All posts in category City Walks

a described route & walk in an urban environment

So T.O.

14 September – And then, from morning to afternoon, I leave Toronto and land in Vancouver. Here I am, looking through slight drizzle to the mountains, with one last love-letter I want to offer “T.O.” (Tee-Oh, Toronto.)

My T.O., that is, nobody else’s — my own mix of memory and re-discovery, blind to what others would notice, alert to all my own triggers.

Glimpses from streetcars, for example.

A rampart mural by Shalak Attack, which I remember watching her paint, many years ago…

the distinctive two-tone brick and architecture I associate with my own decades in the Cabbagetown neighbourhood, but common to the city in that era…

and Streetcar Dog. Not unique to Toronto, but part of my own memory bank of riding the TTC.

Then there are my re-discoveries on foot, all around the Grange neighbourhood and the Art Gallery of Ontario, where I was for years a volunteer and therefore an area where I came and went, a very great deal.

Bronze turtle watching martial-arts in Butterfield Park, the new-since-my-time refurbishment of the land just east of Grange Park and south of OCAD (Ontario College of Art + Design) University…

Henry Moore’s Large Two Forms, looking very at home in its new home in the reinvented Grange Park, with the brilliant blue rear wall and distinctive Frank Gehry staircase as backdrop…

and, once inside, the soaring glulam arches of the AGO’s front-façade Galeria Italia.

Unchanged, these arches. Ditto, the way the Galeria invites you to look out across Dundas Street. Native son Gehry made sure his design honoured and welcomed the neighbourhood of his childhood as its own visual final wall.

I am in the AGO as much to walk old ground as to see current exhibitions, but in the end I do both.

The Joyce Wieland retrospective, Heart On, speaks not only to my memories of her bursting on the scene, but also to how current she now is, once again.

Wieland was a fierce ’60s-70s feminist and, despite (or perhaps because of) long years in New York, a fierce Canadian patriot as well. She often used the soft “feminine” skills of embroidery or quilting to express strong political convictions.

For example, with her 1970 work, I Love Canada – J’aime Canada.

Awwww. (Twist finger in cheek.) So sweet.

Now read the signage.

And read the embroidered fine print.

Wieland’s narrow definition of Canadian identity is now out-dated — but the rest of her analysis is Elbows-Up contemporary.

Some hours later, I leave the building. I still have more circling and prowling to do.

I check out the S/W corner of Dundas West & McCaul. It is also the N/E corner of the AGO footprint and, in my day, was still home to Moore’s Large Two Forms. For the first time, I see what now sits on that corner — Brian Jungen’s commissioned work, Couch Monster. (Read more, here, in a fine post by our WordPress colleague, Canadian Art Junkie.)

I circle the work, and also take in the larger view, including the top of an old mural by veteran Toronto artist Birdo, now obscured by newer construction and backed by even-newer construction.

Finally, and not with terrifically high hopes, I take myself across Dundas West and into the alley between Dundas and Darcy Street to the north. I am eager but also dreading to see what it’s like, these days. My memory is of an alley bursting with street art, full of the “garage-door art” that I associate with my memories of Toronto.

And…

there it still is. On and on, to the west, beyond the frame of this image. Not exactly as it was, of course not, but alive and current and so-very-T.O.

I turn right on a second, N/S, alley, passing delicate tendrils and other art as I go…

and emerge on Darcy Street.

Where I drink in an enclave of old downtown residential architecture, oh look, some still survives…

and then pivot on my heel to look east down the block. Out to McCaul Street.

Still some old brick homes, and still the spire of St. Patrick’s Church (the 5th-oldest Roman Catholic parish in Toronto) as well — plus the immediate examples of all the new towers now exploding skyward.

There it all is.

The whole jarring/exhilarating, cacophonous/euphonious, forever-evolving symphony of the city.

So T.O.

7 Comments
by icelandpenny on 14 September 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, photography, street art, Toronto, Travel
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Posted by icelandpenny on 14 September 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/09/14/so-t-o/

Snowy Owl + Mailbox Spider

12 September 2025 – More old + new, here in Toronto. The joy of time with old friends and familiar places, but also the joy of discovery.

