Streetscape
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Remembering an Olympic scramble intersection party
As City Council considers removal of the scramble at Bay and Bloor, many issues are up for debate: safety, usage levels and traffic congestion, the...
By Shoshanna Saxe -
Spacing presents transit wayfinding events in Mississauga & Toronto on Tuesday & Wednesday
MISSISSAUGA EVENT WHAT: Connecting The Dots: Mississauga event WHEN: Tuesday, March 24, 7-9pm WHERE: Sheridan College, Hazel McCallion campus, 4180 Duke...
By Spacing -
MESLIN: If a billboard falls in a forest… Part 3
Last week a brilliant piece appeared in the New York Times about commercial advertising in public spaces and what the author describes as “the...
By Dave Meslin -
REID: Some thoughts on the 1 Bloor West proposal
Last week, the owner of the land at 1 Bloor West (the former location of Stollery’s, plus some adjacent property) unveiled a proposal for a dramatic...
By Dylan Reid -
Stairs to nowhere, trap streets, and other Toronto oddities
There’s a set of stairs on Greenwood Avenue that lead nowhere. At the top, a wooden fence at the end of someone’s back yard blocks any further...
By Chris Bateman -
The transformer next door
The lights are on but there’s no-one home at 640 Millwood Rd. The two-storey suburban home near Bayview and Eglinton doesn’t exactly stand out among its...
By Chris Bateman -
Welcome to your private nuclear fallout shelter
In 1959, the builders of Regency Acres, a 700-home subdivision in Aurora, Ontario, offered something no other homebuilder in the country could: a private...
By Chris Bateman -
REID: That’s a nice laneway, but it’s no woonerf
One of the more intriguing elements of the West Don Lands development was the promise that it would include some “woonerfs“ — a Dutch...
By Dylan Reid -
The slow and deadly evolution of Toronto’s crosswalks
Crossing the street in Toronto has been a potentially deadly challenge for almost a century. Until the 1950s, when the number of automobiles dramatically...
By Chris Bateman -
REID: Laneways as shared spaces
Last week, I was part of a panel discussion about the potential of Toronto’s laneways, organized by The Laneways Project. I talked about the way...
By Dylan Reid -
There are 100 graves in the parking lot of this mall
The 100 or so people interred at Christie’s Methodist Cemetery near Warden and Finch never expected they would spend a portion of eternity buried...
By Chris Bateman -
How the CN Tower killed Toronto’s rooftop lookouts
There was a time when observation decks were all the rage in Toronto. The designers and developers of tall buildings like TD Centre, Commerce Court, and...
By Chris Bateman