Categories
City Life

Construction Site in Downtown Toronto

Construction worker reaches for piece of metal suspended by a chain

There is a 50+ story condominium going up across the road from me. I like to complain that it’s blocking my view of the 49 story condominium south of it. And when the 49 story condominium was under construction, I liked to complain that it was blocking my view of the 30 story condominium south of it. And so on down to the lake. Such is life in a city.

One compensation is that the construction offers up no end of visual opportunities for a photographer. Like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, I sit by my window with a long lens mounted on a tripod and I scan the scene across the road. I’m looking for action, workers doing things, people in motion.

Categories
City Life

Grasett Park, Toronto

View through the "cheese cloth" installation at Grasett Park on Adelaide Street West, Toronto.

This is a view of Adelaide Street through one of the glass panels of Grasett Park, created by the Canada Ireland Foundation and opened on July 16th 2021 to commemorate the many Irish refugees who died of typhus on their journey to Toronto in 1847, and to celebrate the medical staff, like Dr. George Robert Grasett, who succumbed while treating them. It is a timely monument to mark the contributions of front line medical workers. During the typhus epidemic, Toronto’s original General Hospital was overwhelmed and so they built fever sheds where dying patients lay on cots between sheets of cheesecloth intended to keep away the flies. The memorial’s glass panels are embedded with a lacey design which evokes the cheesecloth partitions of the earlier epidemic.