For example, Biidaasige Park — some 40 hectares once complete, down at the mouth of the Don River and part of an even larger overall program to re-gentle, re-green and detoxify the sprawling Port Lands for what we now understand to be wiser, more multi-purpose and more inclusive use. Read more about Biidaasige (“Bee-daw-SEE-geh” with a hard “g”) on the City‘s website, on an analytical design website, and in her 6 September “As I walk Toronto” post by our WordPress colleague, Mary C.

The park is very much a work in progress, but some elements are already in place. They include several imaginative children’s playgrounds, one of which has as its guardian spirit, Snowy Owl.

Not only is his open tummy a stage for all kinds of child-friendly events, the interior of his body is open to visitors as well. You can walk inside…

and start climbing. Stairs, then ladders, and up you go.

Bang-thwack-ouch! Smack your head a few times and you finally realize the structure is child-scale. You learn to bend and duck accordingly.

Your reward? You get to look out through the Owl’s eyes, across the undulating playground, across Commissioner St. and westward toward downtown.

I scramble back down. We take ourselves off to explore trails down in the marshy areas around the various channels.

I am awestruck. This grubby, much-abused waterfront is being transformed. We lean on the railing of this pedestrian bridge and admire the grace of the new vehicular bridges, the abundant wild greenery along the banks, the habitat all this must offer for so many species. (Plus the knowledge of habitat yet to come, in plans for housing and further human community and settlement as well.)

And then… we move on.

The day is hot, and sunny, and, thanks to on-going park construction, noisy. We want still to be close to nature, but somewhere that offers soothing shade and a lack of noise.

All of which leads us to discover…

Mailbox Spider.

He is only some 4-5 km. away, slightly south-west of Biidaasige Park…

but in a very different world. The world of the Toronto islands.

More specifically and of importance to me, we are on one small island within that larger cluster: Algonquin Island, which is reached by a pedestrian bridge close to the Ward’s Island ferry dock.

Trace your finger over that pedestrian bridge and tap the intersection just off the bridge: Omaha and Ojibway avenues. Got it? Right there on that corner lot, almost invisible within its own mini-forest of trees and shrubbery, there is a white cottage. The white cottage where, 60 years ago, I used to live.

So it’s heavy-duty nostalgia time for me, and my friend is generously indulgent.

We stop, immediately off the bridge, to explore the community take/leave stand. It was active decades ago and, to my delight, is still active now.

A couple of Algonquin residents are near-by, people about my age. We chat, I explain I used to live here, I name a few names and they smile. We three didn’t know each other, but we each knew these other people.

Then, my friend and I, we just weave slowly up and down the narrow, car-free streets. (It is on Ojibway that we meet Mailbox Spider, with his blue cottage tucked away in the rear.)

The atmosphere is leafy, and peaceful. It is now a world of pretty smooth relations between residents and City — the welcome resolution of the long fight by residents and supporters to protect any residential community at all, in the face of the City’s desire to remove everybody and make the entire islands cluster into one big park. Now most of the land mass is park, but residential communities are recognized and stable on both Ward’s and Algonquin.

We reach the foot of Ojibway Avenue, down at Seneca, which runs along the island’s harbour-side waterfront, and offers panoramic views back across the water to the city core.

Including that CN Tower. I gave you only a distant and slivered view in my previous post; here it is, front and centre.

Still on Seneca, a good example of visitor/resident co-existence:

a bench for tourists and residents alike; one of the island’s many art boxes, again for the pleasure of tourists and residents alike — and a hammock in a resident’s front yard. For that family only, thank you!

Finally, my nostalgia satisfied and our minds and bodies refreshed by the peaceful environment…

we board a ferry, and head back to the city.

1 Comment
by icelandpenny on 12 September 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Toronto, Travel, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 12 September 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/09/12/snowy-owl-mailbox-spider/

Land Cruise: 4 September

Somewhere north of Gillam, the sun not yet visible, but the horizon glowing…

and, an hour and a half later, the first glimpse of Churchill, its massive port structure.

We arrive. We scatter, each to our own priorities.

Mine will take me pretty directly from the train station (the dark oblong near the top of that bottom blue loop) straight through town to Hudson Bay.

Not quite directly. First a stop to refuel in the Seaport Hotel’s coffee shop.

It is clean and cheerful, unpretentious, and near the station. A convenient pivot-point. (I have no idea of the dramatic role it will play in my life, later that day.)

