{"id":1422,"date":"2007-01-01T19:13:49","date_gmt":"2007-01-01T23:13:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/?p=1422"},"modified":"2013-01-21T14:18:52","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T19:18:52","slug":"best-of-2006-intervention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2007\/01\/01\/best-of-2006-intervention\/","title":{"rendered":"Best of 2006: intervention"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

The Best Intervention of 2006<\/strong> goes to the bench installed, without permission of the City, outside of the Parkdale Library on Queen Street West.<\/p>\n

In late-March, the City and the Parkdale BIA unveiled a new piece of public art outside the local library and community centre. The World Peace Monument<\/a> is a bronze globe that contains a water display (only is use during the warmer months). There were a number of complaints about the City allocating $300,000 for a sculpture when the neighbourhood is in desperate need of funding for affordable housing, slum landlord oversight, and the battle with the very public crack trade on Queen Street West.<\/p>\n

The globe was placed near the front of the local library which occupies the area that was once Parkdale’s town square. When Parkdale was an independent village in the late 1800s the square and town hall were the centre of this new and prosperous Toronto suburb. From the 1930s onward, the area was slowly neglected and unmaintained, and by 1964 a low-rise modernist library was opened on the space of the old square.<\/p>\n

When the City and the Parkdale BIA revealed the public art project in the spring it was seen as an attempt to return the area to a gathering spot. A BIA report states the globe at will become a “place to meet and a public landmark from which you can start exploring all that Parkdale has to offer.”<\/p>\n

So if you’re making the area a place to meet why wouldn’t you include some benches? It wasn’t an oversight, said Parkdale BIA co-ordinator Devin Horne in a NOW article<\/a>: “In the last two or three years, a lot of the benches have been pulled out by the City,” Horne said. “They were being slept on all the time and were a magnet for drug dealers specifically.”<\/p>\n

This type of mentality is what sadly plagues many of Toronto’s civil servants, BIAs, and resident associations: let’s remove (or not build) something because of its small negative side-effects and ignore all of its positive benefits.<\/p>\n

In early April, a “sit-in” was organized and the bench was installed without the permission of the city or library. It hasn’t been removed and probably to the surprise of the Parkdale BIA, the bench has not become a drive-thru for the drug trade. I walk Parkdale’s Queen West strip almost daily and have watched the activity around the bench with great curiosity. Most of the time the bench is in use by elderly folks, school kids visiting the library, or (in times of good weather) folks eating their lunch. At night, people use the bench to wait for friends, yet I’ve never seen a person sleeping on it.<\/p>\n

The bench may not be the biggest or most publicized intervention of 2006, but it’s having a lasting impact and proving all of its critics wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Best Intervention of 2006 goes to the bench installed, without permission of the City, outside of the Parkdale Library on Queen Street West. In late-March, the City and the Parkdale BIA unveiled a new piece of public art outside the local library and community centre. The World Peace Monument is a bronze globe thatContinue reading “Best of 2006: intervention”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1022,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21757,18],"tags":[4261,25,3695,316,19,391,1808],"class_list":["post-1422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communication","category-neighbourhoods","tag-devin-horne","tag-intervention","tag-parkdale-library","tag-queen","tag-toronto","tag-usd","tag-world-peace-monument"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBest of 2006: intervention - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2007\/01\/01\/best-of-2006-intervention\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Best of 2006: intervention - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Best Intervention of 2006 goes to the bench installed, without permission of the City, outside of the Parkdale Library on Queen Street West. 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