Photo: The Cannon of Whitney Block

The last time I saw a pair of naval cannons on display they were mounted in front of New Westminster City Hall, overlooking the Fraser River and presumably our last line of defense against the Americans. There are another pair in Toronto, in front of the Queen's Park Crescent entrance of the provincial offices at Whitney Block and pointed at the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, presumably in case those MPPs get a little too rowdy.

In fact, they're war prizes; the two cannons were taken off the French warship Prudent when it was burned on the last day of the Siege of Louisbourg - July 26, 1758. To put it another way, the cannons at Whitney Block are nearly forty years older than the single oldest surviving structure in the entire City of Toronto. Funny what sort of history you can stumble upon downtown.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Photo: The Southbound Shuttle

Earlier this month, back on the 11th, a downtown swath of the Yonge subway--specifically, Union to Bloor--was closed for track work and signal installation. The result topside was a stark reminder of why the Yonge subway exists in the first place, a twenty-first century callback to Yonge streetcars that came every minute and a half and were still overloaded by the sheer number of passengers. At one point, there were four southbound buses just in the block between Bloor and Davenport, and just as many pushing north, bursting with riders.

It's not exactly the sort of thing you want to see happen very often at all, really.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Photo: Lighthouse, Less the Shore

Yesterday--with its bright sun, open blue skies, and warm-but-not-blazing temperatures--was a fair day, and it found me out on the Toronto Islands for the first time in years, and the first time I'd ever gone more than a kilometer or so from the Centre Island ferry dock. Among the things I saw before returning via Hanlan's Point: the Gibraltar Point Lighthouse, the oldest surviving lighthouse on the Great Lakes, and at two hundred and five years of age is older than every single construction in the city of Toronto except for three log cabins.

Today it's in the middle of a lightly wooded grove, but two hundred years ago it was right up against the edge of the island's shore, as lighthouses typically are. Centuries of infill and geographical engineering have fundamentally changed the shape and nature of the Toronto Islands in every respect--hell, a time when the islands boasted hotels, shops, movie theaters and bowling alleys is still within living memory, though you'd be hard-pressed to know it from the current parkland state. It's this re-engineering that makes me skeptical of opponents to the Island Airport's runway extension project. I mean, it's not as if the Islands were always some untouched paragon of nature while the metropolis grew up next door.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Photo: Don't Think of Pink Elephants

It is a game challenge, but given the nature of this constant reminder, I'm not sure if you can do it easily. This sign for Elephant Super Car Wash is one of those unexpected things I found while I was wandering around Seattle last summer; the sort of thing you expect would have been everywhere fifty or sixty years ago, and this is just one of the ones that were fortunate enough to survive the years. Pretty sure it's got neon lights as well, but since I was never around there at night, I can only assume that's what those neon tube-like things outlining the sign are for.

I trust you have managed to keep yourself from thinking of pink elephants.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Photo: Moonlight Over the Cargo Cranes

This was one of the last photos I took while I was in Vancouver; specifically, it was taken on November 26th, three days before I left British Columbia, during a typically brief early-winter day. After two years of those towering orange cargo cranes being as close as the foot of Granville Street, it's still strange sometimes to think that there's an entire country between that spot and where I am now.

At least I think that's the moon--the light seems a bit too blue for it to be sunlight filtered through the clouds.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Photo: Again, Walkers on the Edge

This seems to be a pattern for me when I'm on College Street. Once more I had a good, direct line-of-sight to the CN Tower, and once more my camera's zoom is good enough to pick out actual people on the CN Tower, having paid great stacks of money for the privilege of an EdgeWalk. My only real regret is that Saturday morning, when this was taken, wasn't shaping up to be the finest of days--the clouds and chill this weekend seem better suited to Seattle than Toronto. But the Space Needle doesn't have any allowances for you to walk around on the outside, so Toronto wins that particular contest.

Also the ground beneath the city is not honeycombed with fault lines, and the city is not built in the shadow of an active stratovolcano. Those are key bonuses.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Photo: Snowed-In Bixi

On this colder-than-usual May day, I thought it might be instructive to remind everyone in Toronto of what we're leaving behind. While winter seemed to drag on forever this past year--when I landed on November 30th it was snowing, and then December felt like an endless 1 or 2 degrees above freezing with pattering rain--we did get a few significant dumps. I took this shot of the Bixi station at Telus House in early February, and shock of shocks, not many people are using a bike-sharing service in the middle of a blizzard. I have seen people use it since, though, so that's something.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Photo: The Fabulous Markham Skyline

You'll find psychological boundaries no matter where you go, and Toronto is no exception. It's a common stereotype that for the "downtown elites" hizzoner da mayor and his ideological allies are so fond of taking potshots at, everything north of Bloor is a wasteland and Eglinton Avenue is the Arctic Circle. Personally, I live north of Danforth and it's pretty green--but if Eglinton is the Arctic Circle, then Steeles Avenue borders another planet entirely. I was up there in Markham last month for the Ad Astra convention, held in a Holiday Inn just north of Steeles at Woodbine.

