Photo: Snow Memorial

Toronto got a fair dump of snow a couple of weeks ago on Wednesday, the sort of snow I got used to in Central Ontario but which didn't seem to track down south all that often. University Avenue was a white mess, and not even the American Consulate had shovelled (shoveled?) its barrier-protected patch of sidewalk, and it made the entire area take on a winter cast that doesn't come around all that often. Here, the South African War Memorial stands solid against a storm-obscured skyline.

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Photo: Snow Squirrel

It's been a while since I posted a critter photograph, but the Toronto winter doesn't make the local critters any less busy. I found this squirrel dashing up and across trees at Mel Lastman Square in North York, during the flurries we had a couple of weekends ago. Most of the ones I took got compromised by motion blur, but I think this one works well.

Why am I posting so uncharacteristically late in the day, you might ask? To keep you on your toes, mostly!

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Photo: I Don't Think They're Coming Back

While on walkabout along Yonge Street in North York a couple of weeks past, I couldn't help but notice this bicycle locked up outside one of the entrances to Finch Station--although "locked up" is kind of unnecessary at this point, when you consider how hard-packed that stuff must be. It makes me wonder just who these more-or-less abandoned bicycles you find around the city belong to, and how it happens that they're left where they're left.

It also demonstrates the effect which the removal of Igor Kenk has had on the city's bicycle ecosystem. Time was that a bike like this would've been stolen by one of Igor's flunkies long before it had a chance to get buried.

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Photo: You Keep Using That Word

I don't think it means what the people who've been pitching the big black garbage bags into it think it means. Low quality due to it being a smartphone photo taken at night, but really. I couldn't let this go unremarked upon. It's like an encapsulation of the world's problems in miniature.

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We Wish You A Merry Icemas

So, yeah, that all happened. I still remember watching news reports of the 1998 ice storm, people without power for weeks and transmission towers buckling under the strain of all that ice; while Toronto wasn't hit quite as badly, it's a purely academic distinction for the seventy thousand homes that are still without power, nearly four days after the first outages. I may still be one of them; my apartment complex, along with pretty much the entirety of East York south of the Don Valley, lost power at 11 PM on Saturday night.

It'll be ages putting this all back together, and all those snapping trees are going to echo well into the future.

Photo: An Abundance of Yellow Light

Last weekend, the Toronto Transit Commission held an open house up at its Hillcrest Complex; the Harvey Shops, the main maintenance base for the city's streetcar fleet, was thrown open for a morning and afternoon amid the first significant snowfall of the season for people to come and gawk around at. I didn't notice the brightly yellow cast of the lights while I was there, but the camera lens captured it well enough. Here, you can see five streetcars in various stages of maintenance--they've been running for more than thirty years now, and they've well outlived their warranties.

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Photo: A Train Comes to Town, A Train Leaves Town

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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Photo: Bronze Jack

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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Photo: I Don't Think Anyone's Coming Back for These

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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Photo: The Yonge-Univeristy Shuttle Service

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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Photo: A Subway or A Hole in the Ground

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.

Photo: A Moment on the Horizon

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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Photo: That Old Familiar Union

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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Photo: The End of the Road

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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Photo: Red Clouds at Sunset

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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Photo: Meta-Sightseeing

There isn't a major city in North America, I think, that doesn't have them--sightseeing buses, that is. They differ from place to place, of course, from the amphibious Ducks in Seattle to the open-topped double-deckers and repurposed London Routemasters of Toronto and Vancouver, but go down a main street on any given day and you'll be as likely as not to find one of them rambling along, creaking with tourists snapping photos of the city as it goes by.

Personally, I've never been interested in "tourist experiences" like these--when I'm off in another city, I prefer to do things that don't scream "hey everyone, I am a stranger to these here parts." I do, however, make it a point to take photos of these tour buses as they go by. I mean, I'd probably show up in a bunch of their pictures anyway. I'm only returning the favor.

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Photo: Eglinton and the Ripples

It's easy to forget about the effect that air has on photography. When you look out at the horizon, you don't see anything more than small, partially-distinct objects in the distance because the human eye isn't that good at resolving close detail at very long ranges. With a camera's zoom lens, though, it all becomes clear. I took this photo looking east along Eglinton just past Victoria Park, with my camera's maximum zoom--while the foreground looks essentially ordinary, bu the time you get to the intersection, the air's interference makes it look more like a painting.

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Photo: Autos, Autos Everywhere

The best way to get to the Air Canada Centre, if for some reason you're heading down there, is rather straightforward: the train. The place is literally next door to Union Station, with Lakeshore GO trains now rumbling in and out of there every thirty minutes, and Union subway station only steps north of it. Nevertheless, whenever there's a big event, automobiles always try their luck in their hundreds, turning the bit of Bremner past York into little more than a parking lot decorated with maple leaves. I took this photo a couple of weeks ago, when One Direction was having a concert at the ACC; tonight and tomorrow that stage is going to be occupied by Justin Bieber, so I imagine it will look like this, except more so.

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Photo: Free Stress Relief

I came across this taped-up bill offering free stress relief on a glass-walled enclosure next to Union Station a little while back. For those who don't recognize, the face at the bottom appears to be a caricatured version of hizzoner Rob Ford, and a good deal of them have already been ripped off... though I'm not sure how it's supposed to be particularly relieving of stress. I mean, I suppose you could tear it into little shreds or wad it up into a ball, but... that doesn't seem particularly cathartic to me.

I guess we all have our methods of stress relief.

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Photo: I Don't Think They're Coming Back for It

There are a lot of bicycles in Kensington Market. Unsurprising, really--that's just how Kensington Market is, the same way there are a lot of cars in Scarborough. I have to wonder, though, if some of them aren't left as statements running parallel to displays like the Community Vehicular Restoration Project. Some of the bikes I found locked up against fences and signposts have been there long enough for the local vegetation to grow around and through them, the leafy answer to a tree growing around a chain-link fence. So either someone's been planting kudzu along Augusta Avenue, or whoever belongs to that bike isn't getting much use out of it, the way it seems to me.

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