Even more ruins!

Guildwood Park in the east end of metropolitan Toronto (excuse me, that's the Greater Toronto Area, aka GTA) contains more than 70 architectural fragments and sculptures collected by Rosa and Spencer Clark. They rescued fragments from demolished buildings in and around Toronto and used them to create a sculpture garden.

To the right is the one of the columns from the Greek Theatre, which includes the lintel block, Corinthian capital, and two column fragments from the Bank of Toronto.

Below are fragments from the Temple Building and North American Life Assurance Company.


And below is an amalgam of the decorative elements from several demolished banks, and the limestone and marble entranceway of the Bank of Nova Scotia. At least, I think that's what it is. I left my map at home that day...

More ruins

Taking his cue from Mackenzie King's Kingsmere, Stephen Braithwaite used pieces of demolished Ottawa buildings (along with some new bronze sculptures) to create "Strathcona's Folly," a sculpture/play structure in Ottawa's Strathcona Park.

The somewhat unsettling looking faces are from a Bank of Montreal branch.

Ruins

I am spending some time in and around Ottawa, and that included a visit to Kingsmere in Gatineau, Que., yesterday. That's the former estate of our WWII-vintage prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. The grounds have several of these "faux ruins" that King brought in during the 1930s, largely from buildings being demolished in Ottawa. Not much in the way of faces, but neat ruins.
More about this later since I'm using a temperamental dial-up connection.

I will only add, for now, that this has got to be the most photographed scene at Kingsmere - portraits taken through this now-empty window. In fact, this woman was telling her children as she tried to arrange them (there's a third child you can't see - I think he fell off the back and down into a field of choke cherries)that when they got home, she would show them the picture her parents took of her in the same spot.