below: “Protect your energy”
below:A raccoon in pinks and purples, by Jeff Blackburn
below: by Nick Sweetman – two ebony jewelwings, a male and female along with a partially submerged frog with its tongue ready for action. Jewelwings are a species of damselfly.
below: GETSO (or Getsofacto)
below: A larger than life grinning Cheshire Cat by Christina Mazzulla.
below: Some people by Elicser Elliott hanging out in a doorway.
below: Love in the alley
Photos taken January 2023
A short while ago, I posted some pictures from Little India which is centered on Gerrard Street. If you travel farther west on Gerrard you come to what has become known as Chinatown East (as you approach Broadview).
below: Nappa, Chinese cabbage, and White radish,
below: Scenic Aqualium Co., Exotic Fish and Bonsai (yes it has an ‘L’).
below: Shoes, boots, and umbrellas.
below: Carrots and tomatoes
below: Pomegranates in boxes and forks on the wall
below: Aging price list
below: Old Lumberking ghost sign on the southwest corner of Logan and Gerrard
below: Broadview and Gerrard – looking east along Gerrard
below: Streetcar stop on the southwest corner of Broadview and Gerrard
below: Square and orange on top.
below: More stores – Jiahua Trading Company with its assortment of goods beside the Dai Kuang Wah Herb Market.
below: One Plus One Hair Salon, Tung Hing Bakery, and Sing Sing BBQ House – all adding to the eclectic mix of store fronts in the area.
below: House reflections
below: No more ‘Epoch Times’ in front of this store.
below: A get together of paper characters – The Incredible Raffa, Las Mujeres Vampiro, Life (that’s the one-eyed daisy), T-bonez got knifed in the back.
below: Peace, in red
below: White roses to heal with
below: Homer Simpson with 64 slices of cheese!
below: Santa Claus and a skeleton – covering more than one holiday at a time.
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below: Old mural street art painting in the alley (from 2016)
below: Infill – new housing being constructed in the alley
Dundas Street runs parallel to Gerrard, just a bit to the south…. and that is where you’ll find this dog sitting outside in rain or shine.
below: The Dundas Street Public School class of 2022 left their mark on the fence with their messages of love and peace.
below: As did the the class of 2021
This blog post may be getting too long so I will start to end it here with a brief survey of the older residential architecture on Gerrard and Dundas and the streets in between (for those of you who are interested in such things).
below: A semi with a shared central peak.
below: Little diamond windows
below: Details made with contrasting colours of bricks
below: Another semi detached house with a shared central peak.
below: Flat roofed houses with blues and reds.
below: Shapes – rectangles on top, rounded windows,
below: Cameras on the corner…. and a megaphone too?
And lastly, a shout out to Lamoon Thai Cafe where I stopped for a hot drink (great Thai tea!) and to get out of the rain for a few minutes.
Happy New Year!
January 23rd is Lunar New Year as we enter the Year of the Rabbit (except in Vietnam where apparently it’s the Year of the Cat).
below: Although this mural has nothing to do with rabbits (or cats), it is found in Chinatown. Three dragons cavorting on the wall on Oxford Street, painted by sightone in 2016.
below: Blue dragon guarding the door at number 5.
Nearby there is an alley where the Chinatown BIA has sponsored some murals with Asian themes.
below: A large koi, or carp, swimming towards a pink lotus flower.
below: “Flowers of the four seasons – Autumn Chrysanthemum” by rowdyradrat.
below: Another rowdyradrat painting – this one is “Flowers of the Four Seasons – Winter, Plum Blossoms” and it features Chinese plum blossoms.