Fortified, I take my own boots past a boots mural…

straight-lining it to the water.

And there it is.

There, too, is one of the warning signs I’ve been told about. The polar bear “season” has not yet quite started. But this is the polar bears’ world, and they live by their own instincts, not the schedule of glossy tourist brochures. Every visitor is told to obey all the signs. Yes, I am told, go to the beach area, but no, don’t go to water’s edge, because bears can rise right up out of the sea, and don’t go near the rocks, because that’s where they like to hang out. As the tourism rep in the train station explains to the person in front of me: “You wouldn’t want to step on one.”

Lots of “don’ts.” I take them seriously. You have to respect nature.

So I do something very safe. I climb this convenient, if unorthodox, observation tower…

right to the top level.

Where, first, I view the forbidden rocks to the east …

and then, second, I focus on the beach right in front of me.

I focus, specifically, on the man way down there at water’s edge, walking happily along — man plus small dog, equally happy and unleashed.

This dog.

Not eaten by a polar bear, as you can see. The dog’s owner is a quite elderly Inuk, so I decide if anyone can give me reliable advice, he’s the one. I greet him. I say I watched him enjoying his shoreline walk, and I’d like to do that myself.

He explains he goes there because he likes to pick up stones. “Me too!” I cry. We beam at each other, dig in our respective pockets, and hold out our handfuls of stones for mutual inspection. Much murmured enthusiasm and poking at treasures ensues. After all that, I ask about safety. He says, “You have to watch. I don’t see any bears around right now.” He adds that if I position myself behind the sand bar, I should be fine, since I won’t be next to deep water.

With further compliments about our respective good taste in beach stones, we part company. He toward town, and I straight to the rivulet behind that sand bar.

Where (bottom left)…

I keep the promise I made my toes, that day on the Point Grey beach.

The day is cool — about 9-10C — but sunny and not yet windy. I continue walking the beach, completely happy. I see beluga whales cresting the water surface — just arcs of white, rising and falling, nothing dramatic, but clear enough for me to know they are indeed whales and not waves.

Finally, I walk west toward another line of forbidden rocks…

obediently stop short, and turn inland.

These bright, helpful signposts are all over town. This one is just uphill from the beach, and persuades me to visit the Granary Ponds…

with an initial stop in St. Paul’s Anglican Church, there on the left.

I look at various artefacts, including this 1930s Cree plaque quoting scripture from the Gospel of St. Matthew…

and I read the 2008 Federal Government’s Statement of Apology, signed by then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to all those who suffered under the residential school system. Here’s an excerpt:

The road out to the Granary Ponds leads me past riots of wildflowers, still vibrant so late in the season…

and then a closer view of the Port of Churchill…

which, if political promises are kept, will benefit from major expansion in the near future. (An initiative announced by Prime Minister Carney during a European trip — one more move in building stronger and more diversified relations with other parts of the world.)

I backtrack into town. My one goal is to walk. A lot. Though I’ve had only one prior visit to Churchill, in the early 1980s, I spent a lot of that decade going in and out of the Arctic hamlets. I haven’t the foolishness, the arrogance, to think I am any kind of insider, but I do still resonate with all of this. Young self did lots of jumping around. Old self seeks only to put feet on the land, to see and smell and hear the land, and be in this place. So I walk.

And, oh yes, I see very northern sights.

This truck decal, for instance…

and this komatik (sled), waiting for winter…

and this polite request in the doorway of Itsanitaq Museum.

But I also see streetscapes that could be anywhere in Canada.

There are community gardens all over Canada, as well…

though this one takes proper northern measures to protect the crops.

Right next to it, a happy pod of beluga whales, swimming a very different ocean.

And then… and then, no more pictures.

Because then, getting on for 5 pm, my gut announces that it is not pleased with the tasty falafel bowl I had for lunch in a highly recommended local bistro. My gut makes clear that it plans soon to start Throwing Out the Garbage.

This will be merely unpleasant, not dangerous, but also highly inconvenient. The train station is not yet open and I am not registered in any hotel. I’m again near the Seaport Hotel, so I walk in. What else can I do? They look after me. I am safe and sheltered. My gut can briskly go about its housekeeping detail in privacy. When I finally totter off to the train station, a fellow passenger, the station staff and VIA Rail staff are all equally practical and kind. Soon I am whooshed aboard the train, tucked up in my own sleeper-cabin. After a few more rounds of garbage-removal, I sleep. When I wake again, I am completely well. It’s all over.

