Photo: Serendipity on the Water

I grew up in Barrie, Ontario, so one of the marks of the weather turning was the start of TV and radio commercials advertising the Serendipity Princess, a paddlewheeler that ran cruises around Kempenfelt Bay in Lake Simcoe. I was never aboard - cruises were never my family's bag. The last time I was in Barrie, back in September 2010, I caught it at the dock.

Not pictured are the depth charge launchers, for when Kempenfelt Kelly gets too close for comfort. Kempenfelt Kelly is a sea monster, possibly a relative of Ogopogo.

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Photo: Light and Gas

There's something about the patterns of light and shadow in this photograph that calls to me. Just not something I can put into words. It's a Canadian Tire gas station on Bayfield Street in Barrie with the low-slung 70s facade of Bayfield Mall beyond, perfectly ordinary but for the live bait vending machine (closed, at least, until the fishing season begins). Perhaps I stumbled into a good angle.


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PDP #312: Double Rainbow

It wasn't until very recently that I ever heard of this meme, but now that I have I'm seeing them everywhere - double rainbows, that is. There was a pretty awesome one arching over downtown Vancouver last week. While I wasn't able to capture that one, I did take a photo of another double rainbow; this one over the South End of Barrie, around 1996 or so. That's the problem with film photographs; depending on where you get them developed, there's no assurance there'll be a date stamp on the back.

But, still. Double rainbow.

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PDP #282: Green Alley

There was something about this alleyway off Fred Grant Square in downtown Barrie that caught my attention. Now that I have the time to consider it intellectually, it's got to be the tree and the grass in it. Generally speaking, most alleys with which I'm familiar are thoroughly paved and nothing can grow there. Here, it's almost as if there's one last little surviving part of the primeval forest that the city was just built around.

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PDP #280: Catching All the Spirits

Vancouver's Expo 86 left a great deal of legacies behind. The most obvious ones are in Vancouver itself, in the form of the SkyTrain network and the silver geodesic golf ball that is Science World. Some of the things made for it went a bit further afield - and one of the more distant ones is the Spirit Catcher. Originally standing near the floating McDonald's, the sculpture - meant to represent the Thunderbird, "the messenger for carrying people's dreams and desires to the Creator," was installed on the Barrie waterfront in the late 1980s as the core of the Maclaren Art Centre's collection.

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PDP #158: Barrie Before Dark

I don't have many sunset photographs, if for no other reason that I don't take them so much as I stumble into them. There's a very limited window of time in which they're possible, and if you miss it you've got either an ordinary daylight shot or you're drowned by night.

This particular sunset photograph was taken two weeks ago in Barrie, looking from the transit terminal toward a patch of downtown and Fred Grant Square.

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A Real Long Shot: The Barrie Streetcar

Everyone's got fantasies. Maybe you want to be Emperor of Earth, or to marry the person of your dreams, or if you're Zefram Cochrane, to retire to a tropical island filled with naked women. They're all totally understandable desires, but they're not likely to happen, either - look at divorce rates today, for one. Personally, I wouldn't mind going to space, and if I stay alive long enough and have enough money in the bank, so long as Virgin Galactic lives up to its promises that one's actually within the realm of possibility.

In the end, I'd say some of the most compelling dreams are the ones you know can't be realized barring extraordinary intervention. I've got one myself, and all I'd have to do to realize it is win a few hundred million (preferably a few billion) dollars in the lottery. If that happened, and I got bored of financing climate change mitigation projects or other worthies, I'd like to build a streetcar system in my old hometown, Barrie.

Barrie's Five Points intersection. Just imagine tracks on the street here, and wires overhead. And people on the sidewalks.

I'll admit that on the face of it, the idea of a streetcar system in Barrie seems rather ridiculous. Forty years ago, had the money and political will been in place, it might have made more sense, but Barrie is no longer the small, relatively centralized community it was back then. No, today it's a hub of its own, with fattened spokes of suburbs stretching out in all directions, a city of 30,000 with suburbs for 100,000 more stapled on at the edges. Only sheer distance has thus far prevented it from being reduced to an appendage of Toronto. This is a city that, from all appearances, desperately wants to be Mississauga when it grows up.

