Posts in Category: Toronto
Queen Street East
***your phone will magically turn good pictures into bad. Try looking at this post on a bigger screen if you can***
To Book City in the Beaches
This morning, I finished up the last chapter of a fat book that I have been reading for a few weeks. I had a new title in mind so I decided to take a walk from my place to the Book City in the Beaches neighbourhood. Book City is one of the last independent bookstores so, in an effort to support small business, I try to buy most of my books there. And, lucky for me, they had a single copy of the book I wanted. This long walk would take me along most of Queen Street East through Corktown, Leslieville and to the Beaches (named for the white sand beaches nearby along the shore of Lake Ontario).
Return flight
Since I had my camera with me and since I don’t get to the Beaches very often, I decided to take a few photos on the 7km walk home. Compared to the rest of Queen Street, this area has some truly old and interesting low rise architecture and businesses. Some blocks of Queen Street East are so quaint, they almost have the old-time feel of a cottage-town main street. The commercial areas are mostly undeveloped (so far). There is even a gas station right out of the 1950’s with pumps that look like refrigerators, full service attendants in uniform and a round glass reception area. I am excited to take some pictures of it at night! Coming soon!
The Photos
I had not planned on posting about this so I was just taking random pictures for fun. The photos are not really meant to be representative of anything. I just liked enough of them that I wanted to share them. They are generally in chronological order from the Beaches travelling west back towards Corktown.
The End
Hope you enjoyed some of these photos. Queen Street at the Beaches is lined with fun and unique shops and restaurants and is definitely worth a visit. I will be back soon for some night photos. As always, if you have anything to say, even if it’s just “Hi” feel free to comment below.
St James Town at Night
***your phone will crush and distort these pictures. If you can, try to see this on a bigger screen like a laptop***
A Very Short History of St James Town
St James Town was once a working-class Victorian neighbourhood, housing the poorest of Toronto residents in ratty decaying homes. In the 50s and 60s, city planners and developers decided to rezone and bulldoze most of the neighbourhood. Over the next decade or so, they built nineteen highrise buildings including 4 city owned public housing towers. At the time, developers assumed that fresh young middle-class office workers would quickly move in. Instead, that demographic chose to move to the suburbs of North York and Scarborough and the neighbourhood filled up again with Toronto’s lowest income families. Over the last couple of decades, the demographics have shifted more towards new immigrants to Canada and St James Town remains one of the last affordable neighbourhoods in the downtown area.
For a more detailed account of St James Town history and development have a look at this excellent article at Blog TO.
Bad Reputation?
In the late 90’s, when I first moved to Toronto, St James Town had been in steady decline for 30 years. The buildings were crumbling, the public spaces were trampled and neglected and the residents were some of the poorest in the downtown area.
One day, shortly after moving to this city, I went to visit a friend downtown and missed my subway stop. As a result, I accidentally came above ground at the tiny run-down Glen Road exit of the Sherbourne subway station. Glen Road consists of a single block of some of the last surviving Victorian homes in the area but, at the time, the houses were all boarded up and abandoned. It was like coming up into a ghost town of haunted houses. I was so surprised that I took a bunch of film photos but, unfortunately, I can’t seem to find them now. If you want to see some images from this time, this site has some good ones.
A little later I met my friend and told him about getting lost in St James Town. His advice was to stay away from the neighbourhood, even during the daytime. Apparently the area had a bad reputation for drugs, gangs, violence, prostitution. I had no idea if this was true or not but I took his advice and never came back. Not until over 20 years later when I ended up renting an apartment on this very street.
St James Town Today
With 19 highrise towers in a relatively small area, St James Town is the most densely populated neighbourhood in Canada . The “official” population of St James Town today is around 17 000 although it is probably much higher. It is still home to many low income families and is a popular landing place for new immigrants.
Sometime around 2000, the city decided to put some resources towards improving the crumbling neighbourhood. This included plans to clean up and repair the old highrises and renew the parks, playgrounds and public spaces. This is ongoing today.
Eventually, developers started to sniff around one of the last downtown neighbourhoods that had so far escaped gentrification. Condo speculators bought up and fenced off many of the old neglected houses and plots of land. They also gutted and renovated the row of abandoned houses on Glen Road in return for the city’s approval of their development plans. They squeezed in a few new glass and steel towers and tucked little townhouses into the shadows of the old highrises. Since I moved in, no less than 5 new condo buildings have gone up within a 1 minute walk. And many more are on the way.
