news
Newsstand: November 4, 2014
Apparently Christian Bale has walked away from playing Steve Jobs in an upcoming biopic. Now we'll never know what Batman looks like in a black turtleneck. In the news: Tenants are left hanging after several raw sewage backups at a TCHC building, subway station Presto card machines are unaccessible for many people with disabilities, a nearly 150-year-old graveyard is unearthed, and a piece of Jewish Canadian history is discovered at a book sale.
As the Toronto Community Housing Corporation continues to fight a backlog of building repairs, residents at 145 Neptune Drive have been left to live with sewage backups in their building that caused feces and toilet water to flood the main floor hallway last Saturday. Residents say that issues relating to raw sewage backing up occur on a monthly basis, causing an unbearable smell and growing health concerns. the TCHC says that old pipes are to blame for the issues in the building. While some pipes were replaced in August, more work still remains to be done to get the priority building into a state of good repair. Without a timeline for a permanent fix in place, some tenants have asked to be transferred from the building. A TCHC spokesperson said repeated inundations of raw sewage are not an “immediate problem” that merits tenant transfers. “Right now our focus needs to be on helping people stay in their homes and making sure that it’s clean and safe for them to do so,” explains TCHC spokesperson Sara Goldvine.
Five years after the Toronto Transit Commission installed Presto card reading machines at 14 subway stations across Toronto as part of a pilot project, they are being flagged as inaccessible to people with disabilities. The electronic fare cards must be tapped against the machine before letting transit riders enter through turnstile gates to proceed to subway platforms, but there are currently no Presto card readers located at accessibility gates. This means people using wheelchairs, scooters and, other mobility aids cannot use the cards. Metrolinx says that the issue has not been raised previously, but a temporary solution will be created until the full Presto system rollout over the next 24 months will see more subway stations retrofitted to be fully accessible.
The human remains of at least 57 bodies have been found beneath the parking lot of a Catholic church near Weston Road and Lawrence Avenue West. Archaeologists were called to St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church and its adjacent high school when a planned rebuild of the school raised concerns that an old graveyard might be buried beneath the property. So far, the team of archaeologists have found coffins and grave markers that date as far back as 1866. They are currently marking the locations of graves in order to let church and school officials make decisions about their fate before a planned sports field is slated to be constructed over the area.
A rare piece of Jewish Canadian heritage was discovered while a volunteer with Friends of the Kelly Library at St. Michael’s College was helping sort through the nearly 100,000 books it receives annually for its fundraising book sale. Sylvia Lovegren was putting price tags on a box of Second World War-related books when a pristinely preserved comic book titled Jewish War Heroes was discovered tucked discreetly inside the pages of a book. The comic is one of the only known surviving copies of the first of three issues created by the Canadian Jewish Congress as a tool to highlight the significant contributions of Jewish soldiers to wartime efforts at a time when many Canadians accused the Jewish community of not doing enough to help. The issue discovered by Lovegren profiles the careers of Bert “Yank” Levy, General Morrice Abraham Cohen, and Soviet submarine captain Israel Fisanovitch, among others. So far, only four other copies are known to exist. The newly discovered copy will the on display until the book sale ends this Saturday, at which point the library will likely keep it.