Film Vs Digital

I'm learning how to develop b&w photos this semester and although I have always had a certain affinity towards film, I think my choice is digital. The reasons why are facility and time. What just took me hours of labour, frustrations and smelly chemicals, I could have done in minutes with my digital camera and Photoshop. There must be a group of people with a real sentimentality towards film keeping the market afloat.

Behind St. Paul (Revisited)

Remember this place? Well, I decided to leave photos of the backside of St. Paul to show the frontside passer-by what lies behind the membrane of the shops. I left one photo for about 40 of the stores.




After talking to the Downtown Association about this "backyard" scene, I discovered that it is actually up to the store owners and the city to maintain this area.

A Proposal for Downtown

Map taken from the Downtown Association website.

I’ve been thinking about downtown St. Catharines a lot recently. It’s where I work, shop, eat, drink, and live. But one thing that really bothers me is all the traffic that splits through the center of the city, connecting the downtown to several main city streets: Geneva, Niagara, Queenston or Church. The problem is that St. Paul, King St., and Ontario St. are all one-way streets, so people are forced to use the main street to get up-town? At one point, the city discussed whether or not it would be a good idea to make these streets two-way instead, but then there was the issue of a potentially very dangerous five-way intersection at the end of St. Paul St. to consider.

A possible solution is to close the front part of St. Paul St. entirely and make it a pedestrian walkway where, in the summer, people could lounge, go to city-organized events and concerts, and socialize. This would not be so bad for traffic, after making these couple alterations:

1. Making Ontario and King St. two-way streets. This would involve widening King St., but there is enough space to do it.
2. Connecting Glenridge Ave. directly to Geneva St. This way, if someone is coming from the south, they can skip going through downtown and get directly to Geneva. Also, if someone is coming off the highway, they can go left or right – Glenridge or Geneva – North or South.

I can understand that one reason this might not look appealing to city developers is a lack of parking. During the week, the struggle for drivers to find a parking space is a daily occurrence in several downtown centers in Canadian cities, and usually the problem becomes significantly more difficult in bigger cities due to a shortage of usable space. Downtown St. Catharines has the space, but no one is using it yet. For example, behind St. Paul St. there is a space practically the size of a field that is only partially used for parking. To solve the parking issue, we must simply fill up the field and make the backside of St. Paul St. safer by maintaining it. If there were a major parking space available, it would surely be made of use on weekdays by citizens that work downtown, and on the weekends, by shoppers and late-night party-goers.

Pedestrian streets are not new; they are all over Europe and have proven success because they are much more enjoyable, away from the noisy traffic of the city. Because of the decreased traffic, the property value of store-top housing rises significantly. This enables building owners to maintain and fix-up the surrounding areas more.

Here are some other benefits and reasons why we should make St. Paul St. an exclusively pedestrian street:

1. City events, concerts, and outdoor theater. If a stage was built next to L3 on the corner of James and St. Paul St., this would promote consumer spending downtown.
2. Monuments and fountains. These are always city highlights, encouraging people to spend more time and money downtown.
3. No more traffic. This will make life better for those of us that like to sip a coffee or beer on the patios of our favorite watering holes.
4. St. Paul St. will be safer. An increased amount of people downtown will discourage crime.

Really, I see no reason why this shouldn’t happen. I plan on refining my “Utopian Map” and presenting it to the city to see what they have to say.

A New Image for Brock

On December 5^th, Brock University faculty may go on strike for a few reasons, but mainly to preserve academic integrity. The issue is one of funding; and as it stands right now, we have an average of 75% part-time status teachers working in the different areas of study. Right now, it is the various faculties that control how many people in a department have tenure positions but the school administration now wants to be able to decide on this. The problem is this: what is in the best interest to the school administration when there is a problem with school funding to accommodate the new influx of students? Wouldn’t the administration want more part-time teachers (that get paid by the course) to exploit and in the end, have to pay less to keep?

Professors and Associate Professors share the responsibility of the “schools image” with the students because it is them whom, in doing research and writing text, create the scholarly atmosphere and academic integrity. Take the full-timers away and they will be replaced by teachers who will come to school for a few hours (however many classes they teach) and then leave to their other jobs or real life back home.

In an interview of Alfred Holden by Conan Tobias* (both Toronto city enthusiasts), they were talking about the TTC in Toronto and how to get people to use it and love it. Holden says that it needs to create a better, friendlier image for itself and essentially, sell it like a commodity. He says that people should have a warm, fuzzy feeling when thinking about the TTC, a feeling that it is an essential part of their lives. Reading this, I thought: Why do I not feel this way about Brock?

