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There is little in a city that is more elemental to it than the streets it is built on. In the City of Toronto proper we have nearly 10,000 of them. That's a lot to keep track of, too many in fact to hold even 10 percent of them in memory. Ever since settlements first began to grow past the single street or common that the village structures crowded around, there has been a need to describe each street uniquely. In early days you referred to the street in simple ways; Church Street had the church on it, Main Street ran through the centre of town, River Road took you along, or at least down to, the river.
Have a big enough town and you run out of geographic features or coordinates to describe, and you start adding proper names to commemorate significant personages from the past. Your town grows into a city and you don't know who else to commemorate anymore? Well, it's open season and street names are drawn from every memory, every thought, every activity. Over 8 years of paying attention to the signs that record our street-naming history, Edward Chamberlain began to notice all sorts of themes scattered about the city. Last Friday when we posted our first survey of Chamberlain's work we only scratched the surface of his marvelous collection, but the cleverly grouped and beautifully presented street signs struck a chord with many people. It's about to strike more: Edward will be featured today (Wednesday, August 25) on CBC 1 (99.1 FM) at 3:40PM on Here and Now. To celebrate that, we thought we'd post a number of Edward's other thematic groups that you may not have seen yet. Let us take you to...
The Means To This End
The Toronto Very Public Library
A Place To Play
A Place Of Worship
An Alternate Place Of Worship
Colourful Areas
And finally,
Anywhere But Here
You can find many more examples of Edward Chamberain's work in the Street Signs thread on UrbanToronto.
EVCco
2010-08-21 18:34:10