So is the day in Churchill. Our train is now in motion.

I lie there, think about all that helpful kindness — and decide that my little bout of food poisoning was in fact the final heart-warming event in a thoroughly wonderful day.

8 Comments
by icelandpenny on 7 September 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in City Walks, Nature, photography, street art, Travel, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 7 September 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/09/07/land-cruise-4-september/

Land Cruise: 1 September

1 September – I’ll be one day and a bit, in Winnipeg. On the land, and on the water too.

The theme of land and rivers, the two great pathways of our country, keeps gaining strength. Not because I intellectually seek it out. Because it is imposing itself on me.

A tear-off map at my hotel inspires my walk: down to the Red River, there behind the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and then along the walking trails up into Stephen Juba Park, back down and around the curve of The Forks (where the Assiniboine River joins the Red), onto the water in a 30-minute tour, and more river-side walking, both rivers.

The Red River. The cereal of my childhood, even my very own Red River coat, as a child.

The river, of course, is more important for reasons other than cereal and coats.

My path along the Red up into Stephen Juba Park leads me past old pilings, last remnants of the glory days of this port (before the Panama Canal opened, and offered shipping an easier, quicker route through the Americas).

This is also when I first tap my boots in the water.

Literal next step in a whimsical project I hope I can complete: having tapped toes in the Pacific (Burrard Inlet, cf. my post of 25 August), I want now to tap them in the Red River, Hudson Bay and Lake Ontario.

Did you notice the trestle bridge, in the distance of that last photo? Used for military purposes, I’m told, and now the train bridge. I’m drawn to it. I admire the utility of these bridges, their visible geometry and, once I draw near, the majesty (albeit scruffy) of the near end of this particular example.

After I turn, after I follow the riverwalk bend around the point of land, I am now beside the Assiniboine River. I tap toes in its waters as well — a bonus not part of the original plan — and, as I do so, I notice a yellow Waterways tour boat mid-stream.

There is a dock, there is a boat about to depart, I climb aboard.

Only one fellow passenger, this early in the day: a Montreal film-maker, in town to work on a production here. Our guide has an impeccably Spanish name and an impeccably Canadian accent: his family moved here when he was two years old.

Kayak going one way, we’re going the other. Miguel is powering ahead, having now explained those three lines on the bridge pillar. Each is a water level: blue for normal spring levels, yellow for the danger of rising waters, red for floods. (I think of my brother’s years in Winnipeg, and the spring he helped sandbag against that year’s inundation.)

Back on land, toes duly tapped in not one but two mighty rivers, I head for the markets within The Forks complex. While you can buy food aboard the Winnipeg-Churchill run, it’s the like of microwaved subs, I’ve been told — the same person then suggesting I lay in some supplies.

So I do. Bison Snack Sticks (Canadian), Thunderbird “real food” bars (American), oat cakes (Isle of Mull) and Gemini apples (very very very local). Tomorrow morning, I’ll snag myself a few hard-boiled eggs from the hotel’s breakfast bar as well.

Feeling sufficiently prepared, I leave The Forks. But not before I admire Caboose 76602, a permanent installation on the grounds.

Built in Montreal in the 1930s, retired from service in Winnipeg in 1988, it is now “dedicated to the thousands of CN train crews who travelled through Winnipeg and the ‘East Yard’ that is now The Forks.”

Tomorrow, 12:05 pm Central time, I’ll be back on board one of today’s trains.

The one that will take me to Churchill.

7 Comments
by icelandpenny on 1 September 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in City Walks, Nature, photography, Travel, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 1 September 2025

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Discoveries

22 August 2025 – I mean to walk right through Dude Chilling Park, en route farther east. Instead, I stop to admire a brand-new hopscotch chalked into the park’s northern pathway.

Squares a bit on the mingy side, true, but lots of them. And so carefully executed. With European cross-strokes for the 1s and 7s. And the flourish of two colours, not one.

Instead of walking on, I settle myself on the bench just beyond…

curious to see if anyone yields to the temptation, and starts to hop.

