Dead bird FLAP
The Fatal Light Awareness Program’s (FLAP) dead migratory birds exhibit on Thursday, March 21, at the ROM’s Schad Gallery of Biodiversity shone a light on bird collisions with buildings. Birds collected this year by FLAP volunteers: 2,400, a small fraction of the estimated 1 million that die in and around Toronto during the spring and fall migrations.
Cityscape
WHAT Cool cop shop 11 Division, on the site of the former Carleton Village Public School, built in 1913
WHERE Davenport and Osler, just east of the Junction
WHY One of eight Toronto buildings to receive a 2013 Ontario Association of Architects Design Excellence Award, it’s powered by 63, 121-metre-deep geothermal wells in the adjacent parking lot.
Weird scene
Who’s out to get Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti? The York West councillor says he has his suspicions, but they’re not for public consumption. But just to prove that he isn’t making up those stories from last year about “being followed” and his phone records being “tampered with,” he went out and hired a security firm, Executek International, headed by former Toronto deputy police chief Kim Derry, to do some snooping. The smoking gun? A threatening letter that tells Mammo to leave politics “before it’s too late.” How much stock can be put in that “evidence” is debatable. The letter writer couldn’t even spell Mammo’s first name right. In a statement issued by the councillor’s office on March 20, Derry is quoted as saying there’ve been attempts to “communicate” with Mammoliti’s computer and that various unspecified office files were copied. Hmm. An inside job?
Earth Hour
In Roncesvalles Village, Saturday, March 23, 8:30 pm
7% Drop in electricity use reported by Toronto Hydro. That’s the equivalent of taking 92,000 homes off the grid. Lesson learned: conservation pays the 2003 blackout haunts us still.
Photo by R. Jeanette Martin
Inside City Hall
Over the course of two days last month, three hired lobbyists held nine meetings with eight members of council about 25 metres of Bay Street. The super-important issue? Whether customers of chi-chi grocer Pusateri’s Fine Foods on Yorkville will continue to have a lay-by in which to stop their Escalades and toss the keys to a valet. The city, Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam and even the Bloor-Yorkville BIA want it gone. “There has been strong public support to have the sidewalks widened… to provide additional boulevard space to accommodate pedestrians and urban design elements,” says a staff report. But Pusateri’s won’t relinquish that stretch of public roadway without a fight. The issue has been put off for a second time and is expected to re-emerge at a May council meeting.
Online Exclusive
Come As You Are tells Toronto to use it or lose it.
Facing closure, the Queen West co-op sex shop is having a big-time sale and throwing a sex toy Easter egg hunt. John Semley has the dirty details.