Compared to urban design like this, Scarborough is a transit utopia. The sign on Woodbine Avenue welcoming people--well, let's be honest here, drivers--to York Region calls it "Ontario's rising star." At least we can be sure they're not talking about the height of their buildings.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Planning and the Scarborough Subway

The idea of an extended Scarborough subway is sort of like the phoenix: it never dies. Alternatively, it's a hydra; every time the debate seems to settle and an agreement appears to be reached, it comes back and starts biting just when you've started to relax. First it was Hizzoner Rob Ford's refrain of subways subways subways during the last mayoral election and the first year or so of his term, when a build-out of the Sheppard line to Scarborough Centre was decreed to be Toronto's #1 transit priority. Last year saw the OneCity proposal by TTC chair Karen Stintz and Scarborough councillor Glenn De Baeremaker, which would have extended the Bloor-Danforth line east and north from its Kennedy terminus to a link-up with the planned Sheppard East LRT--which, I will remind you, was originally planned to have been completed last year--only for the plan to collapse in a council vote less than a month after being introduced.

Yet it seems that you can't keep a thing like the Scarborough subway down. It's come back in the news again in the past week or two, with Stintz pushing what appears to be pretty much the same thing she pushed with OneCity. The main point of contention is, as always, money: the planned replacement of the Scarborough RT with an LRT line already has committed funding from the province, while a subway extension has... maps with longer green lines on them.

I'm not really interested in going over the pros and cons of a Scarborough subway extension here. I've probably done so at some point in the past, and there are plenty of other places you can go for that kind of analysis. What I'm more concerned about is what got us into this situation in the first place--the planning in Scarborough, or rather, the lack of such. From my new digs in southern East York, I can see Scarborough from my balcony. When I go for a walk, it's still clearly evident where the old Bloor streetcar stopped running, even fifty years after it was replaced by the subway.

Pictured: Scarborough. Not pictured: allowances for the installation of rapid transit.

Until the postwar suburbanization boom, Scarborough was essentially farmland with isolated pockets of development here and there; I like to think that it resembled eastern Lulu Island or the undeveloped parts of Surrey's Agricultural Land Reserve today. With no constraints save those imposed politically, Scarborough's reeves and mayors oversaw the plowing under and paving over of more than a hundred square kilometers of land with new developments designed and built in accordance with the prevailing wisdom of the time: namely, that the car was king and everyone would be driving everywhere. What there wasn't any planning for--what there wasn't even any thought spared for, apparently--was how to integrate transit with the city once it reached the size to warrant it.

Even in the wake of the general streetcar abandonment of the 1950s and the rush to cars across much of the West, it's not as if cities didn't plan for the future. In Calgary, separated rights-of-way were reserved for transit usage decades before the city's C-Train system started rolling. In Los Angeles, Pacific Electric's rights-of-way were maintained even after the streetcars were removed, and today the modern Expo Line runs along one of them. In Coquitlam, where the in-progress Evergreen Line extension will finally bring SkyTrain service, development has been oriented around the expectation of rapid transit service since the 1990s. In Scarborough... in Scarborough, looking on Google Maps, the only empty corridors I can find are two hydro corridors, one paralleling McNicoll Avenue and another reaching from Victoria Park to Meadowvale.

To put it bluntly, Scarborough was not built for transit. Scarborough was built for the car, and we're now in the position of trying to find some way to haphazardly cram it in there. It's not an easy task; just as you can't unring a bell, you can't unbuild a city. We're stuck with the built forms bequested to us by past generations. It's up to us to find a way for them to keep working, despite it all.

Photo: To Dizzying Heights

After two years away, one thing I had to adjust to was that places I remembered as empty pits had become semi-complete skyscrapers. Such is the case with the L Tower, under construction across the street from Union Station at Yonge and Front, and it's being built with the single tallest crane in the country. You may have seen some of the photos that Robert MacFarlane, the crane's operator, has posted on his Twitter account. When you look at that same crane from the ground, you can develop a real appreciation for a vantage point like that.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).