First up, a very young toddler and her mum. The child is clearly new to the act of walking, let alone leaping around. She does not attempt to hop. She stops, frowns slightly at this unknown design, and then, intuitively, gets the idea.

Very slowly, very carefully, she obeys the visual clues: just one foot here, but both feet there. And then one, and then two… Until she loses patience, that is, and a laughing mother carries her off.

Next up, by complete contrast, a geezer. (Being one myself, I can say that.) He also stops, contemplates. Then, with a grin, he tucks his cane under one arm and starts to hop.

Hippity-hop! And again!

Until… whoops. A wobble corrected, a tumble averted, and his cane is prudently back in use.

He grins at me, amused. “Maybe I’m a little old for this.”

My mind flashes to a particular cartoon in Searle’s Cats (Ronald Searle, Dobson Books Ltd., 1967)…

and its caption: “Acrobatic cat discovering quite unexpectedly that it is too old for the game.”

I grin right back at him.

We are complicit, he and I — fellow adventurers in this demanding but rewarding late stage of life.

5 Comments
by icelandpenny on 22 August 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Uncategorized, Vancouver
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Posted by icelandpenny on 22 August 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/08/22/discoveries/

That Smile

18 August 2025 – I’m just off a False Creek ferry and walking uphill toward home, still full of Flat White and café chatter with a good friend, when I stop to admire another good friend. (Albeit in a different category of friendship: painted, not human.)

There she is, high a-top her alley home, her quizzical smile floating out across the neighbourhood.

Is she our Mona Lisa, 21st-c. alley-girl version?

No. Given the pace of local redevelopment, and the building that is her home, she is our Cheshire Cat. Soon she will be gone, with only her smile lingering behind, and only in memory.

I”m standing at 3rd Avenue & Ontario Street, the intersection at the north-east corner of that L-shaped site, outlined in red. This is the huge redevelopment site purchased by the PCI Group in 2021, whose redevelopment proposal finally received City approval in May of this year. Cheshire Cat Smile is mid-way down lot 5, on the south side of the alley.

I head down the alley. Not for the first time, but it’s different every time, isn’t it? (No need to repeat the Heraclitus discussion…)

Crow in a convex mirror! I’ve never noticed him before, so already the alley is different.

The actual crow, opposite…

which causes me, for the first time, to pay attention to the mural as a whole — signed R. Tetrault and, as I later learn, called Flight Path.

Murals both side of an alley and a whole line-up of hydro H-frame poles in between! Sigh. Life is perfect.

I tip my head, pay homage to the Cheshire Cat Smile…

knowing it’s tagged Lil Top but also knowing I’ve never been able to find any info about that tag. So Cheshire Cat she has become.

The woman I’d noticed under the nearest H-frame, as I photographed Flight Path, is now standing next to me, also enjoying the art.

“It’s people expressing themselves,” she says. “And we get to look at it for free! It makes us happy.”

She points: “Like that flower, that butterfly.”

I point to the message next to it, which sets us both laughing.

And then we go our separate ways, each dawdling where we each prefer to dawdle, walking the line of Ciele Beau murals opposite Flight Path.

I pause at a doorway, its notice as outdated as the reminder to “call your mum.”

Nobody, employee or otherwise, will be entering by this door ever again, I tell myself. Or by any other door, on this doomed brick building.

Ghosts of Eras Past to the north of me as well — torn fencing frames the Cosmic Breeze mural on 3rd Avenue, painted by Olivia di Liberto for the 2019 Vancouver Mural Festival. RIP, VMF.

I leave the alley, turn the corner onto W 4th. I’m now looking at the block-long southern length of the site, Ontario to Manitoba. All boarded up, waiting for What Happens Next.

This artist’s rendering shows What Will Happen Next.

“Innovative industrial and commercial uses,” says the corporate website, “heritage retention and refurbishment, office, daycare and ground-floor food and beverage… centred around a new public plaza.”

Now that I’m home, and learning all this… I have to do a little rethinking, don’t I? And so do you.

Employees will once again go in and out of doors in the corner brick building, which is not doomed after all. And Flight Path may fly again. On his website, Tetrault explains he painted it “on plywood for removal and reinstallation on a new commercial development.”

But, ohhhh… Cheshire Cat will be gone.

Her Smile will have to float in our memories.

