This graffito at a Cosburn 87 bus stop has been flaking off for quite a while now. Whether it was authorized or just tolerated by the homeowner, it’s a simple yet fabulous site-specific artwork.
Author: Val Dodge
Ball’s Mill
Ball’s Mill graces the Hamlet of Baltimore north of Cobourg. Although the exterior has been restored and is largely in good condition, the inside is crammed full of junk and looks pretty rough through the windows.
Behind the mill, a portion of the exterior has been left unrestored to show the original condition:
Apparently, the mill was run by a 19th-century Russell Oliver:
TTC ghost stops
Before the TTC started marking bus stops by strapping mass-produced metal* vinyl signs onto poles, they used stencils and paint. I’m not sure when they stopped doing that, but I do vaguely remember the metal signs becoming standard in maybe the early 80s. Most of those old painted signs have disappeared or faded with time, but a few of them are still kicking around on old streetcar and bus routes. The one above is painted on an old utility pole on the east side of Sloane Avenue just north of Eglinton Avenue East. The old pole has been cut down to just above the ghost stop, leaving it with no role other than displaying a bit of old paint. As you can see in this Google Street View, the metal sign was strapped over the painted one before the new pole was installed.
Another TTC ghost is on the southwest corner of Kingston Road and Glen Manor Drive:
As you can tell by the snow on the lawns in the background, the picture wasn’t taken this winter. It looks like this stop was originally on a TTC-specific pole that carried the trolley wire for powering streetcars on this line. I’m not sure why the old pole survived; like the one on Sloane above, it seems to serve no specific function any longer.
Without a doubt, the best TTC ghost stops were in the Wychwood streetcar barns, where decommissioned poles were cut up and used as building material to shore up the floor above:
It’s extremely unlikely that any part of these ad hoc posts and beams survived the conversion of the buildings into the Artscape Wychwood Barns, but it was an amazing surprise to see when it was there.
* Update, March 16, 2012: The newer non-painted signs are actually vinyl, not metal.
Winter canoe
Spring’s coming, but it’s not here quite yet.
I see faces #25
The more keys the merrier, which is why my key ring is so happy that spring is on the way: he’ll get to carry my bike keys more often.
Worst bike name ever
The MEC created a minor stir a few weeks ago when it announced that it would start selling Ghost bikes, a brand long-established in Germany but whose name means something else entirely here. It would have been difficult to find a bike name less suited to the North American market, but then I found the Ibis Tranny:
The Ibis Tranny has both a monocoque frame and a slot machine. Good to know.
It raises the inevitable question: would you rather be caught hammering a Ghost down the trail, or riding a Tranny? Either way, I’ll stick to my Trek, thanks.
Logan Furniture ghost sign
A great ghost sign was uncovered on the Danforth at Chester Avenue last week. The sign for Logan Furniture & Appliances had been hidden behind the facade of Parthenon Jewellery, which closed last year. A small corner of the ghost sign was revealed after a pop-up store hung its shingle for a few weeks leading up to Christmas, and the entire old sign was uncovered just a few days ago.
Worth noting is the old-style phone number giving the exchange name of HO (HOward) for the first two digits. Also worth noting is that even back then, “easy credit” was a big selling point.
Same path, same day, different rules
In Taylor Creek Park near the forks of the Don, a raised pathway was installed a while ago so that pedestrians and cyclists wouldn’t have to contend with vehicular traffic on the park roadway. When you’re heading east into the park, the shared path beckons to cyclists, explicitly declaring that it’s “open for bikers [sic] and pedestrians”:
But at the other end of the path, cyclists heading west out of the park are sternly instructed to dismount:
To be clear, this is the same “shared pathway,” only about 100 metres long, and built with the express purpose of giving safe passage under the Don Valley Parkway away from cars on the park road. And although it’s signed as a shared pathway at both ends, it seems that only eastbound cyclists are actually allowed to ride their bikes.
If the pathway is too narrow to allow cyclists to ride in both directions while mingling with pedestrians (an assessment I wouldn’t disagree with), or if there’s a blind corner that makes riding full-bore unsafe, why weren’t those issues addressed during design and construction? Or better yet, why not just mark it as a pedestrian walkway and encourage cyclists to just take the road, which is the route still chosen by the vast majority of cyclists anyway?
Ironically, the raised path would be of most use to westbound cyclists because it doesn’t dip as low under the bridge as the roadway does, making the short hill on the far side easier to climb. Yet it’s westbound cyclists who are singled out for dismounting. Personally, I think that if the city wants this passage to be safer, it should instruct drivers to get out of their cars and push. After all, there’s a blind corner and the lanes are a little narrow…
This is why Toronto can’t have nice things
Holes for new bollards were cut into the middle of the asphalt ripple pattern on the Lower Don trail.
Less than two months after the upgraded Pottery Road crossing of the Lower Don trail was officially opened to a single rave review (as far as I know, I’m the only one who cared enough to review it), the city had already taken a knife to the artistic blue asphalt ripples to install a couple of bollards to prevent unauthorized vehicular access to the mixed-use path. I don’t have a problem with the bollards themselves, but would it have killed the installation crew to move them forward or backward a couple of feet and place them on the plain black asphalt instead of cutting into the middle of the embedded pattern? And did they have to make the same poor placement choice on the paths on both the north and south sides of Pottery Road? Anticipating the need for bollards during the main work would have allowed them to be installed without having to cut an ugly square patch out of freshly laid asphalt. Even looking at it now, I’m not really sure why the cuts were necessary.
This is such a small detail in the context of the much larger Pottery Road reconstruction that it probably didn’t merit any specific design other than someone jabbing a finger at a drawing roughly where each bollard should go and someone else going down to Bollards R Us to pick up a pair of the current preferred model. I can’t imagine that there was any real requirement to place the bollards exactly where they did, nor that moving them a little bit would create a problem of any kind or cause them to be any less effective. So if there are no drawbacks, why wouldn’t you install them in a way that doesn’t degrade something unique that’s already there? And while this particular incident isn’t really worth getting too worked up about, the carelessness shown here is depressing only because it’s so endemic to public works in Toronto that overcoming it seems impossible.
(Yes, this is my seventh post about the Pottery Road reconstruction. Will it be the last? Probably. At least until next month.)
Horse trees
I mentioned Presqu’ile Provincial Park’s horse trees—Risa prefers the term “camel trees”—in my anniversary gallery post last week. They’re so-called because their swaybacked trunks resemble saddles and people (including Risa and me) love sitting on them for pictures. Trees like this aren’t unique to Presqu’ile, but what is unique is that there are several dozen of them concentrated in a small grove and are all presumed to have developed their distinctive form as a result of the same weather event about 120 years ago.
Ball’s Mill Conservation Area, north of Cobourg in the hamlet of Baltimore, has a few horse trees too and one of them is remarkable for having not only a saddle, but what appears to be a front limb and a very long neck too:
You can see a couple of additional views of this tree and the explanation of this kind of formation from the info board at Presqu’ile after the jump.