Portraits of Queen West is #KevinSteele's extraordinary photo-book, a work of "sequential art" featuring time- and space-series of a single - rather glorious - stretch of #Toronto's #QueenStreetWest:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Steele himself is as extraordinary as his book. I first ran into him through #MackerelMultimedia, the pioneering Canadian #multimedia shop that he co-founded in the early 1990s - one of those art-school kids who discovered the Mac, fell in love with the radical possibilities of digital art, and changed the world:
Steele's pioneering work - in #Hypercard, then #CDROMs, then #Flash - helped define the look-and-feel of the old, good internet; an #urbanist feel that owed a debt to #Toronto's most beloved adopted urbanist, #JaneJacobs. Steele and Mackerel made things that were beautiful and human-centered, human-scaled and human-adaptable.
Not for nothing, Hypercard presaged the web's critical "#ViewSource" affordance, which allowed people to copy, modify, customize and improve on the things that they found delightful or useful; this affordance was later adapted by other human-centered projects like #Scratch, and is a powerful tonic against #enshittification.
Mackerel didn't survive the first great multimedia mass-extinction, but it launched the careers of a whole generation of talented web-writers and builders, and not just its former employees, but also the millions who were touched by its work.
I haven't seen Steele in person in decades, but I follow his work - not as a multimedia artist, but as an urban photographer. Kevin and I follow each other on #Flickr - the once great and great again photo-sharing site that survived decades of abuse from Yahoo and Verizon before being taken indie and rescued by the #SmugMug folks.
Back in November 2010, Kevin started posting photos of individual storefronts on Queen Street West to Flickr. They were painstakingly labeled and dated, and they multiplied. By the end of the year, there were a couple dozen of them:
Now, I know Queen Street West very well. It was once one of Toronto's most bohemian neighborhoods, where my paternal grandfather's fellow refugee Benny Yacht has his schmata shop and where my maternal grandfather took my mother and her siblings to trade in their comics for credit at cramped, crammed used bookstores.
I discovered Queen West as a pre-teen, thanks to #BakkaBooks - now #BakkaPhoenix - the oldest #ScienceFiction bookstore in the world. I haunted Bakka, and, on the way, found myself drawn into the other stores around it:
There was #SilverSnail, a massive comics shop, but a bounty of used bookstores, vintage clothing stores, thrift shops, the indescribably great electronics store Active Surplus and, later, nightclubs like the Rivoli, the Diamond, the Bovine Sex Club and the Zoo Bar.
For a critical decade of my life and more, the stretch of Queen Street that Steele obsessively documented in his Flickr feed had been the center of my life.
I watched it thrive and grow - and then collapse into a kind of self-parody, as the original owners (like Bakka's landlord) died, and their failsons/daughters kicked out longstanding tenants and replaced them with multinational "brands" that turned Queen West into a less-convenient, open-air version of the sterile Eaton Centre mall.
Steele, it turns out, was having similar feelings of dismay as the organic, grown, chaotic delight became groomed, sterile and homogenized.
After a 2008 fire wiped out an entire block of Queen West - including Duke's Cycle, an institution that eventually shuttered after more than a century of service - Steele began his documentation project.
Steele had started documenting the street in 2001, but that fire turned a hobby into a project. Over and over again, Steele returned to the street, meticulously photographing the same storefronts, capturing a time-series that eventually spanned 16 years, from 2001-2017.
The book runs 162 pages, and it meant to be read forwards and backwards - start from the front cover and turn the pages to see the north side of the street, along with insets showing details (like the storied #GraffitiAlley), and then flip the book over and start again, seeing the south side.
For more than a decade, I've thrilled to my unexpected trips through Steele's time-machine, as he posted his space-and-time-series images of a vanished urbanism, an old, good city that paralleled the old, good web. I got a peek at a PDF of the new book that collects these extraordinary image and immediately pre-ordered a copy.
Steele and his publisher #BlackEyeBooks are crowdfunding presales of the book on #Crowdfundr; the book is CAD40 with shipping (there's also a deluxe edition at CAD55, which comes with a signed bookplate and six postcards):
After a string of ghastly mayors - each finding new depths of depravity, selfishness and mismanagement to plumb - Toronto just elected its first progressive mayor in a generation, the wonderful #OliviaChow, for whom I used to ring doorbells support of her city council campaigns:
The enshittification of the old, good web continues apace, but there has never been more energy to build a new, good internet - and banish the #enshitternet of #BigTech to the scrapheap of history.
