Squeaker

From a gallery at the Carnegie Museum. There should be one for women politicians.

I rarely leave the house after dinner, but, when I got an invitation (before the results were in) to Dianne Saxe's "victory party," I thought I'd better go.

The polls in Ward 11 closed at 8:00 p.m. By then I was seated at a table full of strangers in the Victory Cafe on Bloor West. The one thing we had in common was we'd all volunteered for Dianne's campaign. Well, that, and the fact that we wanted her to win.

By 8:30, the local news station had declared Dianne's chief rival, Norm Di Pasquale, the victor by a narrow margin.

So I went home. Bruce had caught a cold in Pittsburgh and wasn't feeling well. And there didn't seem to be much of a reason to hang around.

By the time I got home shortly after 9:00 p.m., the narrow margin of victory had changed. Dianne was in the lead by about 130 votes. So I decided to stay up and watch the numbers ... which did not move, at all, for the next two hours. 70 out of 77 polls had reported in, but I couldn't keep my eyes open. I went to bed.

Back at the Victory Cafe, before the results were made official, Dianne thanked her supporters for her apparent victory and went home. Her campaign team called her after midnight to tell her she'd officially won.

She finished with 8,614 votes, Di Pasquale with 8,491.

Phew.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

That's a hard climb: looking up from the lower
station of the Duquesne Incline.

 

Pittsburgh in Retrospect

Red's Bar summed it up for us. Once upon a time in Pittsburgh, neighbourhoods had bars and stores and places where people congregated. Then thoroughfares cut through the neighbourhoods, industries declined, people left, and no one has came back (at least not yet). There's a 3 kilometre stretch along Fifth Avenue, between the University of Pittsburgh campus and the PG Paints Arena, that is almost entirely dead. 

We went to Pittsburgh on a friend's recommendation. We stayed downtown, where most of the hotels are, but there wasn't a lot going on there.  

The liveliest parts of the city that we saw were the blocks around the University of Pittsburgh, with busy sidewalks and prosperous street level retail.

The rest, especially that 3 km stretch along Fifth Avenue, was deserted-feeling, run down or completely derelict. I'm sure the pandemic hasn't helped.

We were delighted by the Carnegie Art Museum, though. I'd somehow gotten the impression that Carnegie's museum was the poor sister to Frick's. But, no, the CAM's got a great collection. We saw just the tiniest bit of it on Thursday.

It's interesting that they picked this Rothko
for a temporary exhibit.

Part two of this blog's two-part series: the Nixon Agnew Collection.

The Puritan. Still an important part of the American political landscape.

While Frick (whom everyone assured us was not a nice man) collected the works of the past masters, Carnegie patronized, and his museum still patronizes, contemporary Pittsburg artists. So the collection is vibrant, and feels highly locally relevant.  

Overall, we had a fun vacation. We enjoyed ourselves, ate better than we usually do (I recommend The Steel Mill Saloon, Meat and Potatoes, Nicky's Thai Kitchen, and Max's Allegheny Tavern) and everyone we met was friendly and helpful. Plus, I got my camera fixed.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

Facts and Figures

Pittsburgh area in square km: 151.1

Pittsburgh population: 301,000 (est. growth about -.5%/year)

Toronto area in square km: 630.2

Toronto population: 2.93M (est. growth about +1%/year)

So, Pittsburgh has one quarter the land area and one tenth the population of Toronto and its population is shrinking. No wonder it seemed deserted. 

Andy Warhol and Me

I can't decide if Andy Warhol was a great artist or just a guy with a gift for flattering rich people who ran a long con.

We spent two hours yesterday at the Andy Warhol Museum, the storehouse for all things Andy, with a chronologically curated selection of his many, many works.

Usually, after that much time in a museum, I feel "full", like I can't absorb any more information. Yesterday, I felt like I'd spent my time shopping, but hadn't seen anything I liked. 

Correction. I liked these:

Nixon and Agnew hand puppets from one of the hundreds of "Time Capsule" boxes Warhol obsessively collected for more than a decade before he died. 

After the museum, we crossed the Allegheny and Monongehela rivers and rode up the Duquesne Incline.

You can see what kind of a day it was: cold, rainy, windy.

And I took pictures of Bruce interacting with his environment:

By the fountain where the rivers meet.

With Roberto Clemente Walker.

With the big wheels that pull the incline cables.