5 Comments
by icelandpenny on 18 August 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, photography, street art, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 18 August 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/08/18/that-smile/

Snagged

10 August 2025 – Seven moments, over the past few days, that snagged my attention. If these images snag you as well, I’m glad, and thank you. But here’s the rabbit hole: what now snags my attention is the phenomenon of attention-snagging. Of engagement. And the fact that your reason for lingering with any one of these images will be different from my own, and equally valid.

For the image is just the starting point, isn’t it? Each of us makes our own journey, after that. (And never the same journey twice.)

Saying this already has me on a journey.

  • Memory of Harold Town, at a reception for a 1960s display of his art in the Glendon College Junior Common Room, being asked the meaning of one of his paintings. “I just paint it,” he shrugged. “The meaning is up to you.”
  • Memory of Will Gompertz’ observation, in his 2013 book about 150 years of modern art (What Are You Looking At?), that one of the many factors comprising “art” is the engagement between the object and the viewer.
  • Memories of my own frequent observation, back in the day, when addressing a J-school class or mentoring a neophyte writer, that topic and focus are two separate things. (“Banff National Park,” for example, is a topic; “wildlife corridors” is one possible focus within that topic.)

Enough! On with the images. And on with our journeys, mine and yours.

Downtown construction (Main & East Broadway)

I’m snagged by one detail: the muddy power shovel. I remember my dad, during a family 1950s drive holiday in Cape Breton, stopping the car to photograph a steam shovel (as they still were) being used to widen and stabilize the road. His company made that shovel! I was a very little girl, properly in awe both of her daddy and of that huge piece of machinery.

Urban playground (Emery Barnes Park)

When I was a kid, we had concrete underfoot. Now little feet (and my own) bounce gently on a more forgiving surface. Finally! A use for all those discarded car tires.

Evening reflections (Burrard St. south of West Pender)

The snag is less visual than aural — the echo of baroque music. Christ Church Cathedral is just up the hill, a regular venue for Early Music Vancouver concerts. My post-concert walk is back down the hill, with this sparkling visual one more sensory delight, along with everything else I have just experienced.

Urban park contrasts (a Stanley Park pond, looking out to West Georgia)

The bull rushes flip me back to Grenadier Pond in Toronto’s High Park; the larger dance of nature and city reminds me of ravine walks in that city, with nature Down Here and urban life visible Up Above.

Waterfront (Devonian Harbour Park)

I could see heat-parched grass, or bobbing boats, or mountains beyond, or even (admittedly just out of frame) the helpful tourist-info kiosk. Instead, I fixate on the split-rail fence — “snake fence,” we called it, an everyday staple of rural Ontario-Quebec landscapes in my childhood, not the conscious design choice that it has now become.

Memorial name-walls (Komagata Maru memorial, Harbour Green Park)

The wall honours the 376 British citizens aboard this Japanese vessel, which was denied entry in a 1914 stand-off that lasted two months (the people being fed solely by private initiative) before the ship, under duress, returned to its Kolkata (“Calcutta”) starting point. The problem, you understand, was not that the people were British citizens; the problem was that they were also South Asian.

I honour the memorial, but my own engagement is elsewhere. I remember the 1982 unveiling of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, which arguably established the tradition of naming names as the most powerful way to acknowledge the importance of every individual. My memories include AIDS walls, Toronto & Vancouver; Ireland Park, waterfront Toronto, with its few known names of the 38,000 famine refugees who arrived during the summer of 1847 (when the city’s population was only 20,000); and the 2013 presentation at the AGO of Ai Wei Wei’s powerful memorial to the victims of the Sichuan earthquake, with members of Toronto’s Chinese community reading aloud, in groups of ten, every single name.

All those memories come later. As I stand at the Komagata Maru wall, I flash to the wall in Humber Bay Park East in Toronto. It honours the 329 people who, in 1985, boarded Air India flight 182 in Toronto but never reached Delhi. Over Ireland, a terrorist bomb hidden in the luggage blew the plane apart.

