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Toronto Unlocked

4/6/2018

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Entering Toronto, you’ll find yourself surrounded by inordinate construction, either towering above you as half-finished condominiums or lurking all around you in various public works convolutions. A decade-long building boom shows no signs of slowing— testament to the city’s will to keep up to its own growth and breathe life into its downtown core. Many designs seek to restore as they renew— architectural innovation meets heritage preservation, making for an exciting future. Nevertheless, it can all be just a bit overwhelming, so if you’re looking to bring things down to street-level (and human scale), here are some reference points for the labyrinth. On your walk, you’ll get a good sense of some of the Old Town’s most historic buildings, neighborhoods, parks, and landmarks.
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​The Vault – One King West Hotel & Residence
Savings Department Safety Deposit Vaults
From the street, you may question your decision to stay at this historic hotel, but the gorgeous lobby and classy rooms will quickly win you over. It’s got a friendly little reception bar for a nightcap, and a beautifully restored hall at the top of a winding staircase for major events. The underground vault, built into bedrock in 1913, features a four-foot-thick steel door that weighs 40 tons, but can be moved with your little finger. Best of all, it’s as central as central gets.

Just up the road, you can get breakfast at a place that's been serving simple, classic and delicious fare for over 90 years: 

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​Built as a 19th-century home, the Senator is Toronto’s oldest restaurant. By 1929, prior to the Great Depression, the city had become a leading international cultural center, and the restaurant was at the heart of the theatre district. George Nicolau renovated the building in 1948, equipping it with the style and fixtures that remain today. Much of what's on the restaurant's menu is created in-house, including the organic honey produced on a Caledon farm.
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ONTARIO, CANADA
Shopping
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Located in the core of the trendy Queen Street West shopping district, Fashionably Yours specializes in buying and selling pre-owned, authentic designer clothing, bags, shoes, sunglasses, and other accessories by names like Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Hermes, and Gucci. Priding itself on its exceptional customer service, the store has been the recipient of numerous well-deserved accolades. A lifetime 100% authenticity guarantee is provided for all purchases.
Self-described as “your source for curated vintage,” Black Market, an alternative clothing store at Queen and John offers all its wares for $10 or less. T-shirts feature unique designs, and there is a fantastic selection of seasonal articles, like their famous holiday sweaters. The store also offers sweet vinyl finds from Shortstack Records and a professional silk-screening service with very reasonable rates.

​Speaking of vinyl, Toronto’s oldest Indie record store, Kops Records, has been around since 1976 and boasts the city’s largest stock of near-mint used records and value bins. 

​The staff is friendly, knowledgeable, and happy to talk music whether or not you’re making a purchase. And, as a family business with 40 years of buying experience, they’ll treat you fair if you’re looking to sell a precious collection. Kops has a few locations in and around downtown Toronto.
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featured: no glove no love leggings by hundred wunders
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Chinatown

​Toronto’s Old Town is one of the most concentrated areas of 19th century buildings in Ontario, including the site of the first Parliament in Upper Canada. The St. Lawrence neighborhood grew up around the still-standing market of the same name. 

Part of a restored historic corner of commercial buildings (est. 1840) at Front and Jarvis Streets, the Corner Place Restaurant and Lounge is a friendly neighborhood hangout right across from the St. Lawrence Market. Delicious burgers or eight-hour, slow-cooked brisket are perfectly paired with local beer and wine. Soak up some sun on their great people-watching patio; once you're fed and watered, you’ll be ready to continue your walk. ​
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You can wander the Victorian lanes of Corktown and enjoy the architecture of the Gooderham (Flatiron) Building—now a Firkin Pub—the Distillery Historic District, and St. James Cathedral, or take a leisurely stroll through one of the area’s heritage parks. ​

Operated by the Town of York Historical Society, Toronto’s First Post Office (est. 1833) is a historic site, museum and authorized full-service Canada Post dealer, offering special philatelic services. A team of experts, including architects, historians and curators volunteered during the restoration project. Today, the museum hosts fascinating exhibitions, workshops and educational programs. 

Likely the city’s oldest watering hole, drinks and hospitality were first served at the Black Bull Tavern between 1833-1838, just after York became Toronto. For much of the 20th century, it was operated as the Clifton House, a pretty “rough” joint. In the early 1980s the bar was owned by retired football players Taylor and Hughes. Today it continues to be popular with locals, tourists and trends'ters.

