A work entitled Cross Section, comprised of large bas-relief panels made from terra cotta, covers the walls of the underground passageway between Dundas subway station and the Atrium on Bay.
Installed in 1984, Cross Section was created by Canadian artist William McElcheran, For the installation, the terra cotta pieces were oven-fired in two-foot-square tiles prior to assembly.
William McElcheran conceived the Dundas subway stop as being a cross section of Toronto. It gave him an opportunity to sculpt and celebrate the increasing diversity of Toronto’s population.
You’ll notice in the work, the presence of the rotund business man in the trilby hat. The business man seems to be rushing somewhere in each panel, occasionally bumping into people, making them spill their parcels.
Artist William McElcheran (above, right) supervises the construction of his bas-relief art piece at Dundas subway station. In McElcheran’s words, “While the sculpture shows a busy cosmopolitan scene, it is also attempting to communicate the hopes carried in people’s hearts under their overcoats, and the dreams locked in their briefcases”. Photo taken for the Toronto Archives in April 1984.
“The Businessman” seems to be a recurring character in McElcheran’s works of art. His sculpture Businessman On A Horse, found in a small square at U of T’s St. Michael’s College, exemplifies this:
My earlier post for Businessman On a Horse can be found here if you’d like to check it out.
William McElcheran is also the sculptor of Untitled, found outside the Kelly Library, St. Michael’s College (U of T), 113 St. Joseph Street:
Click here if you’d like to read my post on Untitled.
Also true to McElcheran’s style and worthy of mention is his 1981 work Conversation, found on Stephen Avenue in downtown Calgary:
William McElcheran died in 1999, leaving behind an impressive legacy. In Toronto, he created two twenty foot high marble reliefs at WaterPark Place at the foot of Bay Street, and a monumental sculpture of Daedalus and Icarus for the head office of the DuPont Corporation in Mississauga. His piece entitled The Family in Guelph has been adopted as a symbol of that city.
Earlier this year a new park opened in downtown Toronto. Dubbed Love Park, it is located at the southern foot of York Street and Queens Quay (96 Queen’s Quay West, to be exact). The 2-acre park responds to the need for flexible public space in the southern Financial District and Harbourfront neighbourhood.
Talk about making ugly turn beautiful: the former use of this space was the York-Bay-Yonge eastbound off-ramp of the Gardiner Expressway. During 2016-17, the ramp was removed and the space reclaimed for public use.
The project timeline went something like this:
June 2020: Design
July 2021: Construction starts
Spring 2023: Construction complete
June 23, 2023: Park opens with ribbon-cutting ceremony and community celebration
Here’s how Love Park looks from above:
Disclaimer: Not my image
Love Park is a deliberate departure from the hard surfaces dominating downtown Toronto, with healthy existing mature trees retained and dozens of new trees being planted. Tree-lined sidewalks outline the entire perimeter and internal pathways of the park site, marking the transition into a calm urban refuge. Rolling elevated grassy mounds provide further buffer from the adjacent roadways and offer space to relax and enjoy the park at different vantage points.
Love Park’s pond was designed and built as a natural pond, which mimics a wetland and uses a natural water filtration system, not chlorine. Foggy pond water with a green hue can occur for a few weeks while the water system balances its water chemistry. The pond water remains safe and is monitored and maintained as required. The changing water hue and clarity can be affected by fluctuating water temperatures, rainwater, sun and shade.
Plenty of little critters around the park…
If you’d like to learn more about the creation of Love Park, click here to go to the architect’s website, Claude Cormier & Associés.
Time for another post from what I call From The Vaults – pictures and events from Toronto’s past. Here is a Toronto event I’ll never forget as long as I live. Twenty years ago, everyone that summer was asking…
…Where Were You When The Lights Went Out?
On Thursday, August 14, 2003 at 4:11 PM, everything stopped.
In my memory, two big events occurred in Toronto that summer of 2003: one was SARStock (click here to read my post on my general blog My-Ramblings) and the other was the power blackout that affected all of Ontario and parts of the northeast and midwestern United States. It was the world’s second most widespread power blackout in history, with 50 million people affected by the outage. For some, the blackout lasted a couple of days, for others it was as long as 14 days, depending on where you lived.
Ontario originally caught the blame for the gigantic outage, but over time the source would be traced to a stretch of road in suburban Ohio. Weak areas in the electricity grid of U.S. and Canada further exacerbated the situation.
For a high-level technical explanation of the situation, I’ve borrowed some text from blogTO.com.
Cause
August 2003 had been a scorcher. Hot weather and heavy demand for electricity had put the local grid in Ohio under unusual strain, causing power lines to sag into overgrown trees and short out. When the Eastlake coal-fired station near Cleveland went offline it was like knocking over the first in a line of 50 million dominoes.
One by one, power stations across the northeast U.S. became overloaded then automatically powered down as they tried to compensate for other downed stations in neighbouring areas. The blackout rolled northeast from Ohio, round Lake Erie into Ontario, knocking out power to cities and towns as it went.
Systematic faults meant tools used to track and monitor blackouts either failed or didn’t work as intended. Ontario was left 8,000 megawatts short – 500 megawatts usually spells trouble – as nuclear plants in Bruce, Pickering, and Darlington became hopelessly hobbled. When the blackout finally stabilized, 50 million people were left without power in the United States and Canada.