Today the weather will be warmer and dryer. We're going to the Carnegie Art Museum. And I'm going to get my camera out of the repair shop.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

 

Pittsburgh Indoors

Roman-style ceiling mosaic, the Renaissance Pittsburgh Hotel

While we had not expected to gamble with our luggage (which we have now, btw), we did expect that the weather in Pittsburgh in the third week of October would be iffy.

We've not been disappointed in that. It's cold, windy and sometimes it rains. But yesterday was fine enough for us to walk two hours on the way back from the Frick Pittsburgh.

There we saw a show of American folk art, American Perspectives. The whole show was a marvel, but the last room, and especially the last four pieces, almost had me in tears.

In memory of the Bath School massacre: on May 8, 1927, a man named Andrew Kehoe killed 38 children and 6 adults (including himself and his wife) first and foremost because he was sick in the head, but also because he was upset about his financial situation and the taxes he had to pay. He had rigged the schoolhouse, and his car, with explosives, all of which were wired to explode at the same time. Half of the dynamite he'd set under the school failed to go off.
His intention had been to blow up the whole school and kill all the people in it. This is a small hand carved wood replica of the bronze statue erected to remember the tragedy.

A "wood quilt" made from detritus in the aftermath of
hurricane Katrina, by Jean-Marcel St. Jacques.

Quilt by Jessie B. Telfair, who, in 1963, lost her job as a cook
because she attempted to register to vote.

Sculpture in wood and twine over unknown armature by Judith Scott, who, for 35 years was institutionalized (she had Down Syndrome) after being taken from her home and her twin sister at the age of seven. Once her twin obtained legal guardianship of her, she was enrolled in the Oakland Creative Growth Arts Centre. From then until her death in 2005, she lived happily and created sculptures from fabric and twine.

We saw the insides of some other fine old buildings from Pittsburgh's hey day, including The Frick Building

A very slidable-looking marble bannister.

And the Union Trust Building

Atrium over the rotunda.

On the way back from the Frick, I tripped on some uneven pavement, fell (I'm fine) and smashed my camera lens to smithereens. So, today, I'll be getting a new lens, then we're going to the Andy Warhol Museum, and, if the weather allows, we're going to walk the Three River Heritage trail over to the Duquesne Incline and ride it to the top and then to the bottom again.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

Fortune And Her Wheel
Frick Building

Travelling Light

Where the Ohio, Allegheny and Monongehela Rivers meet.

The second most annoying thing Air Canada did to us was, even though we'd arrived three hours early to board a forty minute flight to Pittsburgh, they made us wait more than an hour before they let us into the security line up. Fifteen minutes after our flight's boarding time, we were still waiting for clearance into the US.

The most annoying thing was, of course, that they lost our luggage.

The Air Canada employee at the Pittsburgh airport, who has been telling people for months now that it's her second day on the job, really had no idea what to say or do. I ultimately spoke to a helpful person working for Air Canada in a call centre in Mumbai, who entered our claim into the system and gave me a tracking code. Now I can now go online at regular intervals to see that, as of twenty-four hours after the last time we saw our bag, they have no idea where it is.

Fine. This is a life, lemons, lemonade situation. Every time I pack to go on a trip I wonder how much I really need to bring with me, and how much could just as easily be obtained at my destination, or just left behind.

This is an opportunity to end the wondering.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

The "recently refurbished" Monongehela Incline
being re-refurbished.

The Old Man, His Wife and the Skunk

Bob, when he joined the canvass on Thursday night, did not smell bad. So, when he offered to give me a ride home, I had nothing to tell me that there was anything amiss. 

Tired after two hours of climbing front steps and knocking on doors, I said yes. 

On the way to the car, Bob talked about his skull collection. He explained that in his role as the executive director of the Escarpment Biosphere Conservancy he takes the collection to rural fairs and uses it as a conversation starter. "Kids come running over to the table, and then I get to talk with their parents. We have over 200 properties under the land trust now."

I assumed Bob wasn't talking about human skulls.  

"Can you smell the skunk?" Bob asked when I opened the car door. Trying to be polite because he was giving me a ride, I said, "yes, but it's not too bad." 

He told me that he needed a skunk skull for his collection because he'd been told that what he thought was a skunk was actually a cat's skull. 

Then Bob was in the market for a dead skunk. Soon enough, he found one, lying in the middle of the road.

