The skinny on sidewalk design in Ottawa

Thanks to the Ottawa Lookout, I learned that today at the City's Transportation Committee meeting, Councillor Shawn Menard has a motion in relation to an ongoing review of sidewalk designs.

Since I currently have a cold, I can't present in person, so instead I wrote out a presentation to Transportation Committee. I'm reformatting it here, as a more concise rewrite of my 2014 blog series about Ramp style sidewalks (or "Toronto-style sidewalks", as they were called then).

Wellington Street Part 5: Tinkering with traffic (1910s to 1940s)

   [Show/Hide Contents]

• Viaduct makes Wellington an artery for the 1910s
• Speeding and slowing traffic on Wellington in the '20s
• West End pedestrian woes in the '30s and '40s
• Toronto traffic consultant pays Ottawa a visit
• End of Part 5
• References

Let's continue with our journey exploring Wellington Street as the street was extended, renamed, and rerouted over its 200-year history. In today's post, we'll look at the many little clues that give us an idea of what traffic was like on Wellington Street from the 1910s to the mid 1940s.

During this time, Wellington street wasn't extended or curtailed, but traffic in the city got busier as more people drove automobiles and the City's response to this traffic problem had to mature to cope with it. To set the scene, here's LeBreton Flats from around 1930, with Wellington Street coming in from the left and winding up through to downtown:¹

Peds on Weds: Condo access fail

Suppose you're going to spend $18.5 million on a 12-storey (later 16-storey) condo building. You might build it with exclusively one-bedroom apartments that cater to young, single individuals. Such apartments aren't big enough to raise children, so you wouldn't need to worry about your residents getting in with a stroller. And your target market is decades away from using a wheelchair.

So despite legislation that gradually encourages more and more compliance to provide equal access to people with disabilities, you install a step at the front door:

If a resident loses a limb or is paid a visit by a wheelchair-using relative, there's a second-class entrance at the side of the building. When they're dropped off at the front of the building (as is customary), someone who is unable to walk up a step would of course have no difficulty walking 60 feet or so out of their way on a snowy sidewalk:

To add insult to (hopefully no) injury, the entrance was initially built with a direct ramp from the sidewalk. The step was added after the fact:

According to the Condo project website, a new development in "contemporary Canadian cities" has the following requirements: "a sharp and creative Development Team with a solid track record of success ... design innovation, marketing savvy, systematic project management, financial prowess and political acumen." (I won't go into the "partnership with...neighbours" bit where the first the community association heard of this development was the day before it went to the Committee of Adjustment)

But as the CCCA's Seniors Committee regularly writes in their column in the Centretown Buzz, our ageing population means that we also need to ensure that new buildings are built with accessibility and visitability in mind. These qualities are essential in ensuring that ageing individuals can continue to live in their homes, ensuring a healthy diversity of the community.

There's only so much you can do for older buildings that were constructed before universal accessibility was a consideration, but for new buildings there's no excuse a person with a mobility restriction can't enter the building with as much dignity as an able-bodied person from the first time they visit.

[Tune in on Wednesdays at noon for a new pedestrian-themed blog post. View the Pedestrians label for previous Peds on Weds posts]

Jane's Walk Ottawa 2014 this weekend

This weekend (May 3-4, 2014) is the annual Jane's Walk Ottawa series of free urbanist walking tours, and as with last year, I'm publishing a list of walks in Somerset Ward.

I mentioned two of the walks I went on last year in my blog posts The Lonely Elm (Dennis van Staalduinen's walk on Wellington Street, who this year is giving a walk in Champlain Park) and The stones don't fall far from the hill (Quentin Gall's talk on Ottawa's Building and Monument Stones), both of which seem to have been one-offs.

Here's the rundown of Jane's Walks in Centretown for this year:

Peds on Weds: Delivery door design

Is this delivery truck at the Delta Ottawa City Centre too big, or is the delivery entrance too small?

Either way, it results in the truck blocking the sidewalk completely, and even this short truck diverts pedestrians not just into the roadway, but into the travel lane, to get past. Not the only pedestrian issue at this '60s-built hotel and conference centre.

