One of my favourite Toronto park moments is the allée of silver maples that cuts north-south through Dovercourt Park in the west end. The park is half-way between Dufferin Street and Dovercourt Road, and half-way beween Bloor Street West and Dupont Street. If coming along Shanly Street one block south, you look north up Salem Avenue and are treated to the allée continuing the line of the street through the park.

Apart from the lack of strong formal elements in most Toronto Parks (especially allées), this park is additionally special in that it is a park along the lines of the real English “square”. It is surrounded by small residential streets on all sides, and it is larger than most of the other Toronto “squares”. It successfully works as a whole where so many others dissolve into a collection of uncomfortable uses. The allée also brilliantly divides the park into an open field on the west side (laid out for baseball – I think unfortunately), and a series of more discreet uses on the east side, including a kids playground, a community centre, and tennis courts. If there was a wrought-iron fence around it and the baseball field was just an open field, it could almost be an English “square”.

Unfortunately, the silver maples are (as are so many of Toronto’s majestic Acer saccharinum) reaching the end of their life span. There are gaps in the allée already, and the City has started replanting the missing trees (though bizarrely, by my eye, they are not placing them along the line of the centres of the existing trees, but along their forward edge – very disappointing).

Sometimes simple spaces work best. Many of our new parks, such as the Central Park in the West Railway Lands (Concord Adex Park), or Wychwood Carbarns Park, will be so crammed full of programme, there’s no room for simple space and a grand idea. I can’t help think that we’ve lost something along the way with our busy-body urbanism.

I stumbled across an energetically created hopscotch “board” on the sidewalk of Delaware Avenue north of College. The tireless kids got up past number 450 before petering out. I must say, that would be one hell of a workout to play! Unfortunately it rained briefly on Friday night and the “board” was gone by Saturday. Urban ephemera make for beautiful urban moments.

This beautiful display of colour is outside of a laundromat on Ossington Avenue between Bloor and Dupont. As in so many cases, one person’s disposables are another person’s materials.

Enough said. At the corner of Barton and Albany in the Annex. The first one I saw is at Wells and Albany and is a better stencil than this one. Funny as hell. But I less appreciated the one further west on Barton that was stencilled with “eating animals” – less relevant to a stop sign somehow.

This might not seem like an urban moment – but since it’s but a few minutes walk from Bloor and Yonge in Toronto, it gives you an idea of the wealth that the ravines give this city. This is the Bloor-Danforth subway line as it crosses the Rosedale Ravine viewed from Bloor Street East. The Rosedale Valley Road can just be seen in the bottom of the photograph. Why we always put a road down the middle of a beautiful valley I don’t know, but it does make for one of the most beautiful roads in the city – it just happens to be mostly used as a shortcut to the Don Valley Parkway for vehicles and bicycles. Curiously enough, in almost every other direction you would see a variety of apartment buildings poking out of the foliage, but in this case we’re looking towards Rosedale itself, one of Canada’s most exclusive residential neighbourhoods.