The Brock Press, this week, featured a comic making fun of the whole, “If you can walk and talk, you can go to Brock”, which has become a very widely known expression spread by Brock’s own students. Back in first year, when I was on the school running team, I would chat with the runners at other universities and when they would ask me: “So how do you like Brock?” I would reply: “Well, if you can walk and talk…” but they would finish the phrase for me because the person would already know of it. If you ask me, this is not really good; not really good that I was spreading the expression myself (but, hey, I was just a young kid who didn’t care), but even worse that people in other institutions knew of it as well.

I am not trying to bash Brock here. But maybe if the school approached the students with a new image, in the same way that Holden suggests for the TTC in Toronto, students and alumni would have more of a warm and fuzzy feeling about the school. One thing that won’t help with this is if we have a bunch more part-time teachers that are never around the school because – why would they? – when they are underpaid for the time that they are there.

If we look at schools like UofT, we may find a solution… That is the fact that $34.9 million last year, a large dent in operating cost money, is from alumni endowments. Why would UofT alumni donate all this money to the University? Well, first of all, there are bound to be a few CEO graduates from there, but also because UofT invests in the way that their students feel about the school while they are studying and keeps in touch with them when they leave.

Perhaps the solution to the problem of Brock’s academic integrity lies in advertising the school better to the students and graduates like the TTC might do to Torontonians. This involves a financial investment, initially, but the benefits will come with time.

*McBride, Jason and Wilcox, Alana. Utopia: Towards a New Toronto. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2005. Pg. 176 – 185.

Behind St. Paul

I went out with my camera and explored this scene to get some ideas for possible interventions and ways of drawing attention to the area.

The back of St. Paul.

Iron beams holding up the structures.

Places where the homeless take shelter.

Pornography on a night-table with candles and weigh scale.

Debris.

Ruins of an old highway.

Fort

Is it just me, or does it seem like there are less kids playing outdoor games like “capture the flag” and “fort”? I wanted to be a kid again – temporarily – and indulge in the cheerful possibility of a Sunday afternoon with no one around. I built this structure from construction material that was lying around near a school park. I used wooden pallets, plywood, metal beam supports and roofing, connected securely with wire. I even ripped some branches off a tree and stuck them in the metal beam supports to give my fort a more homey feel. By the end of its construction, I wanted to play, but I was worried about getting caught. When I spotted someone walking their dog close-by, I fled the scene.
Maybe this work calls attention to the lack of play in this particular park and elsewhere, similar to Germaine Koh’s spider webs that bring light to the unused areas of Toronto and other cities. In this way, the fort might be seen as a symbol of something absent, namely, the good old fashioned play that has been replaced by video games.
I hope that kids will find my fort to play in, but I’m sure that by now it’s been taken down because things like that just don’t fly anymore. There’s just too much potential for parents to sue the school for having a “non-secure” structure that hasn’t been inspected and approved by a certified engineer. The experience leads me to question whether the world is more dangerous, people are more frightened, or both. Regardless, I’m glad I still feel free enough to play.

Paths

Roadways, sidewalks, and other city passageways connect us throughout the city in a grid-like maze; whether their form is asphalt, concrete, or grass, they leave behind the markings of passage that the person going from point A to point B might leave behind. Philip Evans, in his article Paved Impressions (McBride & Wilcox, pg.96), describes the urban script left behind along the sidewalks of Toronto, where he grew up. Evans claims that cat tracks, city worker’s stamps, spray paint, and cracks all lead to a memory of activity – a palimpsest – of the area that one can interpret to tell something about the surrounding topography. The dilapidated sidewalk, for instance, may tell us something about the property value or how much the city spends on the up-keep of the neighborhood. But how does the architectural language affect the shared experience that the people who walk these paths have? The people that walk along these routes have an intimate and anonymous relationship with these paths and seldom see how they contribute, on a macro level, to the adding and taking away from them.

Six blocks of yellow line of paint along Scott St.

Likewise, the potentially unintentional trace of yellow that lines a sidewalk is evidence of the sifting urban landscape. The line seems to be made of the same paint that is used to divide roadways and direct the flow of traffic. Is its appearance along the sidewalk evidence of creative intervention, or is it simply the product of a clumsy city worker? I followed the line for six blocks before it disappeared, and once again I felt directionless while walking in the city.

I used this ready-made path as a point of departure to make something of my own. Similar to the incongruity of the yellow line, I made winding paths of freshly fallen leaves. I guess I hoped that someone would follow, and maybe if I made them slowly enough, perhaps then, we could share in the experience of walking the same path together. On the other hand, were there be no followers, the journey is solitary and the path temporary. I like that, too.

Reference: Jason Mcbride and Alana Wilcox Utopia: Towards a New Toronto