Exposed to the elements, overgrown with ivy or bushes, and left on its own to gracefully age. To fade; to peel. That is the fate of a lot of street art, especially those in lanes and alleys. Milky Way Lane is no exception and this blog post features a few pictures that I took last week. I have posted many of these before, back in their youth.
below: Fear and dead ivy in the alley
below: This enormous one eyed ice cream cone monster replaces another Buff Monster creation, also on a pink background.
below: Preserving their modesty, two of the people painted once upon a time by Philip Saunders.
below: A square Elmo
below: Part of a “Stay Home” COVID mural by Elicser Elliott, 2020
below: Still looking good, a moonman mural from 2020
below: Pink faced, orange leopard spotted blast of colour…. A mural by Christina Mazzulla.
Settlement in what is now Parkdale began before 1850. In 1879 it was incorporated as a village and ten years later it became part of the city of Toronto.
below: Mural by Jim Bravo and Lula Lumaj from 2015, celebrating the history of Sunnyside Park. In the early years, part of the attraction of living in Parkdale was its proximity to Lake Ontario and such features as Sunnyside Beach and Sunnyside Amusement Park.
below: Christmas wreath on the globe outside Parkdale Library. This is the World Peace Monument, a globe surrounding a fountain. It was designed by Peter Dykhuis and fabricated in copper and bronze by Heather & Little in 2005. The metal sculpture has aged well but as we should all know by now, the city does not do water features well (i.e. I’ve never seen a fountain there; have you?)
In July 2022, City council adopted the Parkdale Main Street Historic District Plan. It covers Queen Street from Dufferin west to Jameson/Macdonell including this block of three buildings. It hopes to preserve many of the two and three storey brick buildings that line Queen Street and in turn, the character of the area.
below: Map of proposed Parkdale Main Street HDP. This map was found on a City website where you can also find other information about the project if you want.
below: Southeast corner of Queen and Dunn
below: A happy black and white bear to greet you
below: And a cow in a tea cup
below: Looking south on Lansdowne. Note the car blocking the bus stop.
below: Someone’s happy this morning
below: Looking south on Noble towards Queen
below: Northeast corner of Brock and Queen
below: “No Justice No Development” in the window of this former store.
below: Row houses. Each house shares a gable, or a peak, with one beside. Gables were very common in Toronto architecture, especially in the Victorian era, but in those houses each had its own gable. As people have decorated their houses, the resulting mix of colours, materials, and textures forms its own picture. This is not unique to this street – there are many other places in Toronto where homes with shared gables (both semis and rows) have been renovated such that the two halves look very different.
below: Bay and gable houses
below: Parkdale has always had a mix of many different building styles, both commercial and residential. The Tsampa Tibetan restaurant has an octagonal turret.
below: From rows of two storey houses to walls of glass and steel (on the other side of Dufferin, and the other side of the railway corridor).
below: Until a few years ago, this was Designer Fabrics store. The block of buildings was built in 1881 by J.C. Mussen, a Parkdale businessman. It was originally six storefronts. In 2020 there was a plan to build a nine storey condo on this site.
below: Like the building beside it, this grey building at 1354-356 Queen West may be demolished to make way for a condo development. There has been a long line of retail businesses in this space, from John Wanless’s hardware store in 1881 to Designer Fabrics (1950s to 2018). For more information about the building, see the website of Architectural Conservancy Ontario.
below: One person’s trash is another person’s treasure…. I had to double check just to make sure that it wasn’t real!
below: The bottom right section of a black and white mural by Jimmy Chiale.
below: “Danger – Restricted Area” says the sign
below: Nothing changes
below:Another demolition – this one is on Noble, immediately north of Queen Street West. An 8 storey condo has been proposed for this site.
below: Another building, another blue and white sign, another condo. As it turns out, this is immediately behind 1354-13656 Queen West (that grey building a few images above) which means that the 9 storey condo here will front on three streets: Queen St, Brock Ave, and Abbs St..
below: The struggle against colonialism continues
below: After a while there are just too many of these. It can get a bit disheartening. This sign sits in front of 1488 Queen Street West which is already empty and looking derelict at street level. The snails pace of development doesn’t help – neglected properties are a liability. They look horrid and contribute nothing to the neighbourhood.
below: Scan for nonsense
With thanks to @designwallah for helping to identify the artists of some of the murals in this post.
