{"id":4078,"date":"2009-03-05T15:25:57","date_gmt":"2009-03-05T20:25:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/2009\/03\/05\/the-life-of-death-in-great-canadian-cities\/"},"modified":"2013-01-21T15:23:16","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T20:23:16","slug":"the-life-of-death-in-great-canadian-cities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2009\/03\/05\/the-life-of-death-in-great-canadian-cities\/","title":{"rendered":"The life of death in great Canadian cities"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm1.static.flickr.com\/180\/432635280_b2a3792efa.jpg?v=0\" height=\"333\" width=\"500\" \/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/images\/feature-graphics\/feature-toronto-flaneur.gif\" height=\"63\" width=\"500\" \/><\/p>\n<p>My <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eyeweekly.com\/psychogeography\">psychogeography<\/a> column in the Eye Weekly this week examines how death and location collide and overlap in the city. For a number of reasons notable locations have a particular attraction but the places of death perhaps most of all. This isn&#8217;t out of any morbid curiosity &#8212; morbidness is boring &#8212; but rather something I can only describe uncharacteristically in supernatural terms. The place where people left us &#8212; for either nowhere or somewhere depending on what you believe &#8212; is a portal to somewhere else, and a connection back to that person. And yet these sites are often bedrooms, sidewalks, alleys, front stoops, parks, railway corridors and just about every other quotidian place in the city.<\/p>\n<p>Thinking about these sites is like examining an alternate near-invisible map of the city. We see it sometimes, while other times, not so much. In the article I mention the\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www3.thestar.com\/static\/googlemaps\/homicidemap.html\"><em>Toronto&#8217;s Star&#8217;s<\/em> homicide map<\/a>. It makes for disturbing reading as each murder site is marked with a bubble you can click that reveals a short bureaucratic haiku of the details of death, each likely with a novel&#8217;s-worth of story behind it. The Toronto Police&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.torontopolice.on.ca\/homicide\/unsolvedcurrent.php\">unsolved homicide page<\/a> is also compelling, complete with maps of the location of death. For more recent events in the city (of all types, not just murder) check the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.torontopolice.on.ca\/newsreleases\/\">newsreleases page<\/a> as well as the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.torontopolice.on.ca\/majors.php\">major news reports<\/a> page on the police website.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps the most up to the minute way of dramatically changing your mental map of Toronto is by checking Toronto Fire Services constantly-refreshed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.toronto.ca\/fire\/cadinfo\/livecad.htm\">list of active incidents<\/a>. You can judge the size of the incident by how many units have been dispatched, and as with the homicide map the bureaucratic prose &#8212; a sample taken just now: &#8220;Fire &#8211; Subway&#8221;; &#8220;Medical Unconscious&#8221;; &#8220;Natural Gas Leak&#8221; &#8212; is almost euphemistic considering the dramas they likely represent. It also gives an indication of how big this city is, as every refresh (every 5 minutes) usually lists more incidents.<\/p>\n<p>From my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eyeweekly.com\/city\/psychogeography\/article\/53890\"><em>Eye<\/em> piece<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Just after dusk one day last fall, I was passing by Church and Bloor when a Toronto Police cruiser stopped in the middle of the intersection. The officer got out, stood up straight, and saluted just in time for another police car to go by followed by three black hearses and a number of limousines. Activity on the sidewalk stopped and everybody watched, our attention caught by the sudden silence, by that cop doing something we rarely see them do, and by the appearance of a speeding motorcade. Two teenagers asked nobody in particular what was going on and a man answered, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Don&#8217;t you watch the news? These three died in Afghanistan.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The teens said \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Oh,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and went quiet like everybody else, watching and listening to the unusual sound of so many eight-cylinder engines on their way to the Ontario Coroners building.<br \/>\n&#8212;<br \/>\nI don&#8217;t believe in ghosts, but I do believe there is something peculiarly powerful about the places where people died. The location where anything happened is special &#8212; On this site: a great birth; a great speech; a great invention &#8212; because it&#8217;s as close as we can ever get to that event, but sites of death are perhaps as close as we can get to the last few moments of the people we have lost, and it&#8217;s almost as if a bit of them still lingers there.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.eyeweekly.com\/city\/psychogeography\/article\/53890\">Please read the rest on the Eye site<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><em>Photo by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/mlostracco\/\">Bitpicture<\/a> taken in Allen Gardens. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My psychogeography column in the Eye Weekly this week examines how death and location collide and overlap in the city. For a number of reasons notable locations have a particular attraction but the places of death perhaps most of all. This isn&#8217;t out of any morbid curiosity &#8212; morbidness is boring &#8212; but rather something<a href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2009\/03\/05\/the-life-of-death-in-great-canadian-cities\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"sr-only\">&#8220;The life of death in great Canadian cities&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4004,"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":[21759,20],"tags":[3679,423,11612,1637,11613,4755,41,11517,19,80,1643],"class_list":["post-4078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features","category-urban-design","tag-afghanistan","tag-eye-weekly","tag-murder-site","tag-officer","tag-ontario-coroners-building","tag-police-car","tag-psychogeography","tag-the-eye-weekly","tag-toronto","tag-toronto-flaneur","tag-toronto-police"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The life of death in great Canadian cities - 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\/2009\/03\/05\/the-life-of-death-in-great-canadian-cities\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The life of death in great Canadian cities - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"My psychogeography column in the Eye Weekly this week examines how death and location collide and overlap in the city. For a number of reasons notable locations have a particular attraction but the places of death perhaps most of all. 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