The following is a reprint of my recent psychogeography column in Eye Weekly looking at the future of Ontario Place. The photos included in this post are from Not My Father's Slides, Tanja Tiziana's wonderful project that rescues abandoned Kodachrome slides she finds at estate and yard sales. The pictures used here, of an unknown family, are dated to July 1973. They are very much like the golden-hued ones I write about below. Happy days at Toronto's happy day machine. Check out Tanja's site when you're done reading. In one of the photo albums I grew up with, one that contained snapshots of my parents’ lives before I was born, there were a handful of pics taken in 1971 at Ontario Place, the year it opened. They’ve all got the golden tint that photos from that era have acquired — the troubles of the day seem far away as everything is muted by that gilded patina. One that always stood out is of a polyester-clad choir singing what I imagine is the old Expo ’67 Ontario anthem “A Place to Stand.” It all looked so optimistic and young, the brilliant future of Ontario and Canada. The future is old now — nearly 40 years old — and it’s easy to drift into nostalgia about a place like Ontario Place, one of those civic spaces that are nostalgia machines. Everybody of a certain not-too-old age has a memory of either romping or working around here or heard stories passed down from a baby-boomer parent of working here in the early 1970s.

Green Party candidate Ellen Michelson has decided not to put up campaign signs in public spaces throughout her riding of Toronto Centre. “Public space is everyone's”, she says, and she feels uncomfortable altering that space without any kind of agreement process. Instead she thinks that campaign volunteers who go door-to-door get the Green message across, along with information that can be found on the Internet. Rami Tabello of illegalsigns.ca (who was profiled in the Summer/Fall issue of Spacing) disagrees completely with Michelson, however, calling her "completely misguided." Tabello says the system for placing signs on ...

Have you noticed how green this city is right now? I've been nearly knocked off my bike or feet a number of times in the last few weeks by either the smell of this city or some particularly stunning ultra-vivid green vista. The same weather systems that are causing such terrible floods in the American Midwest are dumping just enough rain on Southern Ontario to turn this chunk of province into a rain forest. Word in the dog park the other day was that the Don had crested its banks and covered the path (and there have been some flash floods in the north part of the city). The last few days in particular have seen the Ailanthus Altissima (check out arborist-about-town Todd Irvine's "Tree of Heaven" Tree Tuesday write up of these infamously named "Cum Trees," due to their notorious scent) explode, invading every nostril in nose-shot, even inside air-conditioned buildings. This is the smell of spring, and this year it's the olfactory analogue of those Iowa and Illinois floods. Sitting at the bar in the Rivoli last night, arguably as concrete-encased as any part of Toronto can get, I noticed that the smell flooded inside. It feels thick. Wet and thick and organic. Like you're walking through spoors, stamens and damp leaves writ metropolitan. June is the greatest month because everything is new and fresh and sometimes obnoxious. Come late July or August -- those dog days -- the natural city starts to get a wilted and worn-out look to it. Beaten down by smog days, exhaust, heat emergencies and herbivorous bugs that make erratic mandible patterns in the leaves, it is the point when you might euphemistically refer to the leaves or season as being "of a certain age." Right now, the city has its baby skin and we can't escape the constant anxiety that it all has to be sucked up as quickly and voluminously as possible, like some Scorsese cocaine addict hoarding everything that makes his or her body feel good, lest you let it slip through your fingers. Steam rises from clumps of trees in the distance, especially in those places where you can see a vista like around the Don Valley. Here on the edge of the valley the hot-wet-steam-green is only a couple minutes away. I've taken to going for dusk-to-dark runs up the Don Valley paths. This long route up to the top of Rosedale is good, as is this Brickworks run. Down in the valley it gets even thicker, and sometimes there are strange cool spots -- kind of like the cold spots in a Muskoka lake -- that can send chills up an already sweaty spine. The paths get dark and deserted at this hour and even though you're in the middle of 4.5 million people it's easy to be alone with only a good cadence and a deep-house-music podcast until a deer (as happened on Sunday night coming down from the Brickworks' observation point) or a (very occasional and harmless) Valley dweller wanders out into the path and scares you out of the trance. On some of these humid nights, it's like running underwater -- algae-covered water like that found in nearby Binscarth Swamp.

