growing up in edmonton where almost all of the streets and avenues are sequentially numbered has left me with virtually no innate sense of direction and navigation. anytime i try and get anywhere in a city with named streets, i immediately get lost - my intuition gets confounded, i instinctively turn in exactly the wrong direction, and i end up taking three times longer to get anywhere than i should. last tuesday, i was trying to get to islington and queensway, which should have been a very easy place to get to, since i have driven there several times on my own. however, i thought that i could take a different path than the normal one (since we just received our first dose of real snow and ice in toronto last week) and i ended up in completely the wrong place. however, i was surprised to find myself in a kind of time-warped, historical version of toronto where the streets were tidily, logically, and most importantly sequentially numbered! first street was followed very predictably by second street, and by the time i reached twenty-sixth street, i knew i had no hope of getting to islington and queensway and i had to backtrack almost all the way home (making me half-an-hour late for my meeting with my friend) - but i knew i had to come back and explore this interesting place! my friend informed me that this was old toronto, properly old new toronto, and that it was full of colourful characteristics and stories.

logical guy that i am, i wanted to start my adventure at first street, work my way west along lakeshore boulevard, and see what the district had in store from there. but before i even got out of my car near first street, something caught my eye that i had not seen before. campbell’s soup has a factory here with a weird chimney/smokestack painted up like a can of their soup! this was so marvellously kitschy, it could not possibly have been done within the past 30 years!

as i wandered back across lakeshore to second street, something bright and shiny caught my eye from up the road. i followed along and quickly discovered lake ontario and the prince of wales park which overlooks the lake and has a pretty view of the downtown as well. i guess it was around this time that i realized that the reason lakeshore doesn’t get to queensway is that lakeshore diverges from the road to which i always thought it ran parallel - the gardiner expressway, and follows the lake southwesterly (hence, the clever name “lakeshore”). the proximity to the lake, the numbered streets, and all of the cutie brick houses, and the ease of commuting along the lakeshore all made me seriously consider moving out to this area. i thought of it, but then i was reminded of the stories my friend had told me about comic book stores that were fronts for the sale of LSD or pot or even worse drugs (back in the 60s). i like my nice safe neighbourhood where no one does anything bad.

and now begins the educational part of our program... working my way westward (although i thought i was going northward at the time, even though that would have been impossible given the streets i was crossing), i came across the new toronto fire station, #435. originally built in 1929, the firehall served new toronto, etobicoke (which absorbed new toronto in 1967, and now the city of toronto (which amalgamated etobicoke in 1998).

across the street from the fire station were these crazy row apartments that seemed to go on into infinity (but really just went on five or six sets). they reminded me of these rundown brick apartments back home near the methadone rehab clinics that people should be afraid to walk past (although these ones looked quite habitable).

new toronto’s primary industry was manufacturing - and its principal manufacturer was goodyear tire & rubber (which is ironic because i JUST looked up vulcanization the other day...having forgotten exactly what it was... which goodyear is reported to have patented). while the plant is gone today, in its place are a number of co-operative residences that were initiated by a group who were interested in reclaiming the brown space and making affordable housing in toronto - i am almost POSTIVE that i heard about this in a contemporary design course where urban design was the lecture topic. the residences are colourful and well constructed to provide a safe and neighbourhood-y feel. i felt somehow that these buildings were interesting and important - but it wasn’t until i got home and started doing more research that i discovered why.

my next stop through old new toronto was humber college. they have a lakeshore campus that is situated on a huge plot of land with an enormous park front (this is where i turned my car around last week to try and regain my bearings). the campus appears to be composed of a dozen or so historic schoolhouses that must be about a hundred years old, given that they all remind me of my old high school in alberta that is over a hundred years itself. the funny thing about all of these ancient brick schoolhouses is how many of the windows and doors were boarded up - i wonder about this whole humber college and whether it's really just a front for some kind of money-laundering scam.

this is also the site of another historical building, cumberland house, which is a historical victorian house that currently serves the purpose of a residential treatment centre for women with substance abuse problems. the house is magnificent with its glorious turret and elegant architecture - it literally drew me across a field just to have a better look at it.

there was a lot of architectural history in this area, a lot of which describes the lamentable state of our appreciation of important buildings. i passed a magnificent 50s building, reminding me of buildings that were the peaks of achievement in their day - now reduced to a humiliating state of disrepair to serve the beggared purpose of hosting a bargain store selling goods produced in off-shore slave-labour nations. a few tiles, some structural work, and a decent purpose would make such buildings priceless, but sometimes, like people, buildings are just in the wrong place and make the wrong choices of whom to consort with.

these adventures are frankly taking up a huge amount of time these days. maybe not as much as the actual adventures themselves, but almost as much. it’s dawned upon me that in this entire blog, no one has seen a good picture of me. so, for my parent’s sake, here’s a picture of me, in my (winter) adventuring get-up. it’s not quite indiana jones, but it’s served on these cold days in ottawa or toronto.
the other thing that struck me was that i had walked across half of etobicoke and all the way to mississauga by the end of my trek!! i mean, before this excursion, i barely understood where mississauga was!
another really amazing fact is that i went home afterwards and cycled 16km and ran another 5.7km. as i finish this blog entry, i realize that logged almost 30 self-propelled kilometers of trekking. i think i’ve earned a martini and a solid night’s sleep.

- g

adventure cost:
breakfast @ the philosopher : $7.75 + $2.25 gratuity
snack @ 7-11 (water & powerbar): $4.07
PCI-NIC to replace the one i thought i blew out on thursday changing fuses- $22.79