Locals vs. Tourists

Montreal

We’ve always known there is a gulf between the city as experienced by tourists and the city lived in by locals. Now we have a fun visual representation of that divide. Using various types of data from Flickr, one user of the photo-sharing website, Eric Fisher, has created maps that indicate the spots photographed by tourists and those shot by locals. Local photographs are blue, tourist photos red and undetermined photos yellow.

There are some problems in the methodology. Whether a Flickr user is a local or a tourist is determined by whether they photograph a given location over a long period of time (like a local would) or in just a few days (like a tourist would). That seems fair enough, but not everyone geotags their photos, which could possibly skew the results one way or another. One person who obsessive geotags all of his or her photos could have a disproportionately large representation on the map. You can see this in Vancouver, where one person’s geotagged cycle routes are prominently displayed.

Still, just by looking at the maps you get a strong intuitive sense that they are close to reality. In the Montreal map, tourists overwhelmingly stick to Old Montreal, St. Joseph’s Oratory and the Olympic Stadium while locals take photos throughout downtown and the Plateau, with an especially notable cluster of local shots around Lafontaine Park, Maisonneuve Park and the Botanical Gardens (which, interestingly enough, are right across the street from the Olympic tourist hub).

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Morning Coffee: Toronto’s Café Aesthetic

I Deal Coffee

The Communal Mule

I was looking forward to spending three days in Toronto last year: good food, fun times with friends I hadn’t seen in a long time, aimless autumnal wandering. Instead I was waylaid by a terrible cold I developed on the train from Montreal. I spent much of my time drowning my miseries in the city’s cafés — about five over the course of the weekend, if I recall correctly.

It turns out that drinking lots of milky, caffeinated beverages is the last thing you want to do when you have a horrible respiratory infection. (Also a no-no: hanging out in public places and spreading your germs.) Even if it didn’t make me feel better, though, I appreciated Toronto’s café aesthetic, which seems to lead towards messy spaces with rickety furniture, limited signage and casual, almost indifferent service.

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Aero Diptych

Photographed a couple years ago while en route to Calgary from Pearson International Airport in Toronto. I love how the pilot’s silhouette is so well defined and yet the idea of multiple existences in time and space is very much alive. If you’re viewing with a calibrated display you’ll enjoy subtleties like aqua pastel tones.

‘Round the Side Entrance

Theatre patrons, Toronto, 2004

Relative Stillness

After a long hiatus from photography, today I dove into the vault to share some moments from 2004.

Queen and Spadina is a pedestrian hub abuzz with shoppers and wanderers, delighting in everything from mainstream shopping, the fashion district, and good eats and affordable everything in Chinatown.

At night the bars fill up, cars scoot around, and clusters of smokers can be spotted as readily as the lineups for street meat. Ce soir, we note relative stillness.

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Kensington on a Gloomy Day

I didn’t have much time in Toronto, but I spent much of it in Kensington Market, a tangle of small streets and mismatched buildings just past Spadina Avenue. It isn’t a very big neighbourhoods, but it does a lot with what it’s got.

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Shots and Corners

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Before I left Montreal, my geography geek friend Sam Imberman organized an event for all of the other geography geeks he knew. He called it “Shots and Corners.” For three hours, we walked through Little Italy, Outremont, Mile End and the Plateau to visit everyone’s favourite streetcorners.

We honoured each corner with a toast and a shot of various types of liquor. My corner was the intersection of Groll Avenue and the laneway between Esplanade and Jeanne-Mance, which I picked partly because I like the way it looks and partly because I’m the kind of annoying person who has a preference for the obscure. (My drink, in case you’re curious, was gin.)

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The City Speaks

Mount Royal Avenue, Montreal

Franck Chambrun seems to have rediscovered my photos. After painting several of them in 2007, he has done the same over the past few weeks, though with a distinct shift in style. Whereas his earlier paintings distilled the streetlife depicted in my photos to its bare essence of form and colour, his new works seem to read the city’s thoughts and emotions. Maybe it’s my own personal bias, but his paintings seem to have a greater impact when you see them in conjunction with the photos on which they were based; you get to peek inside the artist’s own mind, seeing what he saw.

