A Colborne Street panorama
As I mentioned in here I've been stitching together photos of every building facade on Brantford's downtown Colborne Street. Its south side, anyway. Instead of making a traditional panorama, though, I cut and pasted each facade and then "distorted" them to make the perspective lines parallel (read more).
I haven't finished the east side of the street yet, but I've used Photoshop's handy "Export as Zoomify" feature to make an easily navigable user interface. Give it a shot:
http://nickwarzin.com/blog/custom/colborne.html
I already want to print this BIG... 10" high, by 130" long? Yes. I'm a little crazy.
From the Archives
Here is where I spend too much of my time: City of Toronto: Search the Archives. You should spend too much of your time there, too.
Here's a depressing before-and-after to top off your Monday evening:
The Gooderham/Flatiron Building in its proper context, with a dense wedge of city behind it and an array of Confederation-era buildings on both sides of Front/Wellington. See under the cut for some "after" shots from the 1960s.
Colborne Street, and the future of Brantford
March 1, 2010
Sent to Brantford's Mayor and Councillors: 'dmccreary@brantford.ca'; 'MCeschi-Smith@brantford.ca'; 'jcalnan@brantford.ca'; 'jkinneman@brantford.ca'; 'jsless@brantford.ca'; 'vbucci@brantford.ca'; 'MLittell@brantford.ca'; 'jbradford@brantford.ca'; 'gmartin@brantford.ca'; 'rcarpenter@brantford.ca'; 'mhancock@brantford.ca'
Sent to various GTA newspapers and local Brantford community groups: 'dlevac.mpp.co@liberal.ola.org'; 'McColeman.P@parl.gc.ca'; 'goodyg@parl.gc.ca'; 'jzronik@brantnews.com'; 'torsun.citydesk@sunmedia.ca'; 'city@thestar.ca'; 'Newsroom@globeandmail.com'; 'webmaster@brantford.ca'; 'info@brantford.library.on.ca'; 'information@brantmuseums.ca'; 'brantford_kinsmen@canada.com'; 'normanphilpott1@on.aibn.com'
Dear Brantford City Council, et al,
My name is Nick, and I love Brantford, Ontario. I visit it, and many cities in Southern Ontario, as often as I can. I appreciate its unique character, its deep history, its rich architecture. I visit its cafes and its restaurants, and I walk its streets. I am also, like many, saddened when I pass through its once glorious downtown. An area that contained busy shops, bustling streets and its own streetcar network has been reduced by 20th century economic trends to a shadow of what it once was. Here’s a photo of a very different time:
It has recently come to my attention that the Corporation of the City of Brantford plans on demolishing a large chunk of this history. I’m not sure when this is planned to happen, but I know that it’s soon, and I know that there are many within Brantford and without who would consider this a grave mistake. The hard lessons taught to us by other similarly afflicted municipalities seem to bear this out.
All of us in Ontario have seen Brantford’s struggles over the past few decades, and we’ve all seen the impact these struggles have had on your downtown. Underestimating how much of your history and how much of your character is trapped in those downtown structures is a common mistake among post-industrial municipalities, but I urge you not to make that same mistake with Brantford. Our understanding of how cities work is growing deeper by the day in the 21st century. To resort to brutish 1960’s ideas when we know there are better solutions available would be a travesty, and you would be doing the people of Brantford and of Ontario, present and future, a great disservice.
Please re-think this course of action. With some thought and care, your downtown could be one of the most varied and colourful in southern Ontario. This is a promise.
Engage your populace. Engage your local businesses. Engage brilliant minds across the province. Make finding a solution to Brantford’s downtown a contest – Brantford could be at the forefront of a new way of municipal thinking. Do what it takes to make this happen, but do not, do not, follow this knee-jerk course of action. You are shooting your beautiful city in the foot, and Brantford will never recover. You are making the entire province and its history poorer with your actions.
Here are some helpful resources and recent press coverage:
A definition of adaptive reuse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_reuse
Memo to Brantford: Hamilton Heritage Demolition 101
http://www.raisethehammer.org/article/1025/memo_to_brantford:_hamilton_heritage_demolition_101
Urban Destruction in the Heart of Brantford, Ontario
http://www.raisethehammer.org/article/1019/urban_destruction_in_the_heart_of_brantford_ontario
Hume: Brantford will live to regret the tragedy of edifice wrecks
Thank you very much for listening. I hope there is still time to reconsider these decisions. Please engage your populace. Please engage local businesses. Please ask the advice of those around you: planners in Hamilton, Waterloo, Kitchener and Toronto have been through this already and would be more than happy to work together with you towards a solution. Also, please click on the “adaptive reuse” link I provided, and research the concept further. There are ways of building community centres in downtowns while maintaining current structures these days. We know how to do this now. We’ve learned from our 20th century mistakes. Please let smart people have a peek at this problem and figure it out.
