Archives /// Infrastructure Fetish

When walking around a big city people generally look straight ahead or perhaps slightly upward to appreciate the built form. But one of Toronto's finer details can be found in our gutters. In the old city of Toronto boundaries, a row of red bricks often sits between the curb and the road. While these brick gutters play a role in the look and feel of neighbourhoods, they aren't without a functional purpose. According to Toronto Public Works these brick gutters are actually channels that allow rainwater to flow to ...

"It's like taking the cherry off the sundae," says architect and designer David Dennis of Jack Layton's claim that the now federal NDP leader came up with the concept for Toronto's ubiquitous ring-and-post bike stand. Dennis tells me this as he holds a chunk of the original cherry-wood bike-ring pattern. "All I'm saying," says Dennis, "is that the concept, the 'ah-ha moment,' came over a drawing board rather than a bar table." By now, the story of the sketch on a napkin, or the sweaty beer ring and swizzle stick, is the stuff of local urban legend. Regardless of the various ...

We all remember those days before the turn of the millennium when the Y2K bug was expected to wreak havoc on our world. We imagined chaos overtaking us as computers failed to keep order. We pictured traffic lights failing, leaving streets a mess of cars unable to negotiate busy intersections without guidance (a scenario that came true during the August 2003 blackout), and forced us all to navigate streets rammed with hapless motorists and pedestrians. With this thought in mind, it is a wonder that we don't think more about how things like our traffic lights work. We come face to ...

They may not be very noticable, but the green, 12-foot pipes that rise from the ground and often dot the edge of parks throughout Toronto are linked to the uglier and less romantic aspects of civic engineering and infrastructure that hide under the city's surface. Three of these curious green pipes stand in a huddle at the northern edge of Trinity Bellwoods Park. They are vent stacks that release odours from the Mid-Toronto Interceptor Sewer, which carries household sewage 80 feet underground. Their purpose is to control the smell ...

George Costanza on the TV show Seinfeld has a deal with the pigeons: they get out of his way, he looks the other way on statue defecation. Torontonians, too, have to make deals with birds, who tend to crowd the city. Luckily for us, Dan Frankian, founder of Hawkeye Bird Control, is negotiating a new contract. Pest birds, causing health hazards and physical ruin, account for tens of millions of dollars of damage every year to buildings, machinery, automobiles, roofs, and ventilation systems. City Hall is therefore continually battling the birds: they are a safety risk in airports and landfills; they ...

The next time you're admiring the wilderness of High Park, you might find some of the vegetation staring back at you. Throughout the park, four distinct faces — carved into trees and stumps — watch over the park's visitors. This isn't the result of a mystical force beyond the realm of our understanding. This is the handiwork of Colin Partridge. In 2006, the City of Toronto commissioned Partridge, a wood spirit carver, to carve figures into the dying trees in High Park (carving living trees would leave a permanent wound, likely shortening the lifespan of a tree). He spent two weeks ...

The apparent lack of lamp posts south of Charles and north of Grosvenor on Yonge Street is at first unsettling, suggesting that the stretch of sidewalk has been neglected by either the City or Toronto Hydro. At night however the street is washed in light — both multi-coloured light, radiating from electronic signs mounted to adjacent buildings, and white light, from metal halide street luminaries mounted above and around those signs. Known as "wall packs," the circular or rectangular fixtures are the same as those used to light tunnels or the spaces under bridges, and in this application are lit with high-pressure ...

Except for the constant thrumming of the 60-cycle hum, these Jekyll-and-Hydes make no other noise. Perfect neighbours, they go about their super-heated business inside while wearing their cool domestic camouflage on the outside — like an army of men in grey flannel suits with beating balls of fire for hearts. Scattered across the city, they are the Toronto Hydro Corporation's 277 substations, and it's their job to break down raw electricity from power plants into something more palatable for our homes, schools, and businesses. Some look like grand late-Victorian public buildings ("Glengrove" at 2833 Yonge near Lawrence) and others like postmodernist ...

With warm weather once again gracing us with its presence, our city's parks and trails have revealed themselves anew. To some of us, seeing our recreation areas come back to life serves as a reminder of exactly how inactive we have become during our winter hibernation. Two green spaces on opposite ends of Toronto bring the gym outside. East of downtown, Kew Gardens and the Beaches Parks have featured public exercise equipment for over 20 years. These parks provide fitness gear alongside the boardwalk, such as stepping blocks and pull-up bars. Scott Attwood, supervisor from the Toronto & East York District ...

It is an indisputable fact that in most locations throughout Toronto, a person is never more than 15 walking minutes from a river or tributary. All that water — yet when asked, less than half of Toronto residents were aware the city was situated in six watersheds. So prevalent are the watercourses meandering throughout Toronto that besides identifying as a "City of Neighbourhoods," Toronto could just as accurately identify as a "City of Streams." The fact that citizens fail to recognize the vast network of tributaries flowing all around them may be because, historically, little regard was shown in maintaining these ...