Dundas Street West Revitalization

[renvel]

My point is that hydro wires aren't a crime against humanity. They add to the cluttered, haphazard vibrancy of the streetscape. I wouldn't put them in for the hell of it, and the vibrancy of a street certainly doesn't depend on them (as the Annex demonstrates), but I'm not going to cry out in embarrassment just because our streets continue to have wires overhead.

The appeal of Kensington Market is precisely it's DIY, unplanned condition, where urban form just gets layered over and over what came before (hence why it's so popular with hippies and anarchists). To start ripping out elements of the streetscape in Kensington and replacing it with centrally planned, "art-infused" street furniture would do harm to the neighbourhood. It would bring it closer to it's logical opposite, the suburban strip mall: centrally designed, well maintained, and aimed precisely at getting consumers to storefronts with little distraction.

Now, I'm not arguing that every neighbourhood in Toronto needs to be like Kensington market. Nor that removing the hydro wires and redesigning Dundas will turn it into a strip mall. I'm simply trying to demonstrate that ugliness and clutter in an urban landscape is not something we should wish away too hastily.

Let's live the UGLINESS to others, more obscure parts of our beloved town, not major streets of Downtown....

 

[Northern Magus]

Whoa! Vitriol and anger!

Lol well if there's one thing you'll learn fast on this site, it's that kvetchers gonna kvetch.

That aside, what stands out to me is the litany of shoddy reasoning propping up their positions.

First off is the herd mentality assertion: that "everyone else" is doing it and therefore we should meekly and blindly follow suit. Perhaps if they were to put forward a sound case for doing it in the first place, but that would require a knock-down argument against telephone poles and wires, and that hasn't been done except by building a straw man.

I'm sorry , I cannot agree with any of the posters that claim overhead wires are "charming, quirky, unique", what a complete cop-out. It looks cheap and third-worldish.

The straw man, of course, is that somehow this

is no different than this

Clearly there is a very substantial degree of difference between the two -- at least to rational, reasonable people. That's why, at least to me, the anti-telephone pole crowd appears to have lost perspective on this issue.

Comme ca:

Major streets like Queen Street, for instance, are lined with great buildings, but what many people notice is the mess of overhead wires, cheap hydro poles, and redundant poles and think that this city isn't very attractive or doesn't have that much history or interesting architecture.

Nope, that's clearly what you notice, since like most of the other grumblers we've heard from, telephone poles and overhead wires have become some sort of flashpoint for civic self-loathing.

Look at the picture of the Gladstone above: quite arguably what the telephone pole and wires do is make perspectives of the buildings inseparable from their urban context. If the situation were anywhere nearly as bad as in Manila (above) I'd probably be much more sympathetic to your view. But realistically, our Victorian heaps were invariably designed and built with their civic environment in mind.

And that civic environment necessarily included utility poles and lines.

Calling this quirky or charming is absurd. That's akin to a Romanian thinking the same about pulling their belongings around town by donkey.

Oh really? Try telling that to the residents of Hydra or Fes. Or telling the residents of Pamplona that bull-running is absurd. Or telling the people of Siena that horse races are stupid.

They'll probably (rightly) look at you like you're a bigot.

When anachronisms persist and are embraced, they become part of a city's unique character. And while telephone poles certainly aren't the Palio, they all can become part of the uniqueness of our city.

When embraced, quirks can undoubtedly be a source of charm. And in the case of telephone poles and wires: urban authenticity and historical context.

It amazes me that anyone finds old, dirty, tilted poles covered in rusty staples, charming. (or even acceptable)

Lol easy there, Howard Hughes. Just remember that OCD can be overcome!

 

[dt_toronto_geek]

There was a story on the news last night about some poor old fellow who lost his balance and took a real nasty fall on rickety concrete slabs where a tree is to go in this construction area. It was marked with four large orange cones but he's suing anyway and of course the locals being interviewed are all up in arms over the long construction time and the mess. Same old story, and that's why they didn't bury hydro lines - the intolerant neighbourhood types that have no appreciation or patience for improvements to their nabe.

