Exit, Pursued by a Bear

Wuzzles!

White elephant

The Danforth Music Hall was the neighbourhood cinema in Riverdale in the heyday of these things, and I’m sure was a busy place through 1945 or so.

After the rise of television, the nabes fell into a terminal decline – the Koreatown one shows porn, one of the Annex ones is a very dingy discount CD warehouse (last I saw), the Runnymede one is a Chapters, and a varying, though declining, number are rep cinemas held together with duct tape and love.

They were all built assuming that more or less the whole neighbourhood would show up on a Saturday, nickels at the ready, to see Clark Gable and a newsreel – the building seats 1,150 people. Or Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and the local pianist, I guess – it was opened in 1919, as the Danforth retail strip was being built, and the year the Viaduct was opened.

There is a real problem with architectural preservation with this kind of structure: what do you do with a building which shouldn’t be torn down, or gutted, for heritage reasons, but can’t work as a viable business unless it is? Apart from the seating structure, they’re at least two traditional retail spaces wide, which seems to shut out most of the potential other uses.

Movie theatres seem to be the anti-How Buildings Learn structures, being nearly impossible to turn into anything else. Just as the old Don Jail will be, with its 4x8 cells each with three structural walls.

I don’t have the answer, and it seems the Music Hall’s owners don’t, either – they have a rather sad little list of eight mostly very obscure acts booked between now and late May. Check out their overdesigned Web site if you dare - it keeps stalling Firefox.

They had a poster for weeks in December promoting their Christmas event, which involved a Romanian folk singer whose picture showed him plunged in gloom (left).

The only gig that seems at all promising, at least in a commercial sense (two performances, both sold out) is the kind of act that would be about right for a birthday party of eight-year-old girls, if they were Very! Extroverted! Which possibly means that that’s the niche the owners should be catering to.

The Royal, a theatre on College Street built twenty years later with half the capacity (and hence less of a white elephant than the Danforth), seems to have a new and so far successful formula: making a rep cinema financially viable by finding efficient uses for the space during the day:

The landmark Toronto theatre, first opened in 1939, has escaped obsolescence — and potentially the wrecking ball — with a new lease on life that also offers a new home to Canadian film.

Theatre D Digital, which purchased the cinema earlier this year, will do post-production film work in four editing suites during the day and has installed a new high-definition movie projector and state-of-the-art sound system for evening screenings and performances.

The theatre will also offer live events, such as theatre, music and readings, and plans to solicit ideas for other uses from community members, Donen said.

story here

Did I mention –

- that that gardenimport.com is one of the few plant retailers that gets e-commerce? I think I have. My credit card bill certainly shows it.

They’ve waited until the first really bitterly cold winter day to launch their spring product list – dangerous, dangerous people.

Book #1: Inside Toronto: Urban Interiors 1880s to 1920s

“This room is a “home office” a few years after the turn of the century,” the guide began. “Look at the cumbersome desktop computers, heavy and expensive. Some of them cost more than a thousand dollars, several months’ rent, and had to last for years.
“Just a few years before this, a user would have to connect to the Internet using a telephone line. The early speeds were very slow. On the earliest models, e-mail was downloaded at reading speed. Until the end of the century, it was possible to think of a computer as separate from the Internet, as strange as that seems now.
“Who would like to try to pick one up? Careful: the front of it is made of glass.”

---

This is an essential book for anyone with a pre-1918 Toronto house and is curious about how the earlier owners lived.A paradox with the material, which the author handles resourcefully, is there are few images of daily life in an ordinary Toronto middle-income home in this period to work with.
The top and bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are very well-documented.



Toronto plutocrats like Sir Henry Pellatt or John Ross Robertson, having built their lavishly appointed homes, then had them photographed in great detail for posterity, down to the children’s bedrooms and glittering plumbing fixtures. It took me a while to realize that the images of Casa Loma when Pellatt actually lived there reminded me of the Richie Rich comic books – it has the same over-the-top effect.

On the other hand, social workers in the same period produced a large number of images of poverty: really foul slums like the Ward, the area more or less where City Hall is now, or pre-gentrification Cabbagetown; a flophouse that looks a lot like a modern homeless shelter; the filthy cells under the Court St. police station.

So for the most part what is being documented, as interesting to contemporaries, is the exceptional, either of wealth or poverty. This is the usual difficulty of the social historian – many of the things you’d most like to understand were considered too ordinary and universal to document at the time they were happening. I’m sure we’ll be frustrating for the same reason a half-century from now.