Going east to Scarborough again…. You can find Highland Creek village at the east end of Old Kingston Road while the West Hill neighbourhood is at the other end of Old Kingston Road. This short stretch of road winds down to the Highland Creek and then back up the hill on the other side. It was bypassed when a new wider and higher bridge was built over the river.
Although this area was one of the first parts of the city that was settled, there are still lots of signs of the rural nature of the area.
There are plenty of signs of changes too…. but there are no glass and steel highrise condos being built out here (in Highland Creek) where the developments are just as likely to be single family homes.
There is a mural on the side of one of the stores, it also happens to be beside the cemetery. This is Mural 8 in the Heritage Trail by Mural Routes. “Community Spirit in Early Highland Creek, Winter 1867” the building of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. It was painted in the summer of 1994 by John Hood, Alexandra Hood, and Zeb Salmaniw. For more information, see a previous blog post from 2017 Heritage Trail, mural 8
The tombstone in front of the mural is for Nelson Hawkins and his wife Susan Cornell who were married in 1877. Nelson was a farmer and he and Susan raised 6 children in the area (not all lived to adulthood).
Also in the cemetery is a plaque to commemorate the life of Cpl. Michael William Simpson (1948-1974) who died in Syria while on a UN peacekeeping mission – all nine Canadians on UN Flight 51 died that day.
below: Deer by the creek in “Creekside” designed by Emily Harrison and painted by a group of youth and local volunteers in 2014.
The Scarborough Historical Society website tells the story of William Knowles who purchased land in Highland Creek in October 1802 and moved his family from New Jersey. … “Knowles was a blacksmith and built the Township’s first smithy, making the nails for the first frame barn in Scarborough and planting one of the first orchards. His son, Daniel, kept the first store in Highland Creek, was a Commissioner for the straightening of Kingston Road in 1837 and was a prominent member of the Scarborough, Markham and Pickering Wharf Company which did an excellent business in shipping grain, timber and cord wood from Port Union to Oswego, New York and other Lake Ontario ports.”
below: Shadows on the door of St. Josephs Church. This Roman Catholic church first served the influx of Irish immigrants who started arriving at the time of potato famine in 1847. It was the first RC community in Scarborough.
The early history of these communities is dominated by families with roots in England, Scotland, and Ireland but like the rest of Toronto, it has become much more multicultural.
below: On a quiet corner in Highland Creek, Baitul Afiyat Mosque
below: And another mosque under construction in West Hill
below: A short walk through St. Margarets (Anglican) cemetery reveals a more multi-cultural side of the neighbourhood. This is just a small sample of the diversity of surnames found there.
below: Another Highland Creek mural.
below: Centennial Community Scarborough consists of the southeast corner of Scarborough and includes both Port Union and Highland Creek Village neighbourhoods.
below: This is the intersection of Kingston Road with Military Trail and Morrish Road, looking southwest towards a wide bridge over the Highland Creek. There is an entrance to Colonel Danforth Park on the other side of Kingston Road (off the left side of the photo) but getting there is very difficult. In the background, right side of photo, are hoardings. Construction has begun on two 8 storey buildings, Highland Commons.
Military Trail is a remnant of Scarborough’s first “highway built in Scarborough in 1799 by American Colonel Asa Danforth Jr. It was a highway to connect the new town of York (i.e. Toronto) to Kingston. The story is that the finished road was considered substandard and Danforth didn’t get fully paid. Or maybe it was a backlash against American entrepreneurs trying to make a quick profit in Upper Canada. Whatever the truth was, Danforth returned to the USA shortly after.