In the same way, Toronto's much eroded urbanism, pluralism and liveability are both at their lowest ebb in my lifetime - and also at their most hopeful moment of the century.
In 1998, the dead-eyed Romneyoid Premier of Ontario #MikeHarris "amalgamated" Toronto with its suburbs, putting it at the mercy of car-addled out-of-towners in an act of gerrymandering that all-but-guaranteed that city residents' political choices would be swamped by suburbanites who could be convinced to vote for laughable Tory bumblefucks like #RobFord.
Overcoming the gerrymander required a massive turnout - not merely a supermajority, but an ultramajority of politically motivated, organized, committed, pissed off Torontonians; Chow's election is a minor miracle that part of the wave of other historic reversals, like the DoJ awakening from its coma to drag Google into court on #antitrust charges.
We are a long way away from making a new, good internet that's a worthy successor to the old, good internet, and at least as far from a new, good Toronto that the people of the old, good Toronto would have built but for Tory wreckers and the Christmas-voting turkeys who elevated them to office. But both are possible - and both demand that we fight for them.
Steele's beautiful photodocumentary of one slice of that old, good city doesn't just memorialize the world we lost - it is inspiration for a world that is ours to win.
@pluralistic Winnipeg has suffered from a similar gerrymandering nightmare from a failed municipal unification process combined with an automobile apocalypse. This image from the same vantage point (looking north up Main Street from Portage Avenue) shows a street built for people & transit taken over by cars
Wow! In the 1915 photo, you can clearly see how all the pedestrians and streetcars prevented people from driving downtown, parking, and spending money at local businesses. It's no wonder downtown businesses collapsed without all the customers you see in the modern photo
@jching@RonBeavis@pluralistic It's insane that we were able to build massive networks of rail cars in the early 20th century but can't possibly afford a single line connecting a few different cities
@weilawei@vitriolix@jching@RonBeavis@pluralistic Boringly technically, the California high-speed rail is budgeted at between 88 and 128 billion. The DoD budget is a bit more than 800 billion. So, no.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't build a high speed line south from DC to Florida via Atlanta and the Carolinas! Or Chicago to St Louis, or the Dallas/Houston/San Antonio triangle, etc!
@vitriolix@jching@RonBeavis@pluralistic when you say “we” you’re talking about Chinese immigrants exploited for their labor during one of the most plutocratic eras of US history
@scottburton@jching@RonBeavis@pluralistic were the Chinese immigrants involved in the urban light rail projects? I've only heard about their role in the big pacific railroads
@vitriolix@jching@RonBeavis@pluralistic I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find some labor exploitation in, for example, the construction of streetcar networks of the 1890’s
@vitriolix@jching@RonBeavis@pluralistic Back when the wealthiest Americans were taxed at 70% before Reagan came along and gave the wealthy all those tax breaks? Weird how that works, isn't it.
@vitriolix if I understood correctly, building and running train lines was never profitable in itself. Railroad companies bought square miles of undeveloped, hardly accessible land, laid tracks through it, and then sold prime city building land around their stations. @jching@RonBeavis@pluralistic
@punissuer@jching@RonBeavis@pluralistic there were big advantages, but also construction equipment / automation has come so far since then it should be reducing overall costs, right? Curious how those projects compare to modern urban light rail in today's dollars
@jching@punissuer@RonBeavis@pluralistic it makes me so bummed every time I walk/bike across those old rusty rails that are still in a lot of streets unused.
@pluralistic One encouraging sign of the city moving beyond amalgamation (and possibly of a banlieue phenomenon emerging in Toronto) is that Chow also won the vote in Scarborough. Anyway, thanks for this tip, I spent a lot of time at the Bovine in its early days and will be buying this book!
@pluralistic
I didn't know you were on Flickr! I saw the change for the worse when Yahoo took over, but stuck around, and I now see the improvements with SmugMug :)
Anyway, you have a new follower on Flickr! :)
(And so does Kevin Steele.)
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