Where manual labourers came to die
Posted on October 8th, 2009 –
Well now I’ve gone and done it. I’ve brazenly ripped off yet another set of photos from the Toronto Archives.
That’s what happens when I’m knackered and I’ve spent most of the night swooping around the financial district in Street View instead of posting! Oh well, if you’ll forgive a few sentences that don’t quite seem to make sense, we’ll be able get through this.
Man, I wish Google never came out with Street View. Between every few words … I manage to travel another couple of blocks.
It’s been thirty minutes since my last sentence!
Back in the olden days they wouldn’t have had these frivolous time wasters. The men with their genitals exposed to the raw atmosphere had enough to occupy their time.
The Royal Alex isn’t one of those locations that’s changed much. Guys are still freezing their nuts off out there.
The next random location — just because it happens to be a few steps down the street doesn’t mean it’s not random! — the next random location I decided on for comparison was the Elephant and Castle across the street from Roy Thomson Hall. In this case, there was a world of difference between then and now.
I figured I’d include something in the picture that I could match to something in the archives. Luckily, I was right. It’s the black building in the above photo that stands in the spot where the building below stood.
Hahaha! What the hell was that?! No one’s getting drunk in that podunk town!
Wow. Thank God we’ve progressed so far.
Savages.
Compare the genteel stoicism of the modern city…
…with the barbaric, angled-for-impalement twenties.
I mean, I like old buildings, just not those mud-covered rectangular bunkers where manual labourers came to die. But, most of those have been demolished and replaced with more interesting buildings, so it all worked out in the end.
The reason I brought this up was that Street View back then would have sucked donkey balls. Major. It’s almost as if back then they really wouldn’t have had a need for any modern technology. Wouldn’t be much to use it on. Horses’d still stink. Mud and dog feces’d still be indistinguishable from one another. No bikinis anywhere.
I don’t know what those people were thinking, but at least we seem to have gotten it together a bit more since then.
The only piece missing now is that sleep I mentioned at the beginning.
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... that's shorter
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October 14th, 2009 9:35 am
very nice the last pict…