On Monday and Tuesday, the City of Toronto displayed examples of Astral's new street furniture elements in front of City Hall. For years, I've lamented why I don't like the economic model the City has chosen for the street furniture contract, so I won't rehash it again. Maybe in 20 years, when Astral's half-billion dollar contract is up and we can see how much the City got hosed, I can have the last laugh. But I'll be in my 50s by then, and my sense of humour will have likely changed. So today, let's talk about the design and functionality. On first glance, all the pieces look pretty much like the renderings we saw last year when the City was fielding proposals. My opinion from a year ago hasn't changed much either -- underwhelming. There is a part of me that wants to see killer designs, pieces of street furniture that are uniquely Toronto. There's another side of me that has seen enough garbage bins and bus shelters from other cities in North America and Europe -- simple, elegant and blend into the background of the streetscape -- that convince me that over-designing these elements can make the items feel dated really quickly. Astral's street furniture designs seem to fall in between my two sentiments: they are kinda attractive and kinda boring; kinda unique and kinda generic. Probably my biggest complaint comes from the lack of colour in any of the pieces -- this greyness seems to fit the dour mood of city hall finances, which is what originally forced the City to enter into such a crap-shoot of a deal. Sadly, only the bench, poster kiosk, and garbage bins are new and original designs.

We are constantly bombarded by ads. On buses, garbage bins, TTC shelters and in the sky line they are hard to escape. But after a while of living in the city, one becomes immune to their carefully constructed lure. For better or worse, ads are a part of the urban fabric that you can learn to ignore. However, once in a while an ad comes along that captures our attention. It's intriguing and beguiling. It's edgy and cool…but, it's an ad. This is true of the life-sized hipsters with scooter heads that have been pasted at street-level on the sides of buildings across town. Canadian photographer and graffiti artist Fauxreel is responsible for the scooter-men, dubbed Antlerheads. Fauxreel's work, especially his pasting, is known for being off-beat and innovative. He plays with perspective, pop culture and politics. The Antlerheads are so appealing that both the Globe and Mail and blogTO have praised their effective marketing. The added mystique of the Antlerheads is that they are not labelled. There is no immediate brand recognition, or website to quell the inquisitive of their curiosity. But a stroll down a certain scooter shop on Queen St. East or College St. will reveal who is responsible for the ads. The Antlerheads are part of an aggressive Vespa ad campaign to promote their newest scooter. These pasted hipsters are or will also be appearing in Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal. They will soon be accompanied by a television commercial and roving Vespas that will project images onto walls in the club district. Despite the creativity of the campaign, this form of guerrilla marketing is illegal. Even if the advertising company responsible for these ads got permission from property owners to paste the Antlerheads on the exterior walls of their buildings, as third party advertising, they require a permit from city hall. And, according to Rami Tabello of illegalsigns.ca, chances are, they didn't. “It's easy to tell that they are illegal. They are located in places not permitted in the signs by-law and didn't receive city council permission,” says Tabello.

I recently spent a few days in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. It was the first time I've visited an Eastern European post-socialist city and it was interesting reconciling it with the mythical Tito-era Croatia my neighbours back in the suburban Croatian-Canadian ghetto I grew up in told us about. Zagreb is lovely, a city of Austrian-Hungarian buildings spreading out below a forested mountain complete with Vermont-like hiking trails, surrounded by decaying Soviet-style concrete apartment blocks on the periphery that are beautiful to look at but likely less beautiful to live in. Yet the most striking thing ...

In today's Toronto Star, writer Murray Whyte examines the current state of postering in the city and discovers that the corporate advertisers are not only taking over our street furniture, they now control postering on major streets. They're the legacy of decades of posters announcing everything from the disappearance of a much-loved pet to a garage sale to a fledgling band's gig to, on one recent afternoon, a curious proposition to "Breathe Less, Live Longer" (from the Buteyko Breathing Association of Canada). These are the familiar, the traditional: neighbourhood communiqués writ just large enough for locals to notice, ...

Inasmuch as history is supposed to be rooted in objectively recorded facts, such accounts often overlook the multi-layered texture of people's lives and, at times, have even ignored entire events and viewpoints. As a local response to such oversights, members of the Missing Plaque Project have spent the past four years wheat-pasting these unacknowledged histories all over the city. Focusing on subjects that have been largely discounted by the official history books, posters cover a range of events — from neighbourhood demolitions to unrecorded riots and protests — and are being put up in the areas where they took ...

Bikes on Bloor anyone? The City of Toronto is embarking on an exciting study to develop a planning vision for the future development of Bloor Street West, between Avenue Road and Bathurst Street. You are invited to the initial meeting with City staff and its consultant team to help launch the study and provide valuable community input into the process. Date: Wednesday, May 9, 2007 Time: 6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. Location: Walmer Road Baptist Church, Upper Gym 188 Lowther Avenue This information meeting will provide an opportunity for the community to view a presentation introducing the study, its goals ...