Nevertheless, while running a modest streetcar system in Barrie seems beyond the pale, it's not unthinkable, either. Kenosha, Wisconsin, a suburban outpost of Chicago and itself smaller than Barrie, has done it already. For nearly ten years now, Kenosha Transit has been operating a 2.7 kilometer streetcar line with five refurbished ex-Toronto Transit Commission PCC streetcars, Art Deco streamliners that still loom large in the imagination. It connects Kenosha's Metra commuter rail station with downtown Kenosha and HarborPark, a transit-oriented development area, and has been sufficiently successful that there's a possibility of further expansion down the line.

Regardless of Barrie's increasingly suburban focus, the downtown core does have potential. Over the last ten years, seemingly half a dozen condos have gone up on what was once empty land, and Allandale Station, left shuttered and silent since the removal of CN's lakeshore railway in 1996, is on track to once again become the northern terminus of GO Transit's Barrie line as early as 2011. I believe that the ingredients are there for downtown Barrie to truly thrive, to be a destination in its own right, to offer the same kind of urban, comfortable, walkable living that can be found in Toronto and elsewhere.

Could it be done, reasonably? From what I understand, Kenosha's streetcar line cost only $4 million to build. As for vehicles, Toronto's streets will see the new Flexity Outlook streetcars rolling along them in a few years. The current CLRVs are thirty years old and will be phased out once the new rolling stock arrives over the course of the next decade. Barrie probably wouldn't have to pay too much to rescue a couple of Canadian Light Rail Vehicles that would otherwise end up in the scrapheap. Five or so would probably be sufficient for a modest line similar to Kenosha's.

A TTC streetcar rolls west along its right-of-way on the Queensway, moving with the dawn. Now just imagine it in blue and white.

What I envision is a route confined to downtown Barrie, once of the few parts of the city where I think dense transit-oriented lifestyle could be credible - a looping downtown circulator, like Kenosha's system or the system currently under consideration in Boise, Idaho. It would begin and end at a loop adjacent to Allandale GO Station, off Lakeshore Drive east of Tiffin Street, and would proceed west and north either along Lakeshore Drive itself or in a right-of-way to the immediate west of the roadway, and would be the only double-tracked portion of the line. The route would then turn northwest along Toronto Street to Dunlop Street West, the indisputable "main drag" of downtown Barrie.

Turning east on Dunlop, the route passes close by the Barrie Bus Terminal, Barrie Transit's central hub and the prime arrival point for intercity coaches. It would continue past the Five Points intersection and the city's war memorial at Fred Grant Square until reaching the intersection of Dunlop, Lakeshore, and Mulcaster, at which point it would turn south and rejoin Lakeshore Drive. This is the only part of the line that I'm not entirely sure could be feasibly engineered - it's a fair hill going south from Dunlop here, but not a big one. Streetcars in Toronto regularly climb and descend worse hills, like where Bathurst Street climbs over the Lake Iroquois shoreline, but not in revenue service.

From there, Barrie's streetcars would pass by Heritage Park, the Spirit Catcher, and the northern extents of the city marina before rejoining the existing Lakeshore Drive track and completing the loop south to Allandale GO. The total length of this route, figured with the Gmaps Pedometer, is 3.2 kilometers - just short of two miles.

So that's my fantastic dream - to go to my hometown again and leave streetcars running behind. Is the project itself feasible? I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be, so long as there was sufficient force behind it. A better question is, is it worthwhile? I don't know, really. It's been more than eight years since I lived in Barrie, and the city's changed a lot since 2001. If by "worthwhile" you mean "would it be anything other than a money pit" then I, personally, think the answer is no. A Barrie streetcar, in my mind, would be more than anything else a symbol of dedication by the city's leaders to move away from the focus on suburban sprawl that's taken Barrie to where it is today.

I know there are some people who think streetcars are relics of the past. I prefer to believe that they're commitments to the future.