With all respect,
Nick Warzin.
The role of Yonge & Dundas Square
Listen.
I'm not pointing this out to confirm a widespread belief that I can find something to be negative about regardless of the circumstances. Amidst all the hooping and hollering of this evening's revelry downtown, however, I noticed an interesting phenomenon and felt I should at least bumble through a word or two about it.
This is Yonge-Dundas Square, a plaza opened in downtown Toronto back in late 2002. It is a public-private partnership, and exists largely due to the efforts of outgoing city councillor Kyle Rae. The square was intended to be the city's new central meeting place; its Times Square; its Piccadilly Circus. Yes, I'm ripping this word-for-word from the Wikipedia page. I'm le tired.
This photo was also taken during what will probably be remembered as the largest impromptu gathering of people on Yonge Street in decades: the celebration of Canada's gold medal in Men's Hockey, and a more general celebration of our Olympic successes.
Notice anything strange about the crowd? About where they chose to celebrate? The Square is dark, barren, unused and ignored, while tens of thousands of people dance and sing in the middle of the street.
There are good reasons for this, and you'll find many of them made clear either directly or incidentally in this book.
I'm not sure if Jane Jacobs ever commented publicly on Y-D Square and the "revitalization" of Yonge Street, but I have a feeling she could have predicted the phenomenon I photographed above. A city's streets are its veins, and its life, and the confluence of a city's most important and most travelled routes becomes the very heart of a city: more so than its financial district, and more so than its shopping strips. This is not, however, an effect that can be manufactured (and as I say this, thousands of SimCity players around the globe grimly nod in unison), and Y-D Square was a distinct attempt to manufacture the heart of our city.
The Square always seemed to me like a really crass attempt at selling a bit of ad space: an exploitation of Yonge Street's role as the heart of our city. Some of the events organized there over the past eight years bear this out, while others seem like genuinely interesting and positive uses of the space (though, probably not surprisingly, much of the latter has been organized not by city staff but by the populace itself: see Newmindspace, et al). This is probably consistent with the idea of a public/private partnership, and I suppose as long as the private sector plays a role in defining our public spaces there will always be events whose primary purpose is to provide a large number of eyeballs in one place.
Any and all cynicism aside, I still find it interesting that when a party of this magnitude occurs -- the celebration of the century so far, easily besting the impromptu party after the Leafs' second-round playoff victory in 2002 -- the square that was built specifically to contain it is left empty. Somewhere out there, a Toronto city planner is still misunderstanding how cities work. And if Jane Jacobs could witness this, I feel she wouldn't be surprised at all.
Sitting on top of the world
On my lunch break today, I took a quick trip to the corner of Wellington and Simcoe to explore the new RBC Dexia building (pictured right). My, er, feelings toward the building aside, I had heard the top floors were still unoccupied and easy to explore and I had been looking forward to visiting it for weeks. So, today, I had an excellent view whilst I sat cross-legged and ate my sandwich:
This is the corner of Front and University
There's more under the cut, if'n y'like...
Google Street View quietly rolled out to rural Canada
I probably shouldn't try to describe how excited I've been for this, or how disappointed I was when I noticed that Google didn't initially allow us to explore more rural areas of Canada, because I'd hate to come across like a nerd.
...
All kidding aside, it's true: without announcement or fanfare, Street View Canada now has coverage about as thorough as most of the US, though obviously with a density proportional to population (meaning no northern Quebec, though Yellowknife is covered!)
Have fun. Explore. Let me know if you find anything particularly interesting. I'll be adding one of my typical look-what-I-found posts when I have time. Until then, here's a park I visited quite regularly from the age of eight onward:
Kay Cee Gardens, Orangeville, Ontario:
Hamilton’s Lyric Theatre demolished
Roof brought the curtain down - Hamilton Spectator
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Lyric Theatre - Raise the Hammer
The Lyric/Century Theatre, before:
The Lyric/Century Theatre, after:
Atrium Invasion 2010
So, on Monday Alicia and I threw a toy paratrooper off the 14th floor of the Atrium on Bay and filmed it. Here are the results:
Golden Horseshoe tour
Interesting (to me) sights around the GTA, with Wikipedia and Flickr cross-references whenever possible:
(okay... I'm having more fun photo-matching than I expected to, so I figure I'll do that in another thread. I'll keep adding "funny" or "interesting" finds to this entry.)