​What is a travel app?
​
A GPS-guided travel app embeds GPS coordinates of locations mentioned in your favorite articles, along with a map guiding you from place to place. You can upload the articles to read at your leisure without wi-fi and use them to guide you in walks around the next beguiling city you visit.
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Enter your email to win a free one-year iTunes subscription ($18.99 value) to our travel article app courtesy of GPSmyCity and hundred wunders! You'll get instant access to over 6,500 walks in 1,000+ cities around the world. ​

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Google Search by Image

3/5/2017

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Louis Caron (1848-1917) founded an architectural dynasty that contributed more than 150 residences and ecclesiastical buildings to the Bois-Francs region of Québec, designed primarily in the Neo-Gothic style. Gothic Revival architecture in Canada was imported from Britain and endured until the 1930s. Victorian eclecticism, with its mansard roofs and fancy embellishments, also influenced the appearance of many towns, and can still be seen today. 
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In an attempt to identify one such building, which I photographed in 2009, I discovered both Louis Caron and what I still believe to be a little known online tool with lots of potential.
   Google Search by Image provides an alternative to scouring the Internet for information via key words and text. You can start with a file of your own or choose one on the Web, then drag and drop, upload, right-click or paste a URL, depending on your needs.
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Once you’ve added your file, Google will generate a series of results according to various parameters, which you can guess at by examining the selections returned below. Foremost will be the colour palette, so our mysterious Victoriaville photo, which was desaturated and modified using an antique filter, generated images in the same range. ​
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Most of the images treat a similar subject, in this case, a building; if you plug in a picture of a red car, you’ll get mostly red cars parked in the same position. But then it gets more interesting. Looking at the examples, you’ll see that composition and geometry play a significant part, and that each picture has several such elements in common with others. Artists will connect with this immediately: strong perspective views, lighter fields of ‘sky’ or ‘ceiling’, squares, triangles, arches, and blocks of dark that contrast with the pallor of the overall image. ​

Finally, all of these images comes with a story: the Vietnamese village of 30 old French villas, a fleet of floating hotels on the Providence River, some Sci-fi guy who is building a model of a frontier power generator at a plasma plantation, a shop-front in the tiny Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye, where the ratio of bookstores to residents is approximately 1:60… The possibilities for artists, authors and historians are literally endless.
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Photo credit: Pierre Girouard
You may wonder at the usefulness of the resource, as it is fundamentally random, which is perhaps why Google hasn’t promoted it much. What would one use this for, exactly? Google suggests: “… if you search using a picture of your favorite band, you can find similar images, websites about the band, and even sites that include the same picture. Search by image works best when the image is likely to show up in other places on the web. So you’ll get more results for famous landmarks than you will for personal images like your latest family photo.” 

​But that’s not the reason I like it so much. It is playful and silly and rather purposeless - but not entirely. In my case, the tool saved me from having to sift 
randomly ​through archival photographs and historical sources online in the hopes of falling accidentally on a picture of a building for which I had no name, address or architect. And let's face it: Victoriaville, Québec, is not a major tourist destination - despite its many well-deserved (but lesser-known) claims to fame.
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Search by Image does return a list of the instances of a specific image online, much like Reverse Image Search by TinEye, which can assist the user in tracing rights owners or infringements. But it also scans the content of the image using some kind of magical algorithm. And this produces results that will be pleasing to all types of users with infinitely diverse missions. At the very least, it is likely to quench one's curiosity about all those snapshots of unanswered questions that tend to rattle about in an avid traveller's luggage. 

​For me, its value is best described by the old adage: a picture is worth a thousand words... and it's why I now know my anonymous, iconic building to be the Grand Union Hotel, Victoriaville est. 1875, designed by the famed 19th century architect, Louis Caron. Set right beside a now defunct railroad, I can only imagine the action this place saw back in the day, when it must have been the swankiest inn in town.
QUÉBEC, CANADA
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hundred wunders launches new store 16/11/16

11/16/2016

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hundred wunders started out as a scrapbook for storing my good memories and doing something useful with the many albums of pictures I've taken over the years. Nothing intense, and much of the time it has simply been a nice place to visit. 

But with patience and dedication, hundred wunders has begun, slowly but surely, to live up to its name. I've been invited to write for travel websites, such as trip.com and GPSmyCity, spent a lot of hours wondering, but best of all, met a whole bunch of incredible people. This fascinating adventure recently inspired me to launch the hundred wunders brand and multiply the iterations of what can be done conceptually with archival photographs taken over the years and all over the world.
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hundred wunders' leggings, dresses, scarves, gender-friendly baby clothing, and handmade soaps are all produced locally in Montreal, Canada, which helps to limit our carbon footprint. Our fashionable, eco-friendly leather bags are handmade by small, genuine leather crafters around the world. These manufacturers use vegetable tanning, a traditional process employed to tan leather without chemicals. Each satchel, duffel and backpack is unique, exhibiting its own grain, nuances and scars. The bags will be among the most reasonably priced and beautiful pieces of leather you will ever purchase.

