Toronto Bloor Street Revitalization | ?m | ?s | Bloor-Yorkville BIA | architectsAlliance

Maybe it's all the cigarette butts in the planters? Smokers use them like giant outdoor ashtrays.
 
argus said:
Maybe it's all the cigarette butts in the planters? Smokers use them like giant outdoor ashtrays.
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I doubt it, otherwise every tree and plant in this city would've died by now. Smokers use the entire city as their ashtray.
 
I wasn't being serious. It was a comment on the planters standing in as ashtrays for the smokers on Bloor.
 
Northeast corner of Yonge & Bloor. Whatever is going in here is going to be substantial

bloorstreets11.jpg
 

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Nice - it looks like something that would be as big as Ai Wei Wei's Rising at Shangri La. Too bad the backdrop is such an ugly building in this case.

AoD
 
From the Bloor-Yorkville BIA website.

It is our hope that, come early this fall, you will pause to enjoy our breath-taking new sculpture, located on the north east corner of Yonge and Bloor. Placed strategically at Canada's most prominent intersection, this new work of art will be the finishing touch to the Bloor Street Transformation Project.

Note: Guaranteed to be a topic of discussion and a new favourite location to take "selfies"!!!
 
thecharioteer said:
Shouldn't the replacement of all the dead trees be the "finishing touch"? Are these people delusional?
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Yes, the replaced trees and removal of the ugly street lighting would be the finishing touches. It would have been nice to replace our ugly traffic signals with something more elegant like what Montreal has for example. The Bloor benches are a terrible design and are not inviting for people to sit and enjoy the area.

This is the typical Toronto mentality. Be proud of half-baked work done on the cheap. The best public works I have seen in Toronto is Sugar Beach but that is deemed scandalous in this cheap-skate Alpha wannabe City.
 
lead82 said:
Yes, the replaced trees and removal of the ugly street lighting would be the finishing touches. It would have been nice to replace our ugly traffic signals with something more elegant like what Montreal has for example. The Bloor benches are a terrible design and are not inviting for people to sit and enjoy the area.

This is the typical Toronto mentality. Be proud of half-baked work done on the cheap. The best public works I have seen in Toronto is Sugar Beach but that is deemed scandalous in this cheap-skate Alpha wannabe City.
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I agree that public spaces in Toronto are not generally up to the level I would like them to be in a city with this population and level of wealth, but something in the tone of your post stands out as the REAL problem with Toronto: the passive, cynical naysaying of so many people in this city.

I would like to know what YOU do to make Toronto better, other than sit on the sidelines of online fora and carp at the results of other people's work? It's people like you, who project your own glass-is-half-empty perspective onto the entire city, rather than training it legitimately on a particular developer, designer, decision maker etc... that is the true champion of mediocrity. Sorry to ruin your delusion, but cranky, blanket-statement naysaying doesn't count as contributing. It does nothing but breed yet more of the same.

Cynicism begets cynicism... so perhaps before you throw around half-baked labels like "cheap-skate" and "wannabe" to describe an entire, complex, diverse city you take a look at yourself and ask what YOU are contributing that the rest of us here aren't living up to? And then, as Gandhi put it: "be the change"
 
^On a similar note, to the extent that this is a project with public money and impacts the public realm I think we as members of the general public should offer our input and criticism. On the other hand this is a BIA initiative, meaning that private business interests and individuals paid money for this. This money is above and beyond the contribution of normal individuals and businesses to the city good. I think that act deserves our respect regardless of if we feel it was ill used or don't personally like the results. If we fail to treat their contribution with respect I feel it opens us to questions such as UrbanFervour pose: what are we contributing? It's easy to say that another person's contribution is poor, it's much harder to contribute our own efforts or resources.
 
One of my neighbours wrote to the Bloor BIA about the sad state of the trees and the granite and got the following reply:

Thank you for caring about our neighbourhood.

Our BIA is working with the Forestry Department of the City to replace the dead trees. It may be the spring of 2015 before they are all replanted.

We are monitoring and working towards repairing all the granite on Bloor.

Sadly the wheels of bureaucracy run very slowly.



Victoria Drysdale, Office Administrator

Bloor-Yorkville Business Improvement Area

416.928.3553 x 21 bybia@bloor-yorkville.com

Now we all know who to write to!
 
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