With GO Transit now running trains on the Lakeshore lines at thirty-minute intervals, it's become even easier to see two of them at once. At Danforth GO, the schedules are coordinated in such a way that if you see one train go through, you'll likely be seeing another one going the opposite direction in only a couple of minutes--assuming, that is, that the "one train" is the first of the two. Here, a departing eastbound train is a rolling wall of green and white as a westbound train chugs toward the station platform.
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It's been just over two years since the death of Jack Layton, the politician who led his party to the promised land of the Official Opposition but who couldn't go there himself. This past week a memorial statue of him was unveiled outside the ferry terminal to the Toronto Islands, depicting him on the rear seat of a tandem bicycle. There's a lot of symbolism tied up in this one, and really, there aren't very many other Canadian politicians actually worthy of being memorialized in such a way.
Thinking about it, though--I have to wonder if whether, at least in terms of image, it was for the best that Layton went as he did. Having gone out at the top of his game, leading the New Democratic Party to greater success than it had ever achieved before, becoming a symbol in and of himself: had he lived, perhaps to become Prime Minister in 2015, he couldn't have lived up to himself. No "transformative" politician can live up to their hype; witness the idea of Barack Obama against Barack Obama in practice.
The memorial is called "Jack's Got Your Back," and that can be true now. Jack Layton, as an idea, as a symbol, can't be battered by politics--he can't disappoint the people who follow him.
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Sure, it may be hot in Toronto now, but everyone in this city knows that at this point in history, summer is strictly a temporary happenstance. The same doesn't hold true everywhere. In December 2009 I was in Los Angeles, a trip which gave me the opportunity to do something impossible up to that point in my life: go to a beach, in December, and not freeze. As I recall, this shot was taken somewhere along Venice Beach. I like the way it turned out.
Fun fact, incidentally: this is the 697th photopost I've made to this weblog, and the file name that my camera originally assigned this shot was IMG_0697. What a synchronicity!
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Regretfully, another interruption--I was down with the sickness, which I choose to believe were retroactive symptoms of something I will get at LoneStarCon3 in San Antonio. I'm back now, though, with another photo. Along the Bay Street entrances to Union Station, particularly underneath the elevated tracks, you'll find an array of bike locks for the use of those who pedal for part of their journey. However, some of those journeys seem to have taken a surprisingly long time. How long does it take for a bike to get that rusted and dust-covered in open air, anyway?
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Things were a bit interesting, transportationally speaking, in downtown Toronto last weekend. As part of the TTC's ongoing signal replacement program as it works to make the ninety-second headways of Automatic Train Control a possibility, the entire Yonge-University loop south of Bloor Street was shut down. What did it mean but, of course, another crush of shuttle buses all lined up in a row; there are seven in this shot I took at Yonge and Bloor, and that's only looking in one direction!
From the look of them, though, you'd be forgiven if you thought that the subway shutdown and bustitution was a bit, well, harried. Take a close look at the fifth bus from the front: the one that proudly exclaims that it is a "Univeristy" shuttle, because spelling is hard. I first heard about the error's presence on Twitter well before I left for downtown, but I guess it takes time to switch letters around, or something. Hell, though--this is hardly the first time the TTC has committed an act of typo, after all.
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This will be a brief post as I am making it from my phone today. Union Station, the linchpin of downtown Toronto's transit, is currently in the midst of a makeover. The subway station is getting a new platform, but in order to build it around the existing station without disrupting operations, there's a lot of tearing up that has to be done. Some might call it breakage, even.
I know I'm not the first to post this sort of photo today--Karen Nyberg already covered this subject matter, and considering that she's an astronaut taking photos from space, it's not something I can equal with my point-and-shoot. Nevertheless, I take opportunities as I recognize then, and the moment of sunset isn't an opportunity that I stumble into often. I was only just walking into my apartment with the groceries yesterday when I realized the sun was literally in the middle of setting--a minute after I went out on the balcony and started snapping, it had sunk below the horizon. This is one of the last ones I managed; fifteen seconds after I took this one, it had finished slipping away.
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Given how things have been going recently, I thought it might be instructive to dig into my archive for a photo of Toronto gone by--not far gone by, mind you, but yesterday is no more changeable than 10,000 BCE. For me, some of the differences between Toronto of the recent past and Toronto of the present were made more stark from my time away in Vancouver--there was no gradually getting used to any changes as they happened for me.
Take Front Street. When I left in 2010, it was a fair, streaming road below Union Station's graven frontage, busy with taxis and buses and pedestrians and food carts all through the day and much of the night. When I got back in 2012 it was more appropriately "Front Trench," as the ongoing rehabilitation of Union Station has left it cordoned off, split up by temporary fences, and otherwise hardly there at all. It's the same way today.
Here, from the archives, is what Front Street and Union Station looked like in March 2010. Remember that? There's actually architecture behind those tarps they've put up!
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This is where the Danforth ends. Considering that it's such a major street, it's astonishing, really, how quickly it changes states. The track of the old Bloor streetcar loop at Luttrell Avenue and the Scarborough border at Victoria Park shape the road dramatically, even now; east of Victoria Park the foot traffic drops off precipitously, and many more storefronts seem to be vacant than west of the avenue, and past Warden it transitions into a wide, tree-speckled, thoroughfare that would not be out of place in any suburb on Earth. It ends at Kingston Road without any fanfare--without even a crosswalk, at that.
It's a strange way for the Danforth to end.
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Sure, I may be thoroughly unable to pull in Citytv or Global transmissions with my rabbit ears--even though they can pull in Buffalo stations without a flicker, for some reason--but having a balcony that faces north according to the Toronto street grid and northwest according to the actual magnetic pole makes up for it in terms of sunset views. In this one, it has the look of the sky on fire, or of the Nexus from Star Trek: Generations.
That really wasn't nearly as good of a movie as it could have been, you know.
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I recently had cause to sit around in Ottawa's airport, waiting for a flight to bring me back to Toronto--a day before last month's floods, incidentally, so in retrospect I'm glad I was able to come back when I did. The conditions in Ottawa certainly foreshadowed what would hit Toronto the next day, with constant grey rain--nevertheless, the planes must still go in and out. Here, a Porter Airlines Q400 is pushed away from the terminal, and I have to wonder if the ground crew is being paid enough to put up with it all.
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