Kingston Road became Hwy 2 and was the main route to Kingston until the 401 was completed in the 1960s.
below: High And Plaza. Strip malls or strip plazas are still plentiful. There is talk of an Eglinton East LRT and many TTC express buses serve the area but cars still rule.
below: Proposal for a 9 storey building with 143 residential units plus retail at street level. City infill on major routes…. and no Greenbelt is affected.
below: Sign in the window: “This store is operated by Sovereign People on Sovereign Land. We are exercising our constitutional and inherent rights.”
below: Wine and yoga! Note the poster in the window about Metrolinx LRT plans on Ellesmere (just to the north).
below: Morningside Ave with its red bus lanes. Looking north towards Ellesmere
below: Another stretch of Morningside, closer to Kingston Road. Certainly not designed with pedestrians in mind. It’s scene like this that give credence to Scarborough’s nickname Scarberia.
below: Looking northeast at Galloway Road and Lawrence
below: Melville Presbyterian Church on Old Kingston Road. It was built in 1852.
below: Very few traces of old West Hill remain. The village got its own post office in 1879 (prior to that it was part of Highland Creek).
below: West Hill suburbia. There must be thousands of houses like these 1960s bungalows in Toronto and the GTA. This street could be in Richmond Hill, Willowdale, or Rexdale. West Hill must have had a major growth spurt in the 1960s and 1970s.
below: On the southeast corner of Morningside and Lawrence is a mural painted in 2018 by BEHIND the Lines in collaboration with the Boys and Girls Club of East Scarborough.
below: Northwest corner of Morningside and Lawrence
below: garbage overflowing. In the recent municipal elections there was a lot of talk about how something as simple as garbage collection was messed up in the city. Although it is outsourced, it has always been problematic. Bins get broken and never repaired. Bins get filled and never emptied. Now when I walk around I see how much of an issue this is.
below: Mayday SOS alert for a love emergency. Whoever scrawled this message probably had a more personal reason but I will use this image as my little prayer to the city. Do better. We can be more. The potential is there if we are willing to reach for it.
This past Saturday’s walk started on a familiar corner, Bloor and Bathurst, but at a new place, Mallo Coffee. I don’t always mention my coffee starts and stops but not all of them have wonderfully eccentric washrooms! The wiggly strands of light were blue which gave the room an eerie blue glow.
Pre-COVID there was a proliferation of small independent coffee shops in the city. It’s nice to see that many have survived and many new ones are opening up. It’s not so nice to see the remains of those that didn’t make it.
From Bloor and Bathurst I walked generally east with a little south thrown in. Is this The Annex? or Harbord Village? Technically the quadrant to the southeast of Bloor and Bathurst is Harbord Village but I kept seeing street art referencing The Annex.
When you’ve been taking pictures in a city for more than 10 years, you end up walking the same streets and alleys. Sometimes you find yourself with identical pictures. Other times things have changed and there’s a new story to present. For this blog post there is a bit of both. Some of the murals that I saw in the lanes behind Bloor were new to me but there were many that I have blogged before. Rather than show all of the previous murals, I have linked to older posts.
below: Part of “Meet me at the Magnolias” by Leslie Phelan
below: The back part of a larger Elicser Elliott mural on the side of Dirty Bird Chicken and Waffle restaurant on Bloor Street. The full mural is featured in the blog post “feeling hungry?” from early in 2017.
Bagpipe Lane runs behind the south side of Bloor for less than a block
below: A few simple designs
below: Boris Badenov from the “Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” – who is he trying to blow up now?!
Barbara Barrett Lane is the eastern continuation of Bagpipe Lane. This is what you see when you first enter the lane from Borden Ave.
below: Nine years ago this was part of a mural that covered the back of buildings on Bloor Street. You can see it, and other murals that were in Barbara Barrett Lane at the time, in a blog post from 2013.
There is a large mural by Elicser Elliott on Barbara Barrett Lane. I have already posted quite a few pictures of it so rather than show more of the same, here is the link to the “elicser paints people” post.