 

[Northern Magus]

Lol well we haven't even gotten into things like cost, road disruptions, the usual tendency for these types of things to go way over budget, the fact that in the future every time a wire needs connecting/disconnecting there'll be some degree of digging up the sidewalk and repaving it with black asphalt, higher maintenance costs, etc etc.

Anyway, NIMBYs and litigation opportunists are everywhere.

 

[wopchop]

We can't even properly coordinate construction around the few buried lines that we have now, and people want to bury more?

 

[renvel]

Wooden utility poles

It is 21st. Century already, and we in, so called ,World Class City talking about wooden poles...

 

[Urban Shocker]

Betcha if Adriaan Geuze told us we need more wooden utility poles we'd jump to it - quicker than you can say, "trendy wave decks" or "fake Muskoka".

 

[adma]

It is 21st. Century already, and we in, so called ,World Class City talking about wooden poles...

Well, we still talk about our obsolete Victorian architecture, esp. when (as a Yonge + Gould) it burns down. I guess that makes us not up to snuff as a Woild Class City, then

 

[renvel]

O, please ! Don't compare Victorian (even neglected) architecture with thirdworldisd utility wooden Monsters...

 

[egotrippin]

O, please ! Don't compare Victorian (even neglected) architecture with thirdworldisd utility wooden Monsters...

The third world would be lucky to have as extensive a telecommunications and power network as us, and we don't even lead the world in that regard. The wooden poles suit some neighbourhoods, such as the Kensington one pictured, and our sleek new high-end shopping streets look better with buried wires (see Bloor Street now). There's a place for both in this city, and as streets evolve, I'm sure we'll slowly bury everything over time.

Who knows, one day all wired communications, even power, may be replaced by wireless technology, rendering wires obsolete. Let's not rush it though.

 

[junctionist]

I find this image to be interesting since it shows that even at the turn of the 20th century, much closer to the time when the wires started to go up, there was uneasiness with them. The postcard, a type of image used to fashion a city, nicely leaves them out of the picture. The buildings comprising that streetscape really stand out more, as if they were designed to be seen most clearly without wires.

The straw man, of course, is that somehow this

is no different than this

Objectively speaking, the wires obscure buildings. Sure, in Toronto you can still see the architectural details if you find the right angles between the wires because in Toronto there aren't that many wires as in the second photo, but a lot of people just don't do that. Casual impressions are formed by casually looking at streetscapes. Buildings like the Gladstone would make a stronger architectural impression without the junky hydro infrastructure in front of them (or the big traffic signals hung over the roadway). And believe me, no one would mistake the scene for the countryside because of the lack of wires.

Look at the picture of the Gladstone above: quite arguably what the telephone pole and wires do is make perspectives of the buildings inseparable from their urban context. If the situation were anywhere nearly as bad as in Manila (above) I'd probably be much more sympathetic to your view. But realistically, our Victorian heaps were invariably designed and built with their civic environment in mind.

One might argue that the buildings are the urban context for the street. They are also a source of historical context, one that often even includes dates on cornerstones. They are sources of multiple historical contexts and if unobscured can leave a person with impressions of a rich history.

The historical context established by the wires is misleading; a person may get the impression that the street represents one time frame of a city's history when various eras are in fact represented in the built form obscured by the wires. Some buildings came before wires spread across the city; others came after. Victorian architects didn't design their buildings to be forever obscured by wires. Architects are generally ambitious enough in terms of aesthetics to assume that one day the successful city for which they're designing exciting new buildings may bury the wires and overhaul the streetscape. I suppose if you're willing to dismiss thousands of buildings as "heaps", then wires don't matter. Even with the wires up for so long, architects in Toronto still design buildings assuming the wires will be phased out, as often seen in the renderings they compose.

When embraced, quirks can undoubtedly be a source of charm. And in the case of telephone poles and wires: urban authenticity and historical context.

It's too much of a trade off to have the buildings obscured. It's unsatisfactory to have one era dominate a street when its actual history symbolized in its diverse built form is much deeper and richer. I don't loathe my city; I love it so much that I want it to present itself in a way reflective of its architecture, beauty, and sophistication.