He'd pulled over, retrieved the flattened skunk, and put it in his car. The dead skunk is now both hanging in a tree in his back yard and, essentially, still in his car. "My wife's not very happy with me," said Bob. 

To help him with that, I offered him the unsolicited advice that a product call Bad Air Sponge would likely remove the stench from his vehicle.

I got to test my advice that same night. When I got home, standing in the front hall, I told Bruce the story of the old man and the skunk and he said, standing three metres away from me, "that explains the way you smell."

I put my shirt, my pants, my jacket and my knapsack in a small closet with an air sponge. Two days later, they were good as new. 

For the sake of his marriage, I hope Bob gives it a try.

Thanks for reading!

Next week, dispatches from Pittsburgh!

Karen

Also famous for mistaking cats for skunks.

Creepy Season

Common garden spider and its lunch,
Ameliasburgh, Ontario, September 20, 2022.

Garter snake, Macaulay Mountain Conservation Area,
September 21, 2022.

Al Purdy's ghostly feet (and the photographer's),
Grove Cemetery, Purdy Street,
Ameliasburgh, Ontario, September 20, 2022.

Apologies to all arachnophobes and ophidiophobes. I needed illustrations to accompany my observation that Hallowe'en is morphing into "creepy season", I assume in a systemic effort to make everyone feel welcome to festoon their homes in synthetic webs and fabric witches.

This week's canvassing for Dianne Saxe was complicated by houses that had covered up their numbers with creepy season decorations. Another complicating factor was we were back in Rosedale, Toronto's toniest neighbourhood, where houses sit on acre lots and you have to wait and wait and wait at the door to give anyone home the time they need to answer your knock. The time and distances involved neutralize the impact of a large canvassing team. In two hours, six of us barely managed 100 homes. A third as many could have done twice as much in any other neighbourhood.

The houses are huge, and grandly appointed, but, in a lot of respects, are like everywhere else. Some are immaculately kept. Others are a mess. Some have been subdivided into flats. Two grand homes on Glen Road are obviously vacation rentals (obvious, that is, if you knock on the door and offer information about a local election). At the west end of Roxborough Drive, most of the properties are decrepit.

Sometimes it feels as if I'm in the same campaign as just a few months ago, when I also folded flyers into the door handles of non-responsive addresses, and asked strangers nosey questions about who they'd be supporting in the election.   

There's really only one big difference between the municipal election and the provincial election. Dianne may actually win this time.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Karen 

Ever seen a frog poop?
A grey tree frog, on the
back deck of our PEC Vrbo.
Terrified by two giant
beings bathing it in light and 
alcohol fumes, it let loose
its little bowels.

The Missing Middle

Prince Edward County sunset, from the back porch of our Vrbo.

In Toronto, you can build single family dwellings or you can build fifty-plus-storey towers. If you want to build something in between those two extremes, like a three-storey infill, well, best leave those plans to your children in your will, because they'll never see approval in your lifetime.

The extremes in Toronto planning policy - ultra low density on the one hand, ultra high density on the other - has given rise to what is called the "missing middle" -- affordable, mid-density housing -- which, among many other things, is often blamed for the perpetual housing crisis in Toronto.

This is another maddening example of how a public policy problem is well understood, and the solution ridiculously obvious (just repeal antiquated restrictions on mid-density development), and yet, somehow, nothing changes, and the only new development you see is fifty-plus-storey towers.

Toronto planning policies are like contemporary politics. Everything is at one end or the other. People at the extremes dominate the conversation. Any person with a proposal in the middle hasn't got a hope.

The current state of political polarization is, among other things, the excuse used by people who have decided not to vote, to free ride on democracy and let elections be decided by the ones who show up.

This is another maddening example of how an obvious solution seems beyond our grasp.

Speaking of a person in the middle, Dianne Saxe is running for office again, this time as councillor in Ward 11, the same arbitrary set of boundaries on the map that she ran for in the provincial election.

Back then, she was a Green Party candidate. Now she's running on a non-partisan platform, pushing for action on climate change, reconciliation with First Nations and housing. 

I can't vote for her, but I'm volunteering again for her campaign. 

If you're in her ward, check her out. You don't have to vote for her if you don't like, but, wherever you are, vote for somebody for goodness' sake.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

  

The frogs of Prince Edward County. All northern leopard frogs, each with its own colour scheme.