David French Lane runs south from Barbara Barrett Lane.
below: Near the north end of David French Lane is this black and white garage. It is now partially covered with ivy and vines but it too also been around since 2013. At that time many of the garages were already covered with street art but they have all been re-painted (see 2013 blog post, ‘graffiti on garages’)
below: This mural on David French is very similar to the “street scene” mural on Barbara Barrett shown above. I wish there was a signature of some sort on them!
In 2017 there was a laneway paint project, “You Are Here” on David French Lane. Once again, you can see images of most of the garages in a previous blog post.
below: Dudeman’s skulls and old TTC bus were part of that project. Route 77B was a combination of the 77 Spadina bus and the 510 Spadina streetcar; it runs from Spadina station (on Bloor) south to Queens Quay before looping and returning north.
below: A dog with a spiked collar by Christina Mazzulla.
below: A blue eyed, black haired person with a tiger and a bluebird, all at 263.
below: Emily May Rose’s now iconic raccoons. They hang out all over the city!
below: “Fat bottomed girls … You make the rocking world go ’round” Name that tune!
Farther east there is another lane but with no name (Toronto is full of nameless lanes!).
below: Glorious old textures
below: This may or not be something called Tomo
… and back to Mallo. Until next time!
Walking an old favorite, the upper section of Roncesvalles.
below: The old Roncesvalles Village mural with the 504 streetcar is still looking good…. Jac’s Milk convenience store at Wright.
below: There is now a bright new mural for Roncesvalles. It was painted by Philip Cote and Jim Thierry Bravo. It’s title is: “The Original People Leading to the Eighth Fire”.
There are many symbols that have been incorporated into the mural. The large brown animal at the top (over the window) is a wolf who was the companion of the first humans. There is an article on the Roncesvalles BIA website that provides more information and insights into the mural’s stories and symbols. Also, what used to be a pharmacy is now Early Bird & Worm – but the painting of the interior of an old pharmacy is still there, under the new black and white sign.
below: On the far right is a thunderbird, a co-creator of the world.
below: It’s pumpkin season!
below: Relax and Recover
below: An oldie – a grominator on a concrete wall in an alley
below: Bike parked in front of a painted door.
below: A defaced 33wallflower33 slap on the back of the traffic sign.
below: Opossums eat about 5000 ticks per season – now you know!
In an alley near Dovercourt and Queen West in Toronto are two unique garage door murals.
below: ‘Elephancy’ by Zirco Fish – It’s an elephant but it’s not. Tusks like an elephant and the ears seem to be big a floppy. But the mouth is like a beak and the eyes are certainly not those of an elephant. A crazy fantastical creature, the product of someone’s imagination.
below: ‘Scrat Attack’ by Zirco Fish.
This post also appears in my street art blog, Eyes on the Street
The TTC subway tracks cross above the Humber River at Old Mill station. The concrete pillars that support the subway bridge have been covered with many watery blue First Nations themed murals.
below: The artist, Philip Cote, described the story behind this image on the ArtworxTO website (see link); like all cultures, the Anishinaabe have an origin story. In the beginning there was just Spirit. “And that spirit decided to send signals out into the universe and waited for a response. And when no response happened that spirit called the signals back and said, “As you come back to me, create light in the universe”. And at that moment they had light and dark in the universe. And that is the beginning of the Anishinaabe cosmology. Everything for Anishinaabe is made of light and dark. Everything we look at has a spirit, everything, the ground, the rocks, the sand, the trees, the birds, the plants, everything is… and even our sun and our Mother Earth and the moon, they all have a spirit.”
connecting with thousands of galaxies in the universe
The blues of the water, the Humber River, were painted by Kwest. Water is the Underworld in Ahishinaabe cosmology and the Guardians of this Underworld are the fish. Another artist, Jarus aka (Emmanuel Jarus), painted the fish.
Most of the paintings have a well defined circle. This is the boundary between water and earth, between the spirit world and the physical world. But there are connections between the two worlds – all living things are connected and we are all connected to the Spirit World.
These pictures also appear on another blog, Eyes on the Streets
as I walk Toronto 