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'the Weekend' leather backpack
​Who knows what else you'll find, off the beaten track? Welcome, and enjoy! And please, shop! In so doing, you'll be supporting some of the finest lesser-known artists and artisans of the world.

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The creations in the hundred wunders collection are inspired by photographs of urban environments, representing otherwise random moments in city time. Each piece is completely original - you will not find either the concept or the designs anywhere else. A far cry from the standard framed print, although I love those too, they capture something precious about each of the strange cities I've travelled, mainly on foot. They are the canvas on which these pieces will live from now on.
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urban meadow big silk scarf
​The 'architecture' series is the heart of the project, and it plays upon the notion of where the environment stops and the people start. The process involves transforming a single view of a place at a given moment, with all its qualities and limitations, to create a completely unique article of clothing that is true to that view: a snapshot of the city has been laid across cloth so that it can wrap around your body, making you one with the urban environment.
 
cambridge cycle leggings
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from a photograph of a bike rack on Harvard University campus
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November giveaway! GPS-guided travel article

11/11/2016

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It's hard to say what came first, traveling or travel documenting. There are accounts of travelogues dating to the Song Dynasty in China (960-1279) through Medieval times and into recent history. The Italian poet Petrarch described in personal terms his experience of climbing Mount Ventoux in 1336. A few years later, Moroccan world traveller Ibn Battuta wrote ‘Rihla’ (The Journey), A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling. Source: The Travel Tester Ships logs, journals, diaries, journalism, and until recently, postcards and letters have served to carry compact, condensed perspectives of an individual’s travel experience to others, either loved ones or strangers.
A city seen through the eyes of another is a different city.
When you travel it will more often than not be solo, certainly if you travel frequently, for business, or take a number of extended trips to different destinations in a year. You may have time on your hands in some of these places, but how much of that is used up working out details once you arrive? Travel article apps are a fun and pressure-free option for exploring intended locations in advance, as you prepare to go away or while you’re en route.
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And while they will save you time by giving you directions, they will also enhance the pleasure of exploration and discovery. Like the places you visit, each individual guide has its own flavor, context or story. You can mix and match, and come away from even the most rushed stay in a new place feeling like you’ve actually connected with the destination. You’ll be both relaxed and enriched, because the time you’ve spent there was well spent.
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There is always a single writer. Travel writing is by definition a solitary activity, much like the experience of travel itself. But it is an activity that strives to reach out and connect another person to that same very subjective and personal experience.
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What is a GPS-guided travel article?

A GPS-guided travel article embeds GPS coordinates of locations mentioned in the article, along with a map guiding you from place to place. There are thousands of articles available from more than 700 cities at GPSmyCity that you can upload free of charge, to read at your leisure without wi-fi. There is a small fee to upgrade ($1.99) to access the GPS-guided article you would like to select for your trip. For just a few dollars, you can plan your entire downtime itinerary within minutes, according to your interests, without having to search any further than a few key words.
I want to try a GPS-guided article!
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Like virtual postcards transcribing different individual perspectives, travel article apps can be superimposed and shuffled, depending on your time and interests. You might follow a map in one area of a city simply because it surrounds your hotel, then choose a guide that is a little more specific and to your tastes. Bookstores and great coffee? There’s probably an app for that. It’s a great way to quickly get to know a place you’ll be returning to time and again or to throw a different light on familiar territory if boredom sets in.

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Niagara. Enigma. is a GPS-guided article that takes you on a walk up Clifton Hill, an attraction that will masterfully distract you from the waterfall when you wander out of the conference center for coffee one morning. The waterfall IS grandiose, but there is a whole other side to this town that deserves an introduction. From November 14-20 you can upgrade the app for FREE at GPSmyCity.
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Prints & Places

9/16/2016

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David L. Paterson
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Niagara. Enigma.

7/30/2016

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Clifton Hill
Located right next to the SkyWheel, classic competition can be had between friends, family or colleagues at Strike Rock N'Bowl, a 14-lane, 10-pin bowling facility. Features include high-definition audio-visual systems, LED lighting, touch screens, and adjustable bumper rails to set game levels for kids and novices. You can also play pool, pinball and other arcade games, and even ride a racing simulator.

