Posts Tagged: toronto

Queen Street East

On July 31, 2025 by admin With 4 Comments - Photography, Toronto

***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.

Time for a pint….
Colourful old-school aquarium shop. You don’t really see too many of these around anymore. When I was a kid, fish were very popular pets and every shopping mall had a huge aquarium shop. I did see many just like this one in Japan and Korea with tanks of pet fish and plants on the sidewalk.
Melba Studios: I just like the look of this place. The old windows and the green paint. I think it is a ceramic studio.
Maru Japanese Bistro. These rainbow benches are all over the sidewalks here.
There is something about hand painted signage that i just love. The graphics here are so cool. The colours too. And the globe lights…so retro.
Dave’s Hot Chicken and electric bike delivery guy. These guys are such a part of the cityscape now. When I go walking and I don’t see one of these guys for awhile, I feel like maybe I have gone too far and it’s time to turn back towards home.
Old pawnshop.
Boston Discount Store at Queen and Boston Street
Jack Black, Pet M.D.
Queen Books.
This is a corner garden centre and cafe. I like the mural but I wonder why it is 11 o’clock? There is a lot of colour everywhere in this neighbourhood. It is the first thing I noticed. A lot of Toronto, especially newly redeveloped Toronto is…well…”neutral”.
Wonderful bulky old building with original windows and paint. Those apartments up top must be incredible. Ali Baba’s…good quality fast food.
Riverside Bridge/Queen Street Viaduct crossing over the Don River. “This river I step in is not the river I stand in”. That’s a Heraclitus quote…feel free to discuss amongst yourselves in the comments. I don’t recommend stepping or standing in the Don River these days. I am pretty sure that clock is broken.
4644 and 4441 meet face to face on the Riverside Bridge. These colours make me happy: the vibrant TTC red framed by the dull green bridge. It’s a good picture.
“Who is Jesus?” billboard beside faded Bay Cat Hospital sign. I had a cat neutered here once but I have not read the Bible in some time.
Concrete bridge-support art.
Speaking of colourful, Thruway Muffler is the sickest colour of pink. This crazy bubblegum colour covers the entire giant auto repair garage. Beside it is Spaccio: commissary kitchen, grocery store and restaurant that is part of the Terroni group. They have the absolute best frozen take home pizzas, a bargain at 2 for 20$.
Poke bowl billboard with float plane.
I like the lines, light and colours here. These old brick factory buildings are real beauties.
“Scenic Route” art posted on a row of boarded up and abandoned houses on River Street.
A rare selfie…Hello Neighbour

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.

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St James Town at Night

On July 24, 2025 by admin With 2 Comments - Photography, Toronto

***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.

St James Town at night
Three-winged 60’s highrises were typical of the time. St James Town has quite a few toward the south. Hand painted murals reflecting the cultural diversity of the area decorate some of the dozens of concrete stairwells.
Stairwell going down
These concrete stairwells are everywhere in St James Town. Some are in parking lots, others in the middle of parks and fields, others under trees. I assume they are exits from underground parking. I almost never see people use them…who knows what’s really down there? How deep do they go? Makes me think of a Haruki Murakami novel.
Mature trees in St James Town
Typical St James Town skyline…the place has kind of a retro space-age vibe at night. There is something beautiful and mysterious about it. All those huge angled balconies and lit windows in neat rows. You can see two people on the concrete path under the trees…this gives you an idea of how big the trees are.
Glowing stairwell
I call this the snow globe. It is one of only a few covered and lit concrete stairwells.
60s twin towers St James Town
Handsome twin towers in white brick. Big old trees and wide green spaces in front.
A small commercial area on the ground floor of a central highrise. This is close to a discount supermarket and community centre. During the day there is a full time open air flea market here. From VHS tapes to protein powder to (found?) bike seats…it’s all here.
The area is dense with unique buildings. This one is bright and clean with red brick and white metal siding with blue trim. There are no balconies on this one which is unusual. I like the lit windows at night, the warm glow.
Working-class neighbourhood with working-class rides.
One of the weird glowing stairwells to….? These are everywhere.
Korean Spicy Tteok-Bokki Truck
Food truck at rest.
240 Wellesley delivery man
Ubiquitous Toronto food delivery guy on electric motorbike.
Dirty payphone near 240 Wellesley
I wonder how serious the emergency would have to be for me to touch this payphone?
Underground parking ramp with cool green porthole building.
Moms chatting in the park. Trash waiting for morning pickup.
urban art on concrete
Stairwell art, beautiful in its detail. These little panels appear in the most unexpected places. The art itself is respected by the community…these pieces never get tagged or damaged intentionally.
Another mural on the back of a concrete stairwell entrance.
Beck taxicab on street at night
Beck Taxi parked outside new building construction site.
closed laundromat. Rows of machines
A hold-out from the 50’s. This was originally an Italian tailor’s house and business. When they were planning the original St James Town in the 50’s, he refused to sell so they built all the towers around him. Today, his building still stands, home to the New World Laundry on Parliament Street.
Glen Road at Howard Street, last remnant of original Victorian neighborhood.
Top view of Glen Road..this was the street in St James Town that I first saw when I moved to the city. At that time, all of the houses were abandoned and boarded up. This cobblestone plaza is a new renovation that just opened this summer. When the city first posted plans for this, there was a lot of resistance in the neighbourhood (mostly around losing parking spaces) but I am really happy with the way it turned out.
New pedestrian tunnel Glen Road Toronto
Newly renovated tunnel under Bloor Street which connects to the Morley Callaghan foot bridge.
That’s the pedestrian bridge at the far end of the tunnel. Interestingly, it connects St James Town (one of Toronto’s poorest neighbourhoods) and Rosedale (one of the city’s richest neighbourhoods).
A 54 story condo tower, recent construction, built directly behind the row of victorian houses on Glen Road.
This is an interesting photo of a vacant lot in the springtime fog. All of the old houses you see in the foreground are boarded up and slated for demolition to make way for a new condo. This is what is happening all over this neighbourhood. The city claims there is not enough affordable housing but they keep knocking it down and replacing it with condos that nobody can afford to live in. Those steel and glass buildings in the background are like a line of storm clouds warning of the coming destruction. The little brick houses are cowering in from of them. It’s a good picture.

