People in Toronto like to drag their parties out onto the streets. It gives the rest of us a chance to sneak in and crash them, or participate, or just watch.
One summer evening I was walking through Seaton Village and passed through the Olive Street Block Party. Residents had brought their kitchen tables out and were all sitting there, in the street, eating and drinking wine. There were little tables for the children, and a couple of long tables where the neighbourhood potluck dishes were sitting. I felt like I was passing through their dining rooms.
Recently I walked through another ...
I like to walk around the city. Since I moved here four years ago, I have wanted to find out what lies beyond each street or park. Not knowing about the adjacent areas makes me slightly nervous. Things could be really cooking over there, and if I don't walk over and find out, I could be missing something good. In the meantime, Toronto has become a very intimate place for me. The people begin to look familiar and friendly. It seems natural to stand in the middle of a Portuguese festival in Trinity-Bellwoods, or watch a Peruvian celebration from the ...
I went for a drive two Sundays ago. My intention was to go for a walk, but it was pouring, and though I often like to walk in the rain, I was cold and I wanted to be sheltered and comfortable, but the urge to wander was strong. I have access to a car so in honour of Passover I drove up Bathurst, following the path the GTA Jewish population took as they migrated from Kensington up to North York and later toThornhill. I admit I like going for drives from time to time. It reminds me of how I ...
Living downtown, it's easy to forget just how suburban much of Toronto is. We may not like suburbia, but it's probably the most common Canadian landscape, and one that sort of makes sense to me, because I grew up in it, and I feel like I know the signs and codes of the place. The TTC makes our suburbs strangely accessible, and Yorkdale Mall is as good as an ambulatory launch pad gets out here.
As malls go, it's probably one of the nicest — and it's also Canada's oldest, built in 1964. Patrons are the usual suburban mall rats mixed ...
Bloor and Bathurst might be our greatest big city corner — not because of skyscrapers or starchitecture but because of Honest Ed's turning it into such an electric place. It's a do-it-yourself K-Mart wrapped in a Las Vegas coat, an odd and striking sight in this city, and old-fashioned precursor to Yonge-Dundas Square. I've always wondered what those infamous and perhaps largely mythological dour Toronto the Good citizens thought of this place when Ed started up his incandescent machine for the first time. More importantly, what would Timothy Eaton have thought?
Cities are all about motion, and when the Honest Ed's ...
The opening lines of Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" read "Whose woods these are I think I know. / His house is in the village, though; / He will not see me stopping here / To watch his woods fill up with snow." Though he's writing about a semi-rural area, there's something about the proximity of those quiet woods to the nearby village that makes Frost's poem seem cozy and urban — how wonderful it would be to walk through a forest on the ...
Sackville Street begins at a chain-link dead end, and it's downhill from there. All of Cabbagetown's northern edge is pressed up against St. James Cemetery, one of the city's finest. Sackville is a little stub of road that extends north of Wellesley for a hundred metres or so, and begins a consistent line of Victorian pleasantness running south, made so by pioneering gentrifiers — so-called "white painters" — in the early 1970s.
Sackville does run noticeably downhill. On a bike you can coast all the way to Gerrard if you are liberal in your interpretation of what a stop sign means. ...
In anticipation of the Walk 21 conference on all things pedestrian, Spacing organized the Great Queen Street Psychogeographic Walk. We began at the Queen, King and Roncesvalles intersection and ended on the green and sunny lawn of the R.C. Harris Filtration Plant in the Beach some three hours and 45 minutes later.
Any street in Toronto would have worked, but Queen starts and ends definitively. Most of us have experienced many of the neighbourhoods that Queen passes through separately, but when walked all at once the city is suddenly stitched together, no longer a collection of separate places.
Anybody can be a ...
I once heard Browns Line described as the ugliest street in Toronto, but I didn't bother to confirm this until recently. Browns Line is rather famous, as obscure arterial roads go, because hundreds of thousands of commuters pass by its Queen Elizabeth Way and Gardiner off-ramp signs every day. It's one of those landmarks on the way in and out of the city that are noted automatically, but rarely examined. Browns Line stands out because it's not a street, avenue, or boulevard, but a line; it's a throwback to farm days, the kind of lonely country road where Southern ...
If you look at a map of Toronto, you'll see two bands that run across the top. One is the fat and wide 401 that we're all familiar with. The other is the Finch Hydro Corridor. It runs roughly just north of Finch Avenue, hence the name, and is generally a continuous green line bisected at predictable points by longitudinal streets. I started my walk at Finch Station at about 2pm on a nowhere, no-time Sunday afternoon. I was going to exit at the kiss-'n'-ride, because I've never done that, but it seemed presumptuous so I exited on the east ...
