NIAGARA FALLS, ONTARIO, CANADA
TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA
and
Branford, CONNECTICUT
September 2001

This is a picture taken with our new camera.
It was a bright clear day. This is the clearest picture we got out of probably 10.
John says he's not using it correctly.
(Now we have a digital camera)

Rosie DiManno E-mail: dimanno@hotstar.net
Article in the Star 9-21-02
Hey mister, can you spare me the whine

If the tourism authorities who are fretful about Toronto's declining attractiveness to visitors — nearly a half-million drop since '98 — are honest with themselves, they will admit that this city just ain't what it used to be in a gentler time. The TTC is no longer the better way, many neighbourhoods are under siege by druggies and drunks, and those so-called tourist attractions (the CN Tower, SkyDome, Harbourfront) have lost their lustre.

Frankly, I've never understood why Toronto had such a high opinion of itself in the first place. I love the homey sense of community that managed to thrive side-by-side with development and that thing called progress. But, come on, Toronto couldn't hold a candle to the great cities of the world, with their rich histories and a culture of the multi-millennia. We were tidy, though, and highly functional and generally good-natured.

Not any more. Toronto today stinks, literally, with mountains of garbage, litter throughout, a crush of eyesore condominiums, cheesy dollar stores on Yonge St., and a threatening malevolence from too many street people.

It seems preposterous, to me, that a new development blueprint for the Toronto of the future is now being touted by city planners when these very same experts and their political masters have failed so miserably at addressing urban blights of the here and now.

I'm not anti-development — well, okay, yes I am — but this city seems not to have learned from its colossal mistakes. The worst thing to happen to downtown Toronto was the Eaton Centre, a massive retail and office development mega-project that sucked the life out of lower Yonge St. Yet bigger is yet again being promoted as better: taller buildings, vaster complexes, corporate rights over individual ratepayer rights. Even the height restriction — the most significant legacy of reform-minded councils from the '70s — are now being pooh-poohed as unrealistic and counterproductive to urban health. Really? Prove it.

Greed is good again. Toronto is open for business. The city will prostrate itself before business. Those who wish to retain the very ethos of neighbourhood are dismissed as not-in-my-backyard isolationists.

There was a time when backyards mattered. Meanwhile, nasty panhandlers have the run of the place. But call them homeless instead and they're transformed into the legions of the socially sanctified.

John's mom,
Ermah Randall
b. October 14, 1912