Living in St James Town
I think that St James Town still has something of a bad reputation today. Reading online, I often see postings where people are nervously asking about safety and crime rates before moving in to the area. And still others (who probably don’t even live here) advise them to be very careful, especially at night.
I have lived here for years and have not had a single incident that would make me feel unsafe. Police, ambulances and fire trucks are a pretty regular sight. But, when you have over 17 000 people living on a few city blocks, this doesn’t seem unusual.
I like that this neighbourhood always has people moving around in it. You are rarely by yourself outside. To me, this feels safe. I used to work at a restaurant directly south of St James Town in Old Toronto. The walk home from there at night felt so unsafe to me during the covid closures that I would carry a police baton with me at all times. Walking on high alert, I wouldn’t feel relaxed until I found myself among the busy highrises of St James Town again.
Maybe the Best Neighbourhood Downtown…
I love living in this neighbourhood . Everything is in walking distance: dentist, doctor, supermarket, subway, Koreatown, Chinatown, Little India, beautiful natural spaces, museums, universities, galleries, live music venues, great restaurants, a fully operating farm, some of the country’s best hospitals…the list goes on. I think this must be one of the most connected neighbourhoods in the city. I haven’t had a car in many years and I never miss it.
The interior of St James Town itself reminds me of the highrise neighbourhood I grew up in when my parents first immigrated to Canada. People are always outside. The parks and public spaces are full even at night. Extended families get together and pass time in the shade of old trees. People who have immigrated from the same place and share language and culture find each other here, in the building hallways and the outdoor playgrounds. They naturally build communities around their shared experiences. If you walk around St James Town, English might be one of the last languages you hear. Tagalog, Hindi, Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, Tamil, Russian, Bengali….these are much more common.
St James Town is one of the last places where low income Canadians as well as newly landed immigrants can afford to live connected to the downtown core. And because so many of the residents share a common experience, St James Town has a the feeling of a vibrant community. People know their neighbours and I believe that people look out for each other. The neighbourhood has a strong feeling of family. All kinds of family.
Night Walks Through St James Town
Some would say that the clump of old highrises is ugly but I see real beauty in them…in their multicoloured brick exteriors, angular balconies, weird glowing stairwells, old mature trees and especially in the people who call this neighbourhood home. Hopefully some of that will come through in these photos but, if not, take a walk through here on a nice summer night and you may be surprised by how much you enjoy it.
Convenience Stores
There is a small commercial strip on Howard street with a couple of Filipino restaurants, a fried chicken place, a small pharmacy, an Ethiopian grocery and a Halal butcher. These convenience stores are part of this strip:
I used to buy cigarettes here. The wife’s mom (the 7 year old’s grandma) worked there at the time and I would visit her everyday on my way to work and buy a pack of smokes. She would cheerfully sell them to me while telling me that they were bad for my health and that I should stop. One day, I quit smoking and so, I didn’t go in for a few weeks. When I finally stopped in to buy an ice cream, she asked where I had been. I told her that I quit smoking and so I didn’t need to stop by so often. I couldn’t believe how happy she was to hear that. It was as if I was her own son!
Winter in St James Town
These are a few pictures of a snowy night walk through St James Town last winter. It really is a pretty place.
The Future of St James Town
There is a tremendous amount of demolition and building going on around here. I think the original towers are safe in their big bulky numbers. Hopefully they will continue to see improvements and provide a home for people who can’t afford to move anywhere else.
As for the surviving victorian houses…I am not so sure. Just last year I found out that Concert Realty bought up the whole west side of Glen Road. This is the same developer that is building the 54 story building outside my bedroom window. This means that right now they own a continuous parcel of land that is more than enough to build a second condo tower. They have not submitted plans to the city yet but I think it is only a matter of time. Lately there has been some pull back on new condos so hopefully Glen Road will survive for a few more years…let’s see what happens.
There is so much more…
These pictures just show a little of this neighbourhood. In recent years, the city has put up a brand new community centre complete with sunlit indoor pool, library, indoor basketball courts and community services.
The Rose Avenue Public School right at the centre of St James Town is one of the last original buildings in the area. This brick building with massive old windows was built in 1924 and still operates as a busy public school and day care, surrounded by old trees and brick walkways.
