Where to relocate Our Lady of York?

Despite the heat and humidity, about 90 people came out on Saturday afternoon for the Heritage Toronto "Faces on Places" walking tour downtown.
I discussed (and showed pictures of) the former York County Registry Office at 60 Richmond Street East, with its sculptures by Jacobine Jones of a woman and the County of York coat of arms, which I've written about here before. It was demolished last year and the sculptures are in storage, awaiting relocation, possibly to the new building that is going up on the site.
I referred the walkers to a really informative comment I thought had been left on one of those earlier posts - but discovered when I arrived home that the comment had been sent to me in an e-mail. I had intended to post it at the time (in April), but failed to.
So here it is now, hoping it's better late than never - but apologies for the delay to Stanley Dantowitz who was a former employee of the Registry Office of the East and West Ridings of the County of York, who provided the information.
"I had wondered what had happened to (the sculptures) in the recent demolition," he wrote. " I agree that they should be on display to the public outside a building, not inside. If they are not suitable to affix to the outside of the new building at 60 Richmond St East, I suggest that they be located in a nearby public park."
The County Registry Office was at Berti and Richmond from 1946 until the mid 1960's when it moved to the current Toronto City Hall, which also housed the City of Toronto Registry Office.
"Prior to the 1960's the City of Toronto and Land Titles Offices occupied a building just about where the south-west corner of the current Toronto City Hall is now. Between the south-west corner of the current Toronto City Hall and Osgoode Hall is a strip of lawn. In the centre of the lawn is a children's playground," Stanley said.
"Perhaps the sculptures could be located on the lawn south of the children's playground?" he suggested. "They would be almost on top of the site of the former City of Toronto and Land Titles Offices. A suitable plaque could describe the three former offices."
Stanley included Toronto Community Housing's Leslie Gash on the e-mail, and she replied after talking to Sherry Pedersen in the Heritage Section of the City Planning Department.
"We spoke last summer about the fate of the sculptures," Leslie said. " I have sent her your email Stanley as well as the link to your website Terry and the renderings of the new building. They are willing to look at other alternatives for the sculptures. We still have lots of time on this but it was good to get the discussion started."

That is very encouraging, especially because all too often, sculptures from demolished buildings are either lost, or place inside the new buildings, where they aren't seen by the public.



Stanley also provided some information on the "Deeds Speak" motto that appears on the County of York coat of arms. He cited an article by Carl Benn (PhD) in last summer in The Fife and Drum, the newsletter of the Friends of Fort York and Garrison Common.
Benn, who is chief curator of the City of Toronto Museums and Heritage Services, attributed it to the Rev. John Strachan while he was rector of the Town of York, who used the phrase in praise of the York Militia in the capture of Detroit during the War of 1812.

I'll stay on top of this, and will post news of further developments in a more timely manner.

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.

Making book on the Booker

Congratulations to Joseph O’Neill whose new novel, Netherland, has been long-listed for the Man Booker prize. It was published in May to exuberant reviews (“rave” doesn’t begin to cover it) in the daily New York Times (by Michiko Kakutani) as well as snagging the front-page of the New York Times Book Review and elsewhere.
In the Review, senior editor Dwight Garner called it “the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.”
He went on to say: “On a micro level, it’s about a couple and their young son living in Lower Manhattan when the planes hit, and about the event’s rippling emotional aftermath in their lives. On a macro level, it’s about nearly everything: family, politics, identity. I devoured it in three thirsty gulps, gulps that satisfied a craving I didn’t know I had.”
Just after the long-list of 13 titles (known as the Booker Dozen) was announced yesterday (29 July), bookmakers William Hill opened the betting with Netherland their 3/1 favourite. Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence was second with odds of 4/1.

In a news release listing the opening odds on the list, William Hill spokesman Graham Sharpe said, "Although Salman Rushdie is the man in form having won the Booker of Bookers, that book is now over 20 years old and his recent work has not been winning literary awards. However, Joseph O'Neill's novel, Netherland has been creating a real buzz and is also being suggested as the first novel to become a serious contender for the Bookie Prize - the William Hill Sports Book of the Year and for that reason we believe it is a worthy favourite.”
(Cricket among Commonwealth expats living in New York is one of the principal settings for the novel.)
I first encountered Joe O’Neill when I read a laudatory review of his second novel, The Breezes, in the Guardian Weekly. In those pre-Amazon days, I called a bookshop in central London and ordered a copy over the phone.

That novel—about a fortnight in the life of a family (the Breezes) who endure “misfortune of absurd but tragic proportions” (Amazon.co.uk)—was funny and poignant, and I felt compelled to write a fan letter.
At the time (the late 1990s), Joe—an Irishman, largely raised in the Netherlands, working as a barrister in London, but latterly living in New York City—was completing Blood-Dark Track, his investigation into secrets in the lives of his grandfathers—one Turkish, the other Irish. I read the book, and interviewed him about it by phone for an article I wrote for Spotlight, an English-language magazine published in Munich.
I met him for dinner when I was in New York on business in early 2002, at which time he said he was working on something to do with cricket. But since then, he has also been a regular contributor to The Atlantic and New York magazines.
Even if it weren’t for the personal connection, I’d be rooting for Joe to win the prize—for the £50,000, sure, but also because he’s a good writer, and Netherland (said she, having just started reading it) is terrific.
The short-list will be announced on 9 September, and the winner on 14 October.

Race Street Firehouse R.I.P.

To update an earlier post: it appears that the Race Street Firehouse in Philadelphia has been demolished. I've checked periodically for news, and just found on the Philly Chit Chat blog, pictures of the demolition which started a week ago (21 July).
No word about the firemen gargoyles, but they were to have been saved.

That was the week that was

Well, it looks like the interest in Terry (the L.A. Kings one) Murray has died down, judging by the Sitemeter stats for this here blog. So it's back to gargoyles, looking out my back window and monitoring the progress of the construction at the end of the street.
Thanks to everybody who swang by thinking this was the blog of Terry-the-Kings-Coach. I hope you weren't disappointed to find what you found.
I had to take my digital camera in for repairs on the weekend - good thing I bought the extended warranty and the shutter mechanism decided to die just weeks before it expired - and now I've got a streaming summer cold... just in time for my vacation.
But I will be posting nonetheless. Stay tuned.

Rear window, part 3: Men in trees

The first of five weeks' vacation - which I am spending at home, working on the Merle Foster book (about which, more later) - has just ended. As I puttered around this morning, I heard the sounds of shouting and some kind of machinery.
I wasn't surprised seeing as there is construction going on at the corner (although I thought the heavy lifting was pretty much over) and for all I know, there is some going on at the other end of the street.
But when I moved to work in my study at the back of the house, it became clear what was going on. A truck drove slowly through the back lane, then stopped and a cherry picker rose up.

And lo, there was a man with a chain saw, lopping wayward branches from trees and tossing them to the truck below (occasionally getting them caught on hydro wires) where they were being fed to a wood chipper.
It made for intermittent entertainment over the course of about two hours, and a few good pictures.





Oh, and I guess that should be " 'man' in trees."