February 2012
8 posts
2 tags
This week: Starbucks, Starbbucks, and snowstorms
In The Grid:
There’s only one fast food or coffee chain with more locations in Toronto than Subway. Guess who?
It’s not often that someone you’re interviewing pleads “Give us a chance!” but hey, it happens.
Here:
Speaking of coffee, if you’re looking for some, might I recommend Tim Hortins, Starbbucks, Seconp Cup, or Counrty Style?.Elsewhere:
Look, you can’t...
2 tags
You've always got time for Tim Hortins?
For this article for The Grid about just how many Starbucks, Second Cup, Timothy’s, Country Style, and Coffee Time locations there are in Toronto (a lot!), I spent a half-day digging through an Excel spreadsheet of all of Toronto’s active business licences. Because operators fill out the licence applications themselves, typos sometimes make their way onto a business licence, a problem...
2 tags
This week: Scarborough, Montreal, and the whole...
Elsewhere:
My map of all of Toronto’s residents’ associations and neighbourhood groups just got two dozen new organizations (there are 108 mapped now), thanks in no small part to Jessica Roher from the Scarborough Civic Action Network, who helped pass the map around the east end of the city. Thanks so much, Jessica!
The Grid went and got itself named the world’s best-designed...
2 tags
This week: planetariums, light-rail vehicles, and...
In The Grid:
The long-dormant McLaughlin Planetarium might end up being demolished in two years, and a new group called Planetarium Toronto wants to stop it from happening.* This is also how I learned that people really miss Lazer Zeppelin.
A small but positive change for Toronto Public Health’s food-safety program: the DineSafe signs you see in the windows of every restaurant, grocery...
2 tags
This week: lots and lots about empty lots
In The Grid:
Back in November, I wrote about the stretch of Queen Street West, near Bathurst, that burned down in 2008; now, a scoop: at least two of the three remaining vacant lots that have yet to be rebuilt are about to be.
Here:
I crunched some data to find out where bike accidents happen most frequently in Toronto, or at least the reported ones.
That map of Toronto residents’...
1 tag
Where bike accidents happen most often in Toronto
The Globe did a great thing today—they got, and mapped, twenty-five years of cycling collision data. And then they released the data, which makes it much easier for people like me to tell you, say, the total number of reported collisions on any street you can name. Which is what I’m going to do here.
Here are some of the Toronto streets that stuck out from a glance at the map as especially...
2 tags
"With new synagogue, Forest Hill Village goes old...
Along with my article about a missing Banksy, the other article I wrote for the Globe and Mail a few months back (while I was freelancing, before landing at The Grid) was about a synagogue coming to Forest Hill Village that’s based on one that the Nazis burned down in Poland. (It’s on the stretch of Spadina Road pictured above.) Since it’s no longer available for free online,...
3 tags
"Banksy was here. And he survived the wrecking...
Because it’s no longer freely available online, here’s the article I wrote for the Globe back in September, about the demolition of a downtown building that a work by super-famous British street artist Banksy was on.
The latest on the wall: it’s in storage, and so, too, is the stencil of a security guard that Banksy painted onto it. The new towers coming where it was are still...