St James Town represents a massive and miscalculated experiment in early city redevelopment. Originally seen as a failure and struggling for decades, I think it has grown into a unique and vital part of the Toronto downtown.
If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. I am always happy to hear from you.
Thanks for reading! : )
Losing Focus: Finding Interest in Blurry Photos
***If you are looking at this on your phone you probably won’t see the blur in these photos. Your phone will crush the images to the point where they will probably look in focus. Of all the posts so far, this one needs to be seen on a bigger screen to make sense…
***photographers: this article is not about using diffusion filters to soften focus.
Finding something interesting in “mistakes”
Over the years, I have taken thousands of pictures. Sometimes they turn out great. Often times they don’t. Sometimes the image I was seeing in my mind didn’t translate well with the camera or, other times, the photos are technically flawed. My camera is older and the auto-focus system is not perfect. It struggles with difficult light and reflections, especially at night. So, I tend to get a few photos that are out of focus from time to time. These blurry pictures are impossible to fix and I always delete them first, without any thought, to save space on my computer.
Lately, I have found a few of these pictures that escaped getting deleted. While they are not what I intended, some of them are still kind of interesting. Unfortunately, only a few of these “mistakes” have survived. So, I decided to go out and try to take some out of focus pictures on purpose and see if I could come up with some good shots.
This project turned out to be much more difficult than I thought. My idea was to just go out, find an interesting scene, manually de-focus the camera and shoot away. I shot hundreds of photos and the majority looked terrible…not interesting…just BAD pictures.
But, over a couple of weeks, I managed to figure out which images are more likely to make a good blurred photo. Here are the ones that I think turned out pretty well.
Shooting through moving water
Manually de-focussed still life shots around my apartment
These photos have a dreamy quality about them: you know what they are but all the details are missing. Like…you know there was a person in your dream…you know what you said, you know what you did…but you can’t see their face no matter how hard you try to remember….these pictures have that kind of feeling for me.
Out in the city at night
I thought night shooting might be a little easier but it was just as difficult to get an interesting shot. Here are a few that I did like. In the city at night, there is a lot of hard contrast in the lighting which I found helps to give some structure to de-focussed pictures.
Time Travel
Photos that look like paintings
Scenes with strong texture and clear structure can make good unfocussed images. Because of the large grain and the soft transition between colours, these ones look like oil paintings to me.
Ghosts…
Images with people in them turned out to be some of the most interesting ones. They all look like dream scenes to me. They are clearly people but their limbs are distorted and their faces are obscured. This is how I tend to remember characters from dreams. I don’t think I have ever seen a ghost but, if I did, I imagine that this is what they would look like.
What’s next…?
This was a difficult project and I am kind of glad that I can get back to taking “normal” pictures again. I am really happy with these few good shots that I did come up with. I hope you like them too. Working on a project about shadows…
As always, you are welcome to leave questions or comments below. I am always happy to hear from you. Knowing you have been here motivates me to keep at it. Thanks for looking!
Midori: Experiments in Green
Please try to look at this post on a laptop instead of your phone. It will look much better.
The World of Wong Kar Wai
I recently found a big picture and essay book about Wong Kar Wai on my bookshelf. I must have bought it years ago and, because I was so busy, never got around to reading it. These days, I have been sitting on the floor every morning and reading it cover to cover as I drink my coffee. The book inspired me to see his films again and I have been watching them one by one in chronological order.
One of the things I love about Wong Kar Wai and his cinematographer Christopher Doyle is the way they use strong colour casts to emphasize mood or setting or time. Often it is a prominent green, especially noticeable in Days of Being Wild, Fallen Angels and even In the Mood For Love. The photography in these films is so striking that on the first viewing, I end up misunderstanding the story because I am so focussed on the images alone. I have always loved these green steeped scenes the most.
Here is a famous example from the end of Fallen Angels:
My Fujifilm X100T
This 10 year old camera is the only digital camera I have ever owned. By today’s standards, it is pretty old technology but I still love it. I have always been able to capture any picture in my imagination with this little machine. If you are interested, I describe it in a more detail at this link.
A few days ago, I decided to try to take some green toned pictures. I wanted to see if I could make some images that come close to the ones I love in the Wong Kar Wai films. I did this by manipulating the white balance of the camera and pushing it hard to the green side. How to do this is not really that interesting so I won’t go into it here but, if you want to know more about it, there are lots of good articles on the subject. Usually, you manipulate the white balance to keep your colours more natural under different kinds of light (like sunlight vs LED lightbulbs indoors). I did the opposite, manipulating white balance to get unnatural colour tones.