I remember standing there, some time in the early 2010s, aware of the intensity of the man standing next to me. His finger hovered mid-air as his eyes scanned the lines of names. Then his finger landed on the name that his eyes had sought. He patted the name, sighed. He turned to me. He just had to say it aloud, to someone. “We worked together. Such a great guy. He didn’t really want to go, but it was a big family wedding, you know? His wife and daughters, they were so excited…”

Windsock (Vancouver Harbour Flight Centre, Coal Harbour)

Oh my, all those years. From CUSO volunteer in the Peruvian high jungle through Oxfam & other NGO travels and then time among our own northern hamlets. All those sturdy little aircraft, all those airstrips, all that varied terrain. All those people. All that they taught me.

I tap my heart, and walk on.

4 Comments
by icelandpenny on 10 August 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Toronto, Vancouver
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Posted by icelandpenny on 10 August 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/08/10/snagged/

Rail Yard. And Other Invisibles. (And Visibles.)

31 July 2025 – I’m on the N/E corner of Quebec St. and East 2nd Ave., and I read the little plaque at my feet.

Really??? I say — but very quietly, to myself. (No point startling others.)

Look up & I’ll see a rail yard? Or an elk? or a forest? or a convoy of Canada geese?

Pfft!!! (My genteel raspberry is also very quietly expressed, to myself.)

Rail yard is historic fact right here at False Creek, not current reality. The first CPR railway station opened in Vancouver in 1887, but the railway-related industrial era boomed after the World War I project to fill in the tidal flats of False Creek, from Main St. on east to Clark Drive, to provide a site for two new railway terminals and associated rail yards. Various changes along False Creek since then, most recently the transformation to parkland, Seawall and residential/knowledge industry occupation, triggered first by Expo 86 and then the 2010 Winter Olympics.

So, no, I am not going to see a rail yard from this street corner, no matter where I look. But I don’t care! I am all for looking, while I walk, not for stomping along in a trance. I am perfectly happy to be reminded to swivel my head and pay attention.

I start swivelling.

Look Up, East: the MEC building, a 2020 arrival in this historic neighbourhood…

and once again (spring 2025) back in Canadian ownership, though no longer a cooperative.

Look Up, West: an even newer new-build.

Look Sideways, East: the eco-conscious alley behind MEC, with watercourse and plantings to attract insects and bees.

Look Sideways, West: the alley behind that new-build, with an historic reference right there at the corner.

Namely, one of the City’s remaining H-frame hydro poles.

Look Down-Along, North: this block’s stretch of bioswale…

which “collects and cleans the rainwater that fall on Quebec Street.”

Look Straight-Across, West: tail end of a straggly crocodile of kiddies (yellow T-shirts) plus their volunteer monitors (green T-shirts)…

crossing Quebec and hurrying to catch up with the croc’s main body, all those children already walking on north along Quebec’s west side.

I have to wait for the next light. After that I’m following in their somewhat distant footsteps, not sure where they’re headed but with my own Best Guess in mind. (Science World, I think to myself.)

Sure enough!

Like them, I turn west on Switchmen St. — a necessary detour while the end bit of Seawall is under repairs — and, from my vantage point at Pullman Porter, watch all those yellow & green T’s double ’round the parking lot & veer back east toward the geodesic dome of Science World. (An aside to you: you have noted these further railway tributes? Of course you have.)

I am charmed by the sight — by my knowledge of how much fun the children will have, and by my respect for all the organizations and all the volunteer support that collectively make these vacation-time excursions both possible and safe. (Flashback memory: the impish YMCA volunteer in Toronto, who explained that when they took 10 kids out, they were expected to bring 10 kids back. “Preferably,” she solemnly added, “the same ten.”)

I head on west. Bye-bye, kiddies.

I am still sufficiently Paying Attention to my surroundings, to notice the fresh-fruit stand near Olympic Village Plaza. I buy strawberries, my fingers guided by the young attendant to the boxes just trucked in this very morning from a farm in the Abbotsford area.

The day is warming up.

I find a shady bench in Hinge Park, and allow myself one strawberry. Just one.

It was…

really, really good! I hustle back home with the rest.

3 Comments
by icelandpenny on 31 July 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 31 July 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/07/31/rail-yard-and-other-invisibles-and-visibles/

Now You See It…

26 July 2025 – Now you see it.

A giddy moment of creative anarchy,

in front of a well-regulated condo complex.

And now — hours later — you don’t!

Peace, order, and good behaviour have been re-established.