PDP #117: The Swamp

When I was young, the Swamp was what nature was. Back then, before Barrie's city planners had suburbanized the city to the grim extent of today, it was practically on the edge of town, beyond which there were only farmer's fields and developer's dreams waiting to be realized. I remember trekking into the bush there, in winter and summer, and how after only a few steps it was as if I was in a primeval wilderness a thousand miles from home.

Today, it seems, the Swamp is under siege. Housing developments are pressing against it form the south, and the recent extension of Ferndale Drive South, from which this photo was taken, has cut it in two. I've never learned its name, never even learned if it had one - it never needed one before. It was just the Swamp. But you see, things without names rarely have power.

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PDP #115: Brazen Bayfield

The city of Barrie has always had delusions of grandeur. If there's one thing its government doesn't want to face, it's that the city is steadily forsaking any identity it might have had in favor of annexing great chunks of Innisfil to build more housing developments from which property tax revenue can be extracted. Because, obviously, if there's one thing Barrie doesn't have enough of already, it's sprawling subdivisions.

This is also the case along its main shopping drag, Bayfield Street north of Highway 400. The signs call it the "Golden Mile," and with a name like that, you'd expect attractions, draws, and excitement, wouldn't you? In actuality, it's anchored by Barrie's three major malls - Bayfield Mall in the south, Georgian Mall in the north, and the centrally-located Kozlov Centre - and otherwise dominated by the same sort of low-rise commercial development you'd find in any GTA bedroom city. I mostly remember it for the truly incredible traffic jams it produced - because, obviously, dropping three shopping centres within spitting distance of each other on one four-lane road is a very good idea.

In this photo, you're looking south along Bayfield Street from Cundles Avenue, next to Kozlov Centre. The forested valley on the far side of Kempenfelt Bay, visible where Bayfield Street drops off into nothingness, really underscores the difference.

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PDP #108: Five Points

The Five Points intersection in downtown Barrie is, like much of the rest of that city, an absolute masterpiece of urban design (cough, cough). At that intersection Dunlop Street East, Bayfield Street, and Clapperton Street meet, and it would be a perfect candidate for a scramble intersection if only 1) there were more trip generators in downtown Barrie, and 2) Barrie prized its downtown over things like annexing bits of Innisfil so that it can build even more suburban subdivisions! Right! Because there aren't enough already!

This photo was taken during Barrie's Promenade Days celebration. Other times, drivers are not too pleased to see photographers standing in the middle of the road, peering through a viewfinder.

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PDP #73: Barrie Gate

I lived in Barrie for thirteen years, and this structure is still an enigma to me. It spans Mulcaster Street at its intersection with Collier in downtown Barrie, and while I believe that it marks where the original city hall stood way back when, I really don't know either way. These days, it's most often used as a symbol for a city that has precious, precious few symbols aside from Kempenfelt Kelly and sprawling suburbs.

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PDP #68: The Juggler

For more than thirty years, the City of Barrie has held one of the few events that give people a reason to go to downtown Barrie in the first place - Promenade Days, held in late June and early July. This year, as in past years, Dunlop Street in the downtown core was closed off and pedestrianized to accommodate the kiosks, booths, and bagpipe performance areas along its length. Fred Grant Square, which I wrote about back in June, was flanked by a stage and a carnival midway.

It was just outside Fred Grant Square where I saw the juggler, a man who juggled FIRE. He was rather good at it, actually.

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PDP #63: Fred Grant Square

It seems as if every Canadian community of village-size and greater, so long as it existed before 1914, must have its own war memorial. That's no surprise thanks to places like Passchendaele and the Somme. Many of them are simple and straightforward in their own way, such as in Long Branch, others with cenotaphs carved with the names of the fallen, or monuments in cities such as Toronto inscribed with the battles and wars where they fell.

My old hometown Barrie has its own memorial in Fred Grant Square, between Dunlop Street and Kempenfelt Bay, in the heart of its vestigial downtown. The statue of the soldier on top helps, I think, to ground it. While the war memorials in Peterborough and Vimy Ridge do include statues, in both places they're symbolic representations of Canada; I think the choice of the First World War soldier at Fred Grant Square represents well the down-to-earth attitudes of what was, at the time, a small-to-middling Central Ontario community.

It makes the war less of an apocalypse and more a thing of men.

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