Archives /// Urban Animals
Like most parents at the Toronto Zoo, Charles tends to relax and let his kids have fun. He occasionally raises his voice if things get out of hand, but mostly he spends his time in the shade, watching his brood as they explore.
As with many Torontonians, Charles was born elsewhere — Gabon, in his case, in 1972. He arrived in our city two years later, the same year the zoo opened, and later established himself as a headline-grabbing abstract expressionist painter. Though those heady times are more than a decade behind him, he's still prodigious in other respects: he fathered ...
Imagine standing on the corner of busy Queen and Spadina. The traffic is rushing, the people are bustling, the horses are neighing. Wait — the horses? With the car being such an overwhelming part of today's urban landscape, it's difficult to imagine a time when cities were organized around a different mode of transportation. Toronto's birth in the 1780s was during a time when city planners needed to accommodate the horse in the urban environment, and to this day it's easy to spot holdovers from the horse-drawn era.
Most of the oldest residential neighbourhoods in Toronto have back alleys that serviced ...
Our city's ongoing expansion and development has an adverse affect on its non-human population. Toronto's list of endangered and threatened species is getting longer primarily because of urban growth and a change in environmental factors. "Over the decades, southern Ontario cities such as Toronto have grown very rapidly," says Donna Cansfield, Minister of Natural Resources, "and the natural habitats of some species have been reduced as a result of development and, in some cases, due to pollution."
Concern centres on more than the potential loss of animals; the stability of many species serve as indicators of how our environment is faring. ...
The Toronto skyline isn't any higher than the tops of the old growth trees, where ravines extended south from the Oak Ridges Moraine all the way to the waterfront and the streams and rivers flow free and clean. The cultural diversity Toronto is known for only extends to the different native tribes of the area. Your backyard is part of the lush system of wetlands that hasn't felt the weight of pavement on top of it. And it is filled with dog-friendly parks; wolf packs choose where they're allowed to go.
This is Toronto, before the Europeans.
For thousands of years, little ...
How many people live in this city? Oh, millions. You know that; you've been crammed on a streetcar with some of them, you've been stuck behind the doddering crowds of them at malls, and you've seen them congregate in vast clumps at parades and protests and concerts. It's a city, it's where people live, it has high-rise buildings to hold them all.
But even though it's people whose names are on the lease agreements, this city has other tenants as well. Look to your left or right, right now, and you might see the evidence of their tenancy: a fat grey ...
