditch 140 educational assistants, no matter what the province says. The Ontario government had hoped to replace the educational assistants with qualified Early Childhood Educators, a program it hoped would encourage the educational assistants to pursue further education and get ECE status. In spite of the province’s lofty goals, the TDSB says that the educational assistants are too valuable to lose, even though keeping them will add $5.8 million to the board’s seventeen-million-dollar budget deficit for this year alone. If only Miller had found just twenty-three million dollars more. Well, there’s always tomorrow, right?