It looks like ass and it’s everybody’s fault, from the lazy and incompetent repair crews to the lazy and cheap landowners to the lazy and complacent citizens of Toronto who put up with this ugly, dangerous shit.
Since when did asphalt (please don’t call it “ash-fault”) become the repair material of choice — no matter what it’s repairing — in the city? And it’s on every, single goddamned downtown block. It’s ugly, shameful, a spit in the face of the original construction design and utterly, utterly unacceptable.
Alternate post slug: Crack Whore.
Charles Street at St. Nicholas
Yonge Street near College
Yonge Street near Gerrard
Yonge Street near Dundas
Bay Street at College
Bay Street at St. Joseph
5 comments
What the hell?
Repairing brick like that is possibly the ugliest thing I’ve never seen before. (Repairwork on brick paving in Perth is, astonishingly, DONE WITH BRICK.)
Bitumen (or asphalt) is for ROADS. I admit that our councils probably have to repair our paving a lot less, as we don’t get snow and so on to put extra stresses on it, but I would have thought that brick would be MORE resilient under temperature extremes than large chunks of extremely ugly bitumen.
I kind of want you to tell me that the pictures you post highlight the worst of Toronto, and it’s not actually a really ugly city, but I suspect you won’t.
Well, yes and no, Sami. Toronto will burst into a green, summery urban success over the next five or so weeks and, while the crumbling infrastructure is never more apparent than it is right now, it somehow becomes overpowered by the exuberant enjoyment of Toronto at its best.
Somewhere along the line, doing something well was abandoned by the lazy, incompetent and cheap, and we all facilitated the erosion of our city with complacency. It ain’t right. Torontonians need to seriously start talking up this stuff. And this is me doing my part.
I always thought summer was Toronto at its worst. The heat and humidity, concrete and ashfault, streets teeming with beggers and the dregs of society. Plus the smog, all the cars belching exhaust. The city took on a Third World feel. I haven’t been there in some time, maybe it’s better now.
Well, with the exception of “heat and humidity”, you’ve pretty-much described Toronto year ’round, snotty. Summer in Toronto is… the opportunity to get out on streets , streets with trees, streets with people strolling (not rushing between warm respites from the cold), streets with art and markets and produce and flirty, sexy people of all shapes and colours and whatnot, unencumbered by parkas and sweaters and scarves. Stay tuned for an entry of my favourite summer thing in Toronto.
[...] I’m totally sure there simply aren’t any patio bricks left in the largest city in Canada. And, besides, don’t we simply use asphalt to repair everything here? [...]