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Toronto’s Poster Plants

When I wrote about the political and cultural importance of posters (not to mention their aesthetic contribution to the city by making it look messy and lived-in), I never considered that they could also have an environmental benefit. Luckily, two artists in Toronto, Eric Cheung and Sean Martindale, have demonstrated exactly how this can be done: they’ve turned lamppost posters into tiny planters.

How’d they do it? Spacing’s Jake Schabas has the answers. “First, they cut triangular shapes directly into the thick existing poster layers. Then they peeled back those layers, wrapping the outside edge of the cut-out posters back into the pole to form the cones.

“Only staples were needed to hold the cones in place and support the soil and flowers planted, with some cones needing extra poster paper wheat-pasted onto the underside. All of the cones have an aeration hole at the bottom and are placed in a corkscrew patter that allows water to flow from one plant to the next.”

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Flying on Two Wheels

Sam Javanrouh, the Toronto photographer who often collaborates with Spacing, has a talent for riding a bike without hands, which he often uses to take photos for his blog, Daily Dose of Imagery. This time, he’s gone one step further and made a video. Forget for a moment that riding without hands on a city street is dangerous; this video captures, more than anything else I’ve seen, the real sense of freedom that set bicycles apart from other modes of transportation. Javanrouh speeds past cars, pedestrians and streetcars with the help of nothing but two wheels and his own energy. In Montreal, I could bike downtown from my apartment in about 10 minutes, about the same time as a taxi, 5 minutes faster that the bus and one-quarter the time of walking. It was like having the speed of a car without any of the additional baggage.

Free the Street Vendors

Hot dog vendor at Spadina and Queen. Photo by Kevin Steele

Toronto is finally getting the street food it deserves. After suffering under years of legislation that prohibited nearly everything but precooked sausages from being sold on the streets, vendors will now be able to serve food from hundreds of culinary traditions.

There’s just one problem: rather than embracing liberalized street food and all of its potential, City Hall is taking an overly bureaucratic approach. Just eight street vendors, out of a total of 19 that applied, will participate in a pilot project that will see Afghan chapli kebabs in Nathan Phillips Square, Ethiopian injera at Roundhouse Park and jerk chicken at Yonge and St. Clair, to name a few delicacies that have been specially chosen for their “nutritional value” and representation of Toronto’s ethnic makeup. Every aspect of the vendors’ operations will be tightly controlled: each one must use a custom-designed food cart (which range in price from $21,000 to $28,000) and they can’t deviate from their designated location.

City officials are concerned about food safety, naturally enough, but they’re also fussy about the nutritional value of what street vendors dish up, having gone so far as to pass a bylaw last December to ensure that street food is not only more “culturally diverse,” but “wholesome and nutritious.” It seems they want to discourage competition among vendors, too, since they’ve gone to great lengths to designate a handful of disparate locations at which street food can be sold under the new program.

It’s a remarkably heavy-handed approach, one at odds with the world’s great street food traditions, which are grounded in the ability to adapt quickly and flexibly to customer demand. Think of something like the now-famous Kogi taco truck in Los Angeles, which serves up Korean-inspired tacos from a roving truck whose location is announced only by Twitter and word-of-mouth. It’s innovative, delicious and exactly what people want — but it would be impossible in Toronto, where food vendors aren’t allowed to move around.

People less cynical than me can consider Toronto’s new approach a step towards street food freedom. But it’s an awfully small step. Even if this pilot project works out, what will dissuade city officials from micromanaging every future street food venture?

Early Morning Walks

Walking by the tracks, Danforth and Woodbine, Toronto, 2005

Leftovers

Lowrise to parking lot conversion, Toronto, 2008

Smoke Break

Audi carpark, Avenue Road, Toronto