More Amy Lavender Harris noticed much the same thing:

... It is clear that some of these images were intended to satisfy voyeuristic appetites as well: many of the images in the book appeared initially in the Toronto Globe newspaper, and more than a few of the excerpts Gibson quotes suggest that their writers reveled a little in moral superiority at the squalor and horror of the lives of the 'great unwashed' depicted in some of the images. Similarly, the photographs of some of the city's more richly adorned salons and ballrooms (published originally in magazines like Saturday Night) seem to have been meant to serve the public's voracious interest in the lives of the rich and powerful, as well as to record for posterity the legacies of Toronto's prominent industrialists and politicians. At both ends of the social and physical spectrum, these photographs captured the city's desires as well as its fears.

Having said all that, we recognized a larger version of our pre-renovation kitchen in a new one being shown off in about 1920, a larger (but still recognizable) version of our second-floor bathroom, and our former fireplace tiles in an editor’s office at the now-extinct Toronto Telegram.

I think it really needed a professional archivist (Gibson, a sometime co-conspirator of More Coffee Please, now works for the Toronto archives) to unlock the City’s enormous motherlode of historic photographs.

I’ve found some wonderful images in the City archives, but I’ve come across useful material by accident at least as often as on purpose.

Photographs are filed by the name of the institution that produced them (parks department, city solicitor’s department and so on), and each institution had its own system. The TTC fonds, for example, are filed in chronological order, which almost reduces you to opening books at random.

To its credit, the archives recognizes that hypertext and scanned images are the solution, but the scanning and cataloging is an enormous project.

If you're thinking of buying it, it's much cheaper from Amazon (.com, not .ca) than from the publisher.

Giant. German. Bunnies.

Details at the link.

I wonder if they make good pets - I like the idea of leading one around on a leash.

Finder's points to BoingBoing.

Wuzzles!

Bulbs!

An overambitious snowdrop comes up in the front garden (below).

There are a number of little craters in the ground of the kind made by hungry squirrels, so clearly the chicken-wire barriers, however ugly, were a good idea. They'd be nicer covered in snow, though.

I was curious last week about the fall's bulb-planting - it had gone by quickly, what with ordering large numbers of bulbs on a fall discount sale and trying to get them into the ground before the end of November, because, of course, there might be a hard frost before Christmas. As it turned out, it's warmer now than when I planted them.

Anyway, I went back to the e-mailed receipts from gardenimport.com, and it turned out that in short order I'd managed to plant 464 bought bulbs, nearly all in the front garden, plus a bag of pheasant-eye narcissus from division in Jville. I knew it was a lot, but I'd lost track of the actual number.

I'm most curious about Camassia, a native which is new to me (details here). I bought five last year for the back garden, which seemed like a big deal at the time. This year, suddenly, they're fifty cents each and you can have a large bag for $10. They must be being bred on a much larger scale, or something.

Details below the image:

6	Allium	SCHUBERTII
25	Allium	PURPLE SENSATION
1	Allium	GLOBEMASTER
3	Allium	MOUNT EVEREST
25	Allium	moly JEANNINE
20	Allium	AZUREUM
10	Autumn Crocus	SATIVUS
5	Autumn Crocus	speciosus ALBUS
20	Camassia	QUAMASH
50	Chionodoxa	SARDENSIS
1	Chionoscilla	X ALLENII
50	Crocus	ANCYRENSIS
25	Crocus	ANCYRENSIS
25	Crocus	vernus JOAN OF ARC
20	Eranthis	HYEMALIS
1	Fritillaria	imperialis LUTEA MAXIMA
25	Galanthus	ELWESII
1 (ie. 50 bulbs)	Galanthus	NATURALIZING COLLECTION
6	Lilium species	Lilium PUMILUM
10	Narcissus	RIP VAN WINKLE
10	Narcissus	MINNOW
25	Scilla	BIFOLIA
25	Scilla	SIBERICA
1	Trillium	GRANDIFLORUM
25	Tulipa	URUMIENSIS
464

Compost, Mr. Bean!

Our new four-door, two bin composter is up and running, started off with the last of the horse manure, some bags of leaves I found on Carlaw, and an inaugural bucket of kitchen scraps (paper-whites from Christmas and some chunks of apple the Wuzzle threw overboard from his high chair), poured in this evening with a sense of ceremony.