Here are a few of the pictures I like the best
I just took pictures of regular things..no extra effort to make cinematic compositions this time…
On my way home to write this post today, I was thinking..
Ever since I was little, if you asked me what my favourite colour is, I would say “green”. Always. The green of the sea, the green of the forest, the green of kelp and algae, the green of moss. Always green.
As I was walking home and thinking about writing this, I was listening to Luminescent Creatures, Ichiko Aoba’s new record. I only know a few words in Japanese but, every now and then, a word will pop out and stay with me… most often just because I like the sound. On the last track, which is so beautiful that I listened to it twice today, the word was “midori” 緑. When I got home and looked it up, it turns out to be the Japanese for word for “green”.
When I rolled that word around in my mind a little further, I realized that I had heard it before. In the movie Norwegian Wood (adapted from Haruki Murakami’s novel of the same name), lead character Toru Watanabe’s true love interest is named Midori. This film, directed by Tran Anh Hung, is full of vibrant green…just like his other famous film, The Scent of Green Papaya. And the cinematographer for Norwegian Wood was Mark Lee Ping-Bing who also worked on Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. So many connections…
Green, my favourite colour. Green, the colour of summer. Midori…something beautiful. Green has been in my heart for the last few weeks. Maybe because it is mid summer after a rainy spring and the whole city is flooded with shades of green. Hope you enjoyed the pictures. I really like them. I will keep working on it.
If you have any comments or questions, please leave them below. I am always happy to hear from you : )
Tommy Thompson Park in Early Spring
An accidental nature refuge
Tommy Thompson Park is a 5km long spit of land that stretches into Lake Ontario at the south east end of Toronto. It is entirely manmade, consisting of silt dredged up from the harbour as well as construction and demolition material produced over the last 75 years as the city grew. The shores of the park are made up of mostly broken concrete, tile and brick which have been eroded by wind and water over time. Shanks of twisted iron rebar jut out from the shoreline like rusty branches. Although it doesn’t sound so picturesque, it is actually quite beautiful.
Nature has taken over as this pile of dirt and rubble has sat here mostly undisturbed. It is now home to indigenous plants, animals, birds and insects. Some rare migratory birds make Tommy Thompson Park an annual nesting ground and there are areas of the park that are closed off during most of the year to allow them to nest in peace. Cars are not allowed. Even dogs are not allowed as the permanent residents of the park see them as predators.
Because it is remote from the city and protected by environmental laws, it is a great place for spotting beavers, minks, martens, coyotes, geese, swans, all types of ducks, birds of prey, insects, turtles, snakes, frogs…. Even Snowy Owls and Bald Eagles make stops here.
Since there are no cars it is also an ideal place for a walk or bike ride when you feel like escaping from the noise and hustle of downtown. For more detailed info here is the official website.
Photos and sounds from an early spring visit to Tommy Thompson Park
I expected it to be noisier, but except for birds quietly nesting and people cycling and chattering away, it was almost silent. Below is a sound sample from late summer. In contrast, the sounds of cicadas, crickets and bees is LOUD! You can also hear a Porter Airlines or Air Canada Dash-8 flying over. This is a typical sound of the park which is at the end of one of the Toronto Island Billy Bishop Airport runways.
This park changes dramatically with the seasons…let’s come back later and see what’s going on
TTC: Line 2 Towards Kipling
The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) runs a few subway lines and many bus and streetcar routes throughout the city.
Line 1 runs north/south along Young Street which bisects the city into East and West and many streets are named accordingly. For example, St Clair Avenue is St Clair West on one side of Yonge Street and St Clair East on the other. Line 1 runs for 38 kilometres with 38 stations.
Line 2 runs east/west along Bloor Street and Danforth Avenue covering 26 kilometres and 31 stations.
Shorter lines make up the rest of the system and get people from city suburbs onto the main lines.
A few weeks back I took the subway west on line 2 to Keele then walked back in the cold taking a few pictures of subway stations that I passed. I like the otherworldly white light they give off at night. They look like portals to another dimension. Lansdowne is my favourite.
As I collect more interesting TTC photos, I will post them here…
Fares, routes and service disruptions listed here.