6 Comments
by icelandpenny on 26 July 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in City, City Walks, photography, Vancouver
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Posted by icelandpenny on 26 July 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/07/26/now-you-see-it/

That Nice Mr. H

21 July 2025 – Busy morning, the day is clipping along, but surely there’s time for a short afternoon walk? I think False Creek (yet again), and then try to freshen the idea with a new combination of component parts.

Cranky Self objects: “I’ve already done all that!” Philosophic Self saves the day, quotes that nice Mr. Heraclitus: “You cannot step in the same river twice.”

Albeit by attribution, and much translated and much paraphrased, but the idea is clear. Everything (you included) is always all new, so go get it.

I haul out my much-creased False Creek map, and make a sort-of plan.

Walk down to The Village ferry dock (south-east end of False Creek, by Olympic Village Square); ferry to David Lam Park dock; walk on west along this portion of Vancouver’s Seawall, on past George Wainborn Park; then up-over the Granville Street bridge; down-around Granville Loop Park… and whatever.

The day is so mid-summer!

Music festival in the City Centre Artist Lodge forecourt as I walk past; patio umbrellas shading crowds on down Quebec & Ontario streets; and here in Olympic Village Square as well…

keeping all these customers cool, as well as one lop-eared dog (front & centre).

Onto an Aquabus, which is surprisingly empty until we stop at Yaletown Dock and pick up an extended family of Brazilian tourists. As we pull away, the driver, for fee-setting purposes, turns his head to quiz them on destination and demographics.

“Round-trip to Granville Island, six adults, two seniors and one child,” says the matriarch. She’s prompt with the data, but loses the credit-card quick-draw contest with one of her sons. She plays to her audience with a “What-can-I-do?” gesture, and is rewarded with amused laughter.

I hop off at David Lam; they carry on to the tourist (& resident) attraction that we call an “island,” even though it isn’t, not quite.

I’m always amazed at the diversity of traffic on and in the water — everything from whopping private vessels in the marinas to ferries to kayaks/dragon boats/paddle-boards to wildlife — and nobody seems to hit anybody else.

Even when they’re a couple moving very slowly on an isolated little paddle-board.

I turn my attention landward.

Thistles old & new, backed by ripening blackberries…

which cause a passing teen to tell her boyfriend about the berry patch behind her house, when she was growing up. “They’re awfully bitter until they’re really ripe,” she warns him.

The Seawall, like False Creek, has a mixed-use culture. Pedestrians here; cyclists there. In between David Lam & George Wainborn parks, I also get a good look at the Granville Street bridge, up ahead.

Closer still, almost opposite Granville Island, a good look at Giants — the six concrete silos painted for the 2014-16 Vancouver Biennale by the Brazilian twins known as OSGEMEOS, and now a lasting icon in the Biennale’s Open Air Museum.

This north-facing façade in shadows, mid-afternoon, but compelling even so.

Once I’m almost beneath the bridge, my next challenge is to find my way onto it.

Please, you’re thinking, how hard can that be? Not impossible, I grant you, but it does involve discovering that the west-side pedestrian path is closed for repairs, and orienteering my way up-along Weedland…

aka Waiting-For-Development-Land, to find the east-side path.

Which I do.

So here I am, heading toward centre bridge. With an overhead view of Creek traffic and a different angle on Giant.

Almost directly overhead, a reminder that this is a working concrete facility, not just a mural backdrop.

Starting down the bridge’s southern slope, I look back. Now I can enjoy the Giant‘s sunny faces and the long eastern view of False Creek behind them.

Over land now, over the Granville Island Kids Market and playground, backing onto Alder Bay.

More orienteering required, to get myself off this bridge!

I place my faith in this zebra crossing over these lanes, then this path and down these steps, and yes! it works.

I’m in Granville Loop Park, with a waterfall sculpture that reminds us yet again that, all those centuries ago, Heraclitus got it right. An ever-constant “V” of water, created by ever-changing water molecules, in ever-flowing cascades from the two upper corners.

Across the kiddy play area, with the yellow Coyotes in Area sign to my right and tennis players straight ahead…

and down and around and out to the West 2nd bus stop…

where, from a shady bench, I look up at the bridge I have just crossed.

4 Comments
by icelandpenny on 21 July 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, Nature, photography, street art, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 21 July 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/07/21/that-nice-mr-h/

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