On Wednesday July 20 at 6:30PM the Toronto Bike Union is planning a "Ride for Jarvis" beginning in Allen Gardens (here's the Facebook event listing). Here's why you should go. Last week was an excruciating one here in Toronto as we saw a number of bike lanes slated for removal from the city streets. Few, if any, cities would do this in 2011, and perhaps fewer would want to burn a vast amount of money in doing so. But many councillors working under a penny-pinching banner curiously did just that. However, as John ...

It's been an interesting few weeks for Pride and Church Street. An article in The Grid that used a small and isolated hipster perspective to declare Church Street and Pride irrelevant and unnecessary was nearly universally condemned as being dead wrong. Coming after a year where the biggest gay-related stories were bullying and suicides, it was certainly an odd and sweeping claim. Yet like a lot of things happening in Toronto right now, it caused people to think about what really does matter to them, and stand up and say why ...

Photo by ecstaticist. Western cities are built in this neat way where the downtown parts, middle parts (say, streetcar suburbs) and farther-out parts (what we might call "suburban" parts) are closer together, and often blended together. These are newer cities — newer than those in the east, and certainly those in Europe — so their tree-like "growth circles" are fewer and closer together. In a place like Calgary, these neighbourhoods surround the downtown core within close view of the cluster of skyscrapers, a proximity that seems subtly odd, but affords and interesting ...

Like many museums, Fort York shows off only part of its collection. In traditional museums, it's simply a fact of space: there just isn't enough room to display everything at once. With Fort York it's a little different: many of the buildings -- or rather, the ruins of buildings -- and artifacts are hidden underground, waiting to be excavated. We don't expect to have archaeological digs in Toronto; we've been trained to think they're more suited to Rome or Athens. But one by the local firm ASI is beginning right now at the fort, and Spacing will be there to cover it. The excavation, sponsored by History Television of Shaw Media, is being documented by YAP Films for an upcoming film about the War of 1812. All buildings at the fort were destroyed in the aftermath of the Battle of York. The ones we see today were built in 1813-16 among the foundations of the original structures. The dig underway now will be peeling back almost two centuries of layers to reveal Government House, the residence of the Lieutenant Governor (LG) of Upper Canada.

Yesterday a new edition of the StrollCity project began. Much of my day is spent on a computer, but Twitter let me keep an eye on what's going on in Toronto. My favorite tweets are the ones people do from locations around the city. For StrollCity, I tweet out a couple city-observations a day, and people respond, and they all go up on the Onestop screens in the subway stations. We even push the weather off the screen briefly! I don't want my tweets to be the only ...

This is a stupid old story that we're all bored with, but you know when people mumble "Toronto sucks" or "Toronto isn't World Class" or some bullshit like that we all know isn't true — but maybe somewhere inside know is true — it's a Fort York bridge thing. Or, rather, the bridge we're not going to build. Or, maybe, the cheap tinfoil makeshift two-bit Rustbelt forgotten-town best-we-can-manage waiting-for-graffiti-and-used-condoms bridge we might get instead. Yesterday we had a smart piece here on Spacing on why the bridge is a good idea. ...

WHAT: Toronto the Good party WHERE: Great Hall, Hart House, University of Toronto WHEN: May 12, 2011, 5PM - 1AM HOW MUCH: Free entry, cash bar Dear Torontonians, It's that time of year again, and the folks at ERA Architects, Spacing Magazine, Toronto Society of Architects, [murmur] and University of Toronto Cities Centre are throwing the 7th annual Toronto the Good party! The Toronto the Good parties bring together a broad cross-section of Torontonians who are interested in the City and in city building. The first Toronto the ...

As Spacing's Dylan Reid wrote earlier today, Mayor Rob Ford is cracking down on graffiti in Toronto. The above picture was taken on April 29, 2010 behind the northwest corner of Queen and Ossington. We assume there will be no provision to grandfather in certain murals. Photo by Shawn Micallef.

WHAT: Celebrate Toronto's 177th birthday WHERE: St. Lawrence Hall, 157 King Street East WHEN: Sunday, March 6, 7:30PM WHY: To benefit Toronto's First Post Office HOW MUCH: $25 at the door Head to the annual fundraiser-birthday party thrown by our friends at Toronto's First Post Office tomorrow (Sunday) for "an evening of drama, music and dancing" and judging by the picture above, lots of tight knickers. TFPO is tucked in behind George Brown's downtown campus on Adelaide Street and is both a museum and functioning post office, one of the few (only?) places in these ...

As more and more (and more and more and more) cities return to and install light rail and streetcars, this film from Glasgow captures that time in the postwar era when trams were thought to be outdated. It turns out the past is the future. Toronto nearly had the same fate, but it's Streetcar Abandonment Policy (scroll down) was itself abandoned.