[Tune in on Wednesdays at noon for a new pedestrian-themed blog post. View the Pedestrians label for previous Peds on Weds posts]
[Look for more one-photo posts under the label Singles]

Peds on Weds: Back turned on the public realm

[Note: at 2pm today, the pedestrian advocacy group Walk Ottawa will be holding a ceremony to place a pedestrian memorial marker at Rideau and Waller, where a pedestrian lost her life to a tractor-trailer in February. Details can be found here, here, and here]

This is a topic I wanted to post about months ago but never got around to, around when Urbsite thoroughly covered the 1970's guidelines for a second-floor enclosed pedestrian system. These guidelines implemented ideas envisioned by such documents as the 1965 Hammer Report (discussed in this post of mine) for a completely segregated pedestrian system, which would allow motorists dominion over the street-level public right-of-way downtown:

Urbsite is almost finished its nine-part series on the planning and (more planning, and) development of the Rideau Centre. In the most recent post, instalment 8 of 9, the author used a bunch of photos I'd taken which I shared with him. (I figured letting him post my best Rideau Centre pics would help me focus on Centretown... I'm not sure that worked!)

I took this photo this past Boxing Week, showing the wider of the two pedestrian overpasses/skywalks/pedways between the Rideau Centre and the Bay. The Bay has made use of this space for additional merchandising. It's perhaps not the best use of such a space, but at least it's being used. This was envisioned in the plans for the Rideau Centre skywalks, and for Ottawa's skywalks in general:

In this photo, one of the ones used on Urbsite, we can see how this affects the outside though. As hinted by the phrase "inward-facing merchandise" in Urbsite's caption for this photo, the merchandise is entirely focused on the shoppers inside the skywalk. As if the skywalk doesn't close in the streetscape enough on its own, the Bay's merchandise literally turns its back on the thousands of potential customers outside.

It doesn't need to. The little drawings of skywalks envisioned in the '70s showed lots of space around the shopping racks, where shoppers could peruse, peer out, and peer in. The skywalk was an extension of the public realm, but instead it has become part of the closed-off public space. They could have at least hung some display merchandise on the backs of the cabinets to serve as long-distance window-shopping!

I highly recommend reading Urbsite's series on the development of the Rideau Centre. It's a fascinating story with many twists and turns (and period images!) Start with part 1 here.

[Tune in on Wednesdays at noon for a new pedestrian-themed blog post. View the Pedestrians label for previous Peds on Weds posts]

How the Corktown Footbridge got its name

I know I just posted a blog post about the Corktown Footbridge, and I've previously covered the opening, but in honour of St. Patrick's Day—and my just-over-one-eighth Irish heritage—I'm reprinting the article I wrote in this month's issue of the Centretown Buzz, telling the story of my time on the naming committee for what is now the Corktown Footbridge.

An urban gas station in Centretown

The Petro Canada at Bronson and Somerset quietly reopened this past Friday after about six months of construction, which started shortly after the reopening of newly reconstructed Bronson Avenue. It comes complete with a convenience store at the corner, seen best at night in HDR.

Even though about three-quarters of Centretown residents walk, bus and bike as part of their regular commute to work and school, the car ownership rate in Centretown is about 1.3 cars per household. So when residents of Centretown, Chinatown and Dalhousie eventually have to fill their tanks, they have to go somewhere. After the closure of the Shell station at Gloucester, this station just on the far side of Centretown's Bronson border is one of the closest to downtown. (I'm not saying I regret the closure of the gas stations that used to pepper Centretown much more heavily!)

But just because a gas station is a car-oriented business, it doesn't mean it can't also fit into the fabric of a walkable urban neighbourhood. Before the construction photos, let's look at how the station used to look:

Peds on Weds: Part 4: A history of sidewalk design in Ottawa

Today for the fourth and final entry of the sidewalk-design series, I'm going to give a history of sidewalk design, starting at the establishment of the original City of Ottawa, in 1855 (and earlier!). In part 2 of this series, I already gave a "little history" of the Toronto-style sidewalk design, relating specifically to how they became standard back to the establishment of the current amalgamated City of Ottawa in 2001. This followed part 1, in which I described "Toronto-style" sidewalks and the problems they're meant to address, and part 3, in which I discussed some of the issues the Toronto-style sidewalk itself has faced.

Today's entry starts with the West Ward Market, built in 1848 by Nicholas Sparks. This was used as Ottawa's first City Hall, roughly where the NAC is today.

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The first municipally-built sidewalks in Ottawa actually predate the City of Ottawa's 1855 incorporation: by-law number 37 of the Town of Bytown, approved the 23rd of September, 1850, was "To authorize the expenditure of £75 in making a Plank Sidewalk, S. side York Street":

Peds on Weds: Toronto-style sidewalks part 2 - a little history

As promised, this week's Peