AlvinofDiaspar
Moderator
I think Mike in TO is still around; not sure where Mr. Man went. Such is life online.
AoD
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UrbanToronto is Celebrating 20 Years
- Thread starter Edward Skira
- Start date
I think Mike in TO is still around; not sure where Mr. Man went. Such is life online.
AoD
Northern Light
Superstar
@Mike in TO is indeed still about, but almost entirely as lurker.
His scoops were legendary and among those things that brought me to UT.
Northern Light
Superstar
A note from me:
I joined UT, lo those many years ago.......because I was interested in development, in urban politics, in the changing City, and the future of the City.
I wanted to learn more about it, and how I could positively influence it too.
****
In the ancient days the youngin's here know nothing about ......before everything went to the web, you actually used to have to go down to Urban Affairs Library at Metro Hall (and before that Toronto City Hall) to read agendas and city reports.
I started doing that when I was....uhh, I'm going to guess at 12-13 years of age. That, of course, was quite the task, to go downtown, and dig up agendas and reports roughly once a month, and then if you wanted to retain some of the info, you had to photocopy the pages you wanted to take home!
Keeping up on things is a great deal easier today, and I'm entirely grateful!
****
As I joined UT, I was first merely a guest, then a new member.............but not the presence I am here today.
I just looked back at 2007, I averaged about 1 post per week.
For comparison's sake, I made 18 posts yesterday, LOL.
That evolution was one of my learning how to find agendas online, then how to move images by screenshot; and how to use the Lobbyist Registry and the Application Information Centre along with the Building Permit Status Page.
There are countless members who helped me over the years to learn the above and a great deal more. Some, merely by example, but others, by taking the time to 'teach me' how to look for things.
As time has passed, many members have also come to trust me, and to share, not yet public information on both public sector projects and private developments. I am extremely grateful for their trust and allowing me to act
as their conduit to provide insights to members here that would not otherwise be available.
Equally let me extend my gratitude to all those over the years have posted insights, scoops, explainers, renders, photos, article links, agenda/report links and so much more; as well as to those who have shared their technical expertise on construction, project management, engineering, planning, architecture amongst others.
UT has gone from being something I looked at from time to time; to something I keep open in a window through much of my day.
From a forum where I knew not a single poster in 'real life' to one where I have had the pleasure of meeting a great many of you, and can confidently call many here a friend.
****
I want to thank those that helped make that journey possible, and continue to make it fun. There really are too many names to list, and I would doubtless inadvertently omit too many!
But let me clearly extend my thanks to Current and former UT Staff, Writers, Admins/Management and Ownership; and to the many members here whose contributions have made this place and this poster what it and I have become.
I joined UT, lo those many years ago.......because I was interested in development, in urban politics, in the changing City, and the future of the City.
I wanted to learn more about it, and how I could positively influence it too.
****
In the ancient days the youngin's here know nothing about ......before everything went to the web, you actually used to have to go down to Urban Affairs Library at Metro Hall (and before that Toronto City Hall) to read agendas and city reports.
I started doing that when I was....uhh, I'm going to guess at 12-13 years of age. That, of course, was quite the task, to go downtown, and dig up agendas and reports roughly once a month, and then if you wanted to retain some of the info, you had to photocopy the pages you wanted to take home!
Keeping up on things is a great deal easier today, and I'm entirely grateful!
****
As I joined UT, I was first merely a guest, then a new member.............but not the presence I am here today.
I just looked back at 2007, I averaged about 1 post per week.
For comparison's sake, I made 18 posts yesterday, LOL.
That evolution was one of my learning how to find agendas online, then how to move images by screenshot; and how to use the Lobbyist Registry and the Application Information Centre along with the Building Permit Status Page.
There are countless members who helped me over the years to learn the above and a great deal more. Some, merely by example, but others, by taking the time to 'teach me' how to look for things.
As time has passed, many members have also come to trust me, and to share, not yet public information on both public sector projects and private developments. I am extremely grateful for their trust and allowing me to act
as their conduit to provide insights to members here that would not otherwise be available.
Equally let me extend my gratitude to all those over the years have posted insights, scoops, explainers, renders, photos, article links, agenda/report links and so much more; as well as to those who have shared their technical expertise on construction, project management, engineering, planning, architecture amongst others.
UT has gone from being something I looked at from time to time; to something I keep open in a window through much of my day.
From a forum where I knew not a single poster in 'real life' to one where I have had the pleasure of meeting a great many of you, and can confidently call many here a friend.
****
I want to thank those that helped make that journey possible, and continue to make it fun. There really are too many names to list, and I would doubtless inadvertently omit too many!
But let me clearly extend my thanks to Current and former UT Staff, Writers, Admins/Management and Ownership; and to the many members here whose contributions have made this place and this poster what it and I have become.
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Jayomatic
Active Member
I sure do! Maritime Life was one of the only commercial projects that wasn't a traditional box. Then along came Spire which wowed us with height. The city I see now is so different from what it was then.
UtakataNoAnnex
Senior Member
Wait...there was a party?
junctionist
Senior Member
Urban Toronto sparked a lifelong interest in urbanism and rekindled my childhood interest in architecture. I was admittedly ignorant when I joined on a lot of urban issues, but people here usually responded thoughtfully, respectfully, and intelligently. I learned a lot and quickly realized that it was a great community.
There used to be in-person meets, which were fun. Hopefully, we can have some more meets in the future. Also, I miss Urban Shocker, a legendary fan of neomodernism and Peter Clewes who would go "Clewes spotting" in the early days of the building boom
There used to be in-person meets, which were fun. Hopefully, we can have some more meets in the future. Also, I miss Urban Shocker, a legendary fan of neomodernism and Peter Clewes who would go "Clewes spotting" in the early days of the building boom
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whatever
Senior Member
I was on Maritime Life, and that was in 2001, so that gives a pretty good reference point in time!
3Dementia
Senior Member
With the name change to UT, a new soaring logo was designed by my graphic designer partner Stephen Wilke ... that also featured the 70 storey Trump Tower Toronto (before its haircut ;-).
egotrippin
Senior Member
So according to WHOIS, this domain was registered 2002-03-27, for what it's worth. So happy 21st birthday! lol
Growing up in Stouffville my life was not particularly urban, but I joined Urban Toronto around the time I moved downtown since I wanted to learn more about development, history and the city in general. I had briefly wanted to get into architecture when I was younger, which is why I became very invested in new development, although I never ended up pursuing anything close; I'm in food manufacturing now.
I was really into photography back in the day as well. I started an ambitious project to photograph every major street downtown to keep a record of the city's evolution, although that didn't quite pan out lol. Sadly I've lost a lot of my photos to failed hard drives and computers over the years, but a few live on from when I moved downtown in 2007, some likely on this website as I believe I posted a lot of my shots back in the day.
The source of my first and only profile picture on UT, the CN Tower shortly after being lit up again:
Along with the SkyDome around the same time:
One of the earliest "exciting" new glass towers, Spire, competing with the namesake spire of St. James Cathedral:
Also rising around the same time, Residences of College Park; much derided at the time if I recall:
The Keg on Lower Church Street before the condo on the SW corner (forget its name):
A not yet restored Pretzel Bell Tavern, pre Shangri-La:
And the old commercial building on King St. E. near Little Trinity Church, also pre-restoration:
FCP looking pretty dumpy in those days too, this was shortly before the marble slabs began to fall off; look at that, Toronto had a crisis of shedding buildings before all the balcony glass incidents:
A couple of significantly less dense skyline views:
And then one of my favourite shots from when HDR was all the rage, but also back before it was a standard feature on every phone. *shakes fist* I had to exposure bracket and then composite the images manually in Photoshop! I intend to recreate this one day with 160 Front in the picture.
Looking forward to many more years of UT!
Growing up in Stouffville my life was not particularly urban, but I joined Urban Toronto around the time I moved downtown since I wanted to learn more about development, history and the city in general. I had briefly wanted to get into architecture when I was younger, which is why I became very invested in new development, although I never ended up pursuing anything close; I'm in food manufacturing now.
I was really into photography back in the day as well. I started an ambitious project to photograph every major street downtown to keep a record of the city's evolution, although that didn't quite pan out lol. Sadly I've lost a lot of my photos to failed hard drives and computers over the years, but a few live on from when I moved downtown in 2007, some likely on this website as I believe I posted a lot of my shots back in the day.
The source of my first and only profile picture on UT, the CN Tower shortly after being lit up again:
Along with the SkyDome around the same time:
One of the earliest "exciting" new glass towers, Spire, competing with the namesake spire of St. James Cathedral:
Also rising around the same time, Residences of College Park; much derided at the time if I recall:
The Keg on Lower Church Street before the condo on the SW corner (forget its name):
A not yet restored Pretzel Bell Tavern, pre Shangri-La:
And the old commercial building on King St. E. near Little Trinity Church, also pre-restoration:
FCP looking pretty dumpy in those days too, this was shortly before the marble slabs began to fall off; look at that, Toronto had a crisis of shedding buildings before all the balcony glass incidents:
A couple of significantly less dense skyline views:
And then one of my favourite shots from when HDR was all the rage, but also back before it was a standard feature on every phone. *shakes fist* I had to exposure bracket and then composite the images manually in Photoshop! I intend to recreate this one day with 160 Front in the picture.
Looking forward to many more years of UT!
Parkdalian
Senior Member
Yeah, I wonder what happened to Urban Shocker. I had a few discussions with them back in the day!Urban Toronto sparked a lifelong interest in urbanism and rekindled my childhood interest in architecture. I was admittedly ignorant when I joined on a lot of urban issues, but people here usually responded thoughtfully, respectfully, and intelligently. I learned a lot and quickly realized that it was a great community.
There used to be in-person meets, which were fun. Hopefully, we can have some more meets in the future. Also, I miss Urban Shocker, a legendary fan of neomodernism and Peter Clewes who would go "Clewes spotting" in the early days of the building boom
ericmacm
Active Member
I joined at the end of 2015, when I was 18, during my first year of university, but I had been lurking for at least 2 years prior.
Growing up in Mississauga, I was personally always intrigued by skyscrapers and construction. I remember sitting in the back of my parents’ cars driving down the 403, watching the Absolute World towers getting built. My early exposure to downtown Toronto was mainly when my dad took me and my siblings to downtown Toronto for Blue Jays games, concerts at the ACC, or the Auto Show. When I got older, I was increasingly more interested in tower development. I remember seeing downtown change year after year, very quickly filling in with new tower developments. One of the major inflection points in my interest was learning about the Oxford Place development, which I’m still disappointed never came to fruition in that form. It was especially exciting to see large towers being built in my own backyard, at places like Eglinton/Erin Mills and Eglinton/Hurontario. I was also really into infrastructure development, with one of the major projects I was interested in being the Mississauga Transitway.
By the time I was graduating high school in 2015, I had made the decision to leave the GTA for school and go to Windsor (my grades also helped me make this decision lmfao) to get my engineering degree. At that time, I joined UrbanToronto so I could still feel connected to my interests. I can say for sure that UrbanToronto helped form the interests that led me down my current career path into environmental engineering. My work is not often directly related to major urban tower or infrastructure developments, but it is essential early on in the process and have already been part of some major projects in SW Ontario, more specifically London, where I live now.
Additionally, thanks to other users like (mainly) @Koops65 creating future skyline models, being here helped spur another interest in 3D modelling, which is what lead to me making my Pan-Canadian Skylines Project. This work has done a lot of things for my career and has brought me to places I never even thought of, including having multiple articles written about this project, and even doing a radio interview with CBC London back in 2021.
At this point, I couldn’t imagine where I would be without UrbanToronto. Here’s to many more years!
Growing up in Mississauga, I was personally always intrigued by skyscrapers and construction. I remember sitting in the back of my parents’ cars driving down the 403, watching the Absolute World towers getting built. My early exposure to downtown Toronto was mainly when my dad took me and my siblings to downtown Toronto for Blue Jays games, concerts at the ACC, or the Auto Show. When I got older, I was increasingly more interested in tower development. I remember seeing downtown change year after year, very quickly filling in with new tower developments. One of the major inflection points in my interest was learning about the Oxford Place development, which I’m still disappointed never came to fruition in that form. It was especially exciting to see large towers being built in my own backyard, at places like Eglinton/Erin Mills and Eglinton/Hurontario. I was also really into infrastructure development, with one of the major projects I was interested in being the Mississauga Transitway.
By the time I was graduating high school in 2015, I had made the decision to leave the GTA for school and go to Windsor (my grades also helped me make this decision lmfao) to get my engineering degree. At that time, I joined UrbanToronto so I could still feel connected to my interests. I can say for sure that UrbanToronto helped form the interests that led me down my current career path into environmental engineering. My work is not often directly related to major urban tower or infrastructure developments, but it is essential early on in the process and have already been part of some major projects in SW Ontario, more specifically London, where I live now.
Additionally, thanks to other users like (mainly) @Koops65 creating future skyline models, being here helped spur another interest in 3D modelling, which is what lead to me making my Pan-Canadian Skylines Project. This work has done a lot of things for my career and has brought me to places I never even thought of, including having multiple articles written about this project, and even doing a radio interview with CBC London back in 2021.
At this point, I couldn’t imagine where I would be without UrbanToronto. Here’s to many more years!
Dan416
Senior Member
This and TrekBBS are the two forums I spend/spent the most time on over the years. TrekBBS I was on longer, since it shows my join date as March 1, 2002 and UT shows my join date as April 24, 2007. I was definitely on UT before the switchover, and I noticed in that copied thread that I used to use the moniker "dashing dan" which I thought was cool back in the Web 1.0 days of MSN/Yahoo Messenger/ICQ/AIM.
I was at U of T from 2001-2005, so I'm assuming that is why I joined, although tbh I can't remember. After that I was mostly in the city for going out and such. And starting this year I'm now commuting downtown 2x, soon to be 3x, a week for work, and rarely go dt to "go out" anymore, sadly. I guess I got old.
I find of late I pay more attention to the infrastructure projects more so than the buildings. I think, like many, at first the most important thing was height. Nowadays, something like The Well I find much more appealing. Who is to say if my tastes would have evolved like this if not for UT.
Super grateful for the quality of so much of the discourse on the forum, have definitely learned a lot and has helped me see things differently, especially since I never went into urban planning in school or anything like that (although I did try to apply to the urban planning program at Ryerson years ago as an adult student, but did not get in). If I knew then what I know now, I probably would have tried to get into something like that when I was in high school and applying to university.
I was at U of T from 2001-2005, so I'm assuming that is why I joined, although tbh I can't remember. After that I was mostly in the city for going out and such. And starting this year I'm now commuting downtown 2x, soon to be 3x, a week for work, and rarely go dt to "go out" anymore, sadly. I guess I got old.
I find of late I pay more attention to the infrastructure projects more so than the buildings. I think, like many, at first the most important thing was height. Nowadays, something like The Well I find much more appealing. Who is to say if my tastes would have evolved like this if not for UT.
Super grateful for the quality of so much of the discourse on the forum, have definitely learned a lot and has helped me see things differently, especially since I never went into urban planning in school or anything like that (although I did try to apply to the urban planning program at Ryerson years ago as an adult student, but did not get in). If I knew then what I know now, I probably would have tried to get into something like that when I was in high school and applying to university.
JasonParis
Moderator
I'm tempted to change my moniker back to Darkstar416 for the ~20th anno!
FTR, it was me trying to follow the construction progress of Line 4 (Sheppard) that inadvertently dumped me into an early UT thread, and well, the rest is history.
FTR, it was me trying to follow the construction progress of Line 4 (Sheppard) that inadvertently dumped me into an early UT thread, and well, the rest is history.
Branden Simon
Active Member
Since i was joined UT member as The Big Developers and now my full name Branden Simon at age 15 on April 30, 2018, I was dreaming at architecture and creating designing/drawing projects.
I was born and currently in Hamilton there's not much of High-Rise towers in Downtown in early 2000 and 2010's and today it get grower with couple of new high rise buildings and new detached and townhouses in Sub areas. Since UT added Hamilton on the map last year and now there's bunch of projects in Hamilton
I posted my first pic it was sales center building at Mirabella Condominiums before construction with my Iphone SE and today I have my camera equipment: A iphone 14, DJI Mini 2, and Canon SX620 HS, I'm planning to buy a new camera soon. I take on bike rides around Hamilton and other areas.
Then I was taking a break from posting on UT to focus on High School and i was graduated my High School in 2020 and back posting on UT in Feb 2021, I was started to create a new thread on Buildings and it was Millen Road Condos at beginning of January of this year and now I'm posting couple of times a day.
Here's to another next 20 years of UT
I was born and currently in Hamilton there's not much of High-Rise towers in Downtown in early 2000 and 2010's and today it get grower with couple of new high rise buildings and new detached and townhouses in Sub areas. Since UT added Hamilton on the map last year and now there's bunch of projects in Hamilton
I posted my first pic it was sales center building at Mirabella Condominiums before construction with my Iphone SE and today I have my camera equipment: A iphone 14, DJI Mini 2, and Canon SX620 HS, I'm planning to buy a new camera soon. I take on bike rides around Hamilton and other areas.
Then I was taking a break from posting on UT to focus on High School and i was graduated my High School in 2020 and back posting on UT in Feb 2021, I was started to create a new thread on Buildings and it was Millen Road Condos at beginning of January of this year and now I'm posting couple of times a day.
Here's to another next 20 years of UT
A Torontonian Now
Senior Member
Congratulations Urban Toronto on the 20(+?) years!
I'm humbled to have been a member now for nearly half its life - having joined in Jan 2014 (which feels like, but was not, yesterday).
I first started lurking SSP while in Ottawa around 2006, joining as user "Ottawan" in 2008. When I moved to Toronto in 2012, I was surprised by how little coverage there was on SSP, especially given that Toronto is a larger centre. It did not take me long to find it was because everyone was on UT!
I quickly became a lurker here, and joined as a member in Jan 2014, as mentioned. Since I was "Ottawan" on SSP, and did not yet know I would settle in Toronto for a lifetime, I joined with that name, changing to the current handle about a year ago now.
I'd like to thank the staff, owners, mods, and indeed entire membership of UT for the enormously positive impact you've had on my life. Construction, urbanism, planning & architecture has always been an interest of mine, but by fostering this interest, teaching me about these issues and giving me the industry-specific lexicon, I have been inspired and able to transition from the relatively run-of-the-mill legal career that brought me to Toronto to having one that very much is related to what is covered here. In fact, I have just learned of my success with a new opportunity that is very exciting, but for which it would not be prudent to have the details publicly attached to this pseudonym.
So, again: THANK YOU, Urban Toronto, and here's to another 20 years!
I'm humbled to have been a member now for nearly half its life - having joined in Jan 2014 (which feels like, but was not, yesterday).
I first started lurking SSP while in Ottawa around 2006, joining as user "Ottawan" in 2008. When I moved to Toronto in 2012, I was surprised by how little coverage there was on SSP, especially given that Toronto is a larger centre. It did not take me long to find it was because everyone was on UT!
I quickly became a lurker here, and joined as a member in Jan 2014, as mentioned. Since I was "Ottawan" on SSP, and did not yet know I would settle in Toronto for a lifetime, I joined with that name, changing to the current handle about a year ago now.
I'd like to thank the staff, owners, mods, and indeed entire membership of UT for the enormously positive impact you've had on my life. Construction, urbanism, planning & architecture has always been an interest of mine, but by fostering this interest, teaching me about these issues and giving me the industry-specific lexicon, I have been inspired and able to transition from the relatively run-of-the-mill legal career that brought me to Toronto to having one that very much is related to what is covered here. In fact, I have just learned of my success with a new opportunity that is very exciting, but for which it would not be prudent to have the details publicly attached to this pseudonym.
So, again: THANK YOU, Urban Toronto, and here's to another 20 years!