The Mister and me went to the ROM today and took the subway for the first time in a few years. I was disappointed at how dirty it is.

When I compare it to say Madrid, or even NYC...for a small subway system, the TTC is embarrassing.

The missing ceiling slats in all the stations we were at, the absolutely gross coffee shops (went in to get a coffee at Bathurst subway station and turned on our heels. Newspapers all around one half of a table. It looked like someone pissed there and they couldn't be bothered to mop it up)...By the Way Bakery at Bathurst station looks like it needs a hosedown compared to what it looked like just a few years ago.

At Yorkdale subway station, we went to buy tickets..just as we got to the wicket, the attendant closed it, looked at us, pointed to the hand written sign he was holding in his hand, shoved it above the mouth piece, and turned his back on us.

Nice.

It's just sad.
At 3 bucks a trip in January.

The Washington Post crowns ROM the worst piece of...architecture in the world.

The Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. Sure, there were a lot of Wal-Marts thrown up in the Aughts, but Daniel Libeskind's addition to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto surpasses the ugliness of bland functional buildings by being both ugly and useless. His aluminum-and-glass-clad crystalline forms grow out of the building's original 1914 structure, and from the street it's dramatic. But go inside and you need a map to move around its irrational and baffling dead spaces.

And where do you put art in a room of canted walls? Curators seem as baffled and frustrated by it as casual visitors. And it cost only $250 million.

(article via blogTO)

I'm not terribly fond of it.
It does look like something dropped on the building from outer space.
But, it's also typical of Toronto architecture.
Screw up the old beyond repair rather than to restore.

Blansdowne



(click on image to see the collection of photos)

I have a soft spot for Bloor and Lansdowne.
I grew up in the area, and I'm still there every day.

Ramanan Sivaranjan from Funkaoshi has taken some great photos of a neighbourhood that is gentrifying.

20 years from now, the places he's photographed will be very different.

Ram is curating history.

Kind of cool little video of night time Toronto...in the style of Night Moves, if anyone remembers that from the 1980's and 90's on global from 2am to 6am...and then flips into something completely different

Developers building condos on Toronto transit lines will now have to buy every unit a TTC metropass for a year in order to obtain condominium approval from the city, a policy critics say comes at a high cost and without proof people will use it.

No...but, for real...City Council is determined to drive (no pun intended) developers and businesses out of this city.

Councillor Howard Moscoe, however, believes it “will cause people on transit lines to abandon their cars.”

He pushed the initiative forward, which passed council without debate. The policy states the cost of the metropasses cannot be passed on to the condo buyer.

Oh, yeah...I'm sure that will totally be the case.

The TTC has exhausted the rider, our taxes...and now new condo owners, and developers are going to have to throw money into it's bottomless pit of bad management as well.

OMG...I can't believe what a shithole this council is.

Observation:

These five or so, signs on Allan Road south of Lawrence should really stop bullshitting people, and tell the truth.

The signs should actually read:
"This continent's longest left turn lane"

World's Ugliest Buildings



I'm disappointed that The Ontario College of Art & Design isn't in there...as well as The Royal Ontario Museum...they both should be on that list.

Click on the image to see the rest of the buildings

Next door to a strip bar...uh, yeah...no thanks.

(Jacqueline, and Tat; you know where this is...)

Racist graffiti scrawled on Beach boardwalk



Police said they were investigating racist and anti-Semitic graffiti scrawled along the boardwalk in Toronto's Beach neighbourhood as a hate crime.

Pussies.
They knew they couldn't do that shit on Eglinton West.
They wouldn't have made it west of Dufferin alive.

David Miller almost sounded like he grew some balls today in this interview with CBC's Metro Morning.

"It's a hot summer afternoon outside Toronto's City Hall and amid the throng of picketing unionized city workers, a dark-haired young woman with a strike sign hanging from her neck is as worried about her wallet as her job."

How many weeks of walking the picket line does it take before you've lost in income what you fought to keep in the contract, and end up behind in the game with less than you started?

Landlords and Human Rights Violations:

"Even when rental housing is available, thousands of marginalized individuals and families cannot make it through the door," says the report by the Centre for Equality Rights in Accommodation."

See, this is why the City should be responsible for affordable or low income housing.

The article makes all landlords sound like mustache twisting racists.
I don't think it's as simple as that.

I'd like to see things from his point of view but I can't get my head that far up my ass.
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What a pussy.