Maybe now they’ll learn to shut the lights off up there…
An American woman on a local newscast, trying to blame the outage on Canada’s power consumption
In Toronto…
My Memories of the 2003 Blackout in Toronto
At that time in my life I was still working at Canada Life Assurance in the downtown core of Toronto, at Queen Street and University Avenue. I remember the outage hitting just at the start of everyone’s commute home from work. It foiled a lot of attempts to get home that Thursday afternoon – the GO trains weren’t running, there was no subway, the downtown core was so clogged with cars that no one could move. Out of our team of about a dozen people at work, I was the only one who lived downtown so guess where everyone came for food, rest and some strategic planning to get home.
It was Vince’s day off that day so he was at home. He had put on a huge slow cooker of stew early in the day, which luckily was now ready. I had been unable to reach him to let him know there would be a dozen of us descending on the house; the phone lines were all overloaded and jammed so it was impossible to get through. It was a big surprise for him when a dozen people showed up on our doorstep for dinner! Over the course of the next 4-5 hours we all ate stew, had lots to drink and watched the Jarvis Street pedestrian parade and revelry from our balcony – oh, the sound from the streets! It was one really big party out there – the streets were jammed with people, cars and party fiends who were simply making the most of the unusual event.
Cell phones did not work during the blackout (no power=no functioning cell towers), so there were only land lines available (imagine no cellular service for a day!). Using my one wired phone on a land line, one by one my guests for the evening took turns calling their homes to arrange a pickup or to give a status update to their respective families.
When one has a dozen guests eating and drinking for any length of time, there is an inevitable need to use a bathroom. When you live in a high-rise, one of the downsides of a power failure is the lack of water (water is electrically pumped up to the units), so guess what – the toilets can’t flush. The bathroom turned into a communal toilet during the course of the evening (was I ever glad when the water came back on!). It was all good though – by the end of the evening everyone found their way home, be it by cab, shared ride or pick up from a family member (no Uber or Lyft in those days).
Along with many other things that day, the streetcars came to an abrupt halt.
For about three days, the hustle and bustle of Toronto came to a stop. People slowed down, became friendlier, and just seemed to enjoy life a little more during this unusual time. I have memories of Vince and I sitting in the food court in College Park, just killing time along with so many others. These were calm, happy, patient people – something you rarely find in downtown Toronto. Our part of the world, or so it seemed, had stopped all its rushing about and bustle.
There was a definite party atmosphere on Toronto streets during the blackout
Darkness descends on Toronto
Meanwhile, In New York City…
Chaos reigned supreme:
It was an amazing and unique time no matter where you lived in the blackout region. I’ll never forget that hot summer of 2003 when the lights went out.
So, where were you during the blackout that summer in Toronto? Please feel free to leave a comment or remembrance in the Comment form below.
A sombre Remembrance Day ceremony took place today around the Cenotaph at Old City Hall, 60 Queen Street West.
The City focused this year’s events around the 70th anniversary of the Korean Armistice Agreement that brought about the end of the Korean War. Other milestones honoured today were the 75th anniversary of Canadian participation in peacekeeping missions for the United Nations and the centennials of the Naval Reserve of Canada and HMCS York, a Royal Canadian Navy Reserve Division in Toronto.
The ceremonies began at 10:45 AM, starting with the singing of our national anthem, a reading of In Flanders Fields, a two-minute silence at 11:00, and a trumpeteer playing The Last Post:
A fly-past by the Canadian Harvard Aircraft Association (CHAA)Mayor Chow delivered her Remembrance Day messageThe laying of wreaths on the CenotaphThe ceremony concluded with people leaving their poppies on the CenotaphA special “Toronto Remembers” presentation on Queen Street West, outside Old City Hall
Video of today’s ceremony at Old City Hall can be found here.
Other locations for today’s Remembrance Day ceremonies were:
Scarborough War Memorial: 2190 Kingston Road
East York Civic Centre – Memorial Gardens: 850 Coxwell Avenue
York Cemetery – Cenotaph: 160 Beecroft Road
York Civic Centre Cenotaph: 2700 Eglinton Avenue West
Etobicoke Civic Centre – Cenotaph: 399 The West Mall
Fort York National Historic Site: 100 Garrison Road
Banksy is the pseudonym of a UK-based street artist, political activist and film director, whose real name and identity remain unconfirmed and the subject of speculation. Active since the 1990s, Banky’s satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humour with graffiti executed in a distinctive stencilling technique.
His works of political and social commentary have appeared on streets, walls and bridges throughout the world. Like Toronto’s own Elicser, Banksy’s art has a style which is instantly recognizable.
Here in Toronto we are fortunate to have his Guard with Balloon Dog (2010). It used to be on the exterior of what was formerly OPP headquarters in downtown Toronto. The building was torn down to make way for residential and commercial towers, but a section of the wall with the art was saved. Menkes, the company who redeveloped the site at One York Street, preserved the concrete slab and it now has a permanent home on the mezzanine level of One York Street.
There used to be 7 Banksy works scattered around Toronto, but several were destroyed or painted over. Now only two exist, including Guard With Balloon Dog.
Everything you could ever want to know about Banksy is located here.
Shooting “Guard with Balloon Dog” at One York Street
Here are some examples of Banksy’s work (disclaimer: only the first image is mine):
I came across this piece while I was visiting St. Austell in the UK. The work resides on a door beside the Cafe Tengo. If it’s not a genuine Banksy, it’s a great imitation.
It was another very busy Halloween night on Church Street once again this year. The weather was crisp and quite cool, but there was no rain to speak of. The turnout was massive, having a lot to do I’m sure with events re-energizing after COVID-19.
The mayhem ran from Carlton Street to Gloucester Street, and every inch of the street was packed with people. There were so many inventive and impressive costumes; people’s creativity never ceases to amaze me:
This is such a lovely part of the city. I love how they fixed up that square and the fountain…