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:

Howard Convenience Store
Howard Convenience…cheapest Haagen-Dazs ice cream. You can even buy beer now. A really nice old man runs it. I have been coming here for a long time and we know each other as neighbours. This picture was originally from my green series.
The no-name “store on the corner”.
Same “store on the corner”. I have met 3 generations of the family that run this place (and 2 generations of calico cats, both named Nyu-Nyu). A young Chinese couple own it. Shortly after I moved here, the wife became pregnant and later gave birth to a little girl. I asked yesterday and apparently her daughter is 7 years old now!

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!

Jamestown Convenience
Jamestown convenience store is just south of the highrises on Wellesley Street. An old Korean man and his son run this one. It is FULL of plants and flowers. It’s really like a flower shop pretending to be a convenience store. I think the old man prefers selling ferns over lottery tickets. This one is not directly in St James Town but it is still part of it in my mind.

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.

Snow in St James Town
Indian couple showing their baby what is probably his first snowfall. Imagine that…your first snow. The address of the white brick building is 666 Ontario Street: the highrise of the Beast!
Ventilation units pushing out clouds of steam from under 240 Wellesley St tower
Snow in St James Town park. Empty benches at night
Central Park, St James Town during a big snowfall. This park was completely redone over the last 2 years with new benches, lighting, playground and basketball courts. It’s normally full of people but I took this picture very late on a cold winter night so everyone was probably bundled up inside.

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.

This is the walkway along the side of Rose Avenue Public School at night. It’s a pretty and peaceful spot.

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! : )

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Losing Focus: Finding Interest in Blurry Photos

On July 11, 2025 by admin With 0 Comments - Photography, Toronto

***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

blurry shark at COEX aquarium in Seoul
This was a deletion-survivor from a recent trip to Korea. It is a picture of a shark in a big tank at the COEX aquarium in Seoul. I took the photo from above through the rippling surface of the water, so all the light is bent into these unnatural shapes. While it isn’t the best picture of a shark, I like the way all the colours are swirled together to make this abstract image.
I tried to recreate this phenomenon in my kitchen sink with these coffee cups. I like the way the water distorted them and I may try some more like this in the future. Maybe not as interesting as the first picture but…they are just coffee cups not sharks : )

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 of focus book looks dreamlike
A paperback book: what’s inside is obscured. You can almost make out a word or two but not quite.
water glass in strong morning sun
Water glass in morning sunlight…the light is strong and direct and the glass is a cold hard object. But…the slight blur softens and warms the whole image.
fern leaves backlit by morning sun
Sunlight filtered through fern leaves: if I stare at this long enough I feel relaxed…there is a calmness in this photo that wouldn’t be there if it was razor sharp.
out of focus moon jar
White porcelain vase: The plant is mostly in focus but, because it is off to the side and dark, the white porcelain jar becomes the main subject. All the hard reflections in it are smeared together giving it a liquid softness. Having a small portion of a picture in focus turned out to be a good technique for keeping the image interesting.

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.

fox family with green filter
I really like this one. It is a survivor from our green-photo project. We were taking photos around Philosophers Walk near the ROM and a mother fox with 4 pups came out to dig for food around the trees. I didn’t have the camera set up for this kind of subject but this is what I got anyways. This one looks otherworldly to me. Because of the green light and the motion blur. This could be another planet.
de-focussed karaoke neon sign
Colourful business signs lit up at night make good photos anytime. After many bad shots, I learned that for a de-focussed photo, it helps to be able to read the words.
out of focus city skyline
This is a pretty severely de-focussed shot of the city skyline. It works because the subject is obvious and the contrast between light and dark is strong. I like how all the points of light become circular here.
food trucks at night
Food trucks on the university campus. Great light, colours and graphics add to the interest of the blurry image. I don’t know why but it makes me think of those iridescent puffy stickers…
These two photo-bombed me. I am including it just because they are cute (and blurry)
ghostly looking backlit cyclist at night
There is some motion blur here and the cyclist is also strongly backlit. It gives the picture kind of a ghostly appearance.
woman studying at night in a field by lamplight
This is just a good image. The blur adds a little to the strangeness of this student studying by streetlight under a tree in the middle of the night. This is not really even near a building…she is in a field.

Time Travel

manicured garden in front of old low rise building
This one has a nice warm light. The manicured garden and the building itself give it a vintage vibe. It looks to me like the 1950s. Like, if you backed up the camera a little, you would see big american cars with fins and lots of chrome parked outside. Dreamy.

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.

tiny house with river rock facade
This is a tiny house in Cabbagetown with a white picket fence and a river-stone facade. This image has great texture and no clutter. Nothing extra: house, tree, fence. With the slight blur and bright sunshine it looks more painted than photographed.
U of T Convocation Hall
Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto. The massive pillars of the building along with its imposing size and the night lighting make it look painted here.
Old couple and fisherman at Brickworks pond. This image has strong lines that help it stay together even blurred as it is. This could easily pass for a painting.

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.

After dark at King’s College Circle. Night time ghosts.
Sherbourne Subway Station at Glen Road. Daytime ghosts.
Beltline Trail ghosts
people who look like ghosts in forest
Ghost couple leaving the forest

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!

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