If wax museums are your thing (and let’s face it, they aren’t everyone’s…), Niagara Falls is your place. Since 1983, the Ramunno family has been running a rock music souvenir store, while patriarch Pasquale perfected his sculpting technique. The resulting Rock Legends are not to be missed. You’ll discover a one-of-a-kind collection showcasing over 70 excessively famous and lesser-known rock stars, from Buddy Holly through Ozzy Osborne to Slipknot.
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So too, on the outskirts of what is less a town than a motley collection of mismatched streets, you cannot help but be struck by the number of abandoned homes and businesses (700+ in fact), often standing alone in vacant lots against a backdrop of monster hotels. The cause is a 50% population drop since the 1960s, and the lack of a realistic recovery plan. You may wonder where the residents of the remaining shacks have gone. You won’t see them, and the people left over seem somewhat tired and worn, as if dependent on the next wave of seasonal visitors to wind them up again.
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Casino Niagara
Niagara is an enigma, a place of paradox. She has dual citizenship, and on either side of the Canadian-American border the chasm between tourists and locals is about as deep as the gorge itself.
Get this article as a GPS-guided app from
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At any given moment you can find all kinds of weird exhibits and activities to pass the time on Clifton Hill, from the famous Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum to the Moving Theater to limited engagements such as Wigan's Micro-miniatures, a display you can only see through a 400x microscope. How long each attraction holds your kids’ attention is subjective, so you may want to consider discounted flex combo packages. Wizards’ Golf is a climate-controlled, wheelchair-accessible miniature golf course – one of the largest in North America and one of the newest attractions in Niagara Falls. It’s also one of the best. A mystical, intriguing, glow-in-the-dark world of fantasy will enchant you, and no two holes are alike. If you enjoy a great challenge among good company (wizards, trolls, fairies, and dragons), you’ll get your money’s worth here.
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In warm weather, both the Canadian and American towns are over-run with sightseers and impossibly crowded. On the off-season, the streets are somewhat bleak, and despite the bright lights and gaudy painted frontage of popular attractions, there is a kind of faded grey emptiness to the in-between spaces. You get the impression that everyone who works at this great pantomime is either unnaturally young or significantly old: the absence of lifeblood in the middle range is striking.
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Nevertheless, whatever the weather, there’s always action within the walls of the town’s two casinos. Casino Niagara is slotted into the Crowne Plaza-Sheraton hotel complex, while Fallsview sprawls the length of the downtown mall. With 150 tables and 4,500 slot machines between them, these vast adult arcades excite the senses, day and night. Clearly, cash runs through this town like water, but there is no reservoir. Rather, it rushes over the city like the cataract, and away again, down the river.
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There is no shortage of metaphors to describe Niagara – she’s a puzzle constructed of riddles, fashioned from legend, built on hearsay, fuelled by invention, marred by broken dreams. She’s a showgirl without her makeup – natural and artificial, mysterious and obvious, handsome and tiresome. But if melancholy and nostalgia is a mix you enjoy, then drive on down to the waterfall and take a good, long drink.
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ONTARIO, CANADA
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Stained glass and stonemasons

2/12/2016

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The restored stone is an admirable display of craftsmanship that adequately showcases and complements the Gothic windows
"of rolled cathedral-stained glass in leaded quarries, with pretty patterns of sash, and harmonizing schemes of colour. The end windows, each panel having a beautiful floral design and text of Scripture burned in, on a ground graduated from deep yellow to white, are exceedingly pretty."

Cyrus Thomas in History of the Counties of Argenteuil, Que. and Prescott, Ont., 1896
Nowadays, the congregation of St. Mungo's consists of a small, loyal group of caretakers and patrons who  succeeded in raising enough funds to supplement government grants and restore the exterior of the building, before moving on to the interior, which despite its age is remarkably intact.
       A gallery runs round three sides and the pews and pulpit are original. In its day, the church could easily accommodate three hundred people. Now, it is only opened two or three times a year for special services.
      Late in the 18th century, tracts of land in Chatham township were granted to veterans of the first battalion of the 84th Regiment of Foot, also known as the Royal Highland Emigrants, who fought in the American Revolution (1775-1783) and Seven Years War (1756-1763). Archibald McMillan, whose house still stands in Grenville village, brought some 450 Highlanders from Locharkaig, Scotland, to settle along the river in 1802.
      Built by the stonemasons who worked on the Ottawa River canals, St. Mungo's played an important role in uniting the vibrant Scottish pioneer community who helped develop western Québec in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. McMillan himself remarked that he had never heard more Gaelic spoken than he did along the Ottawa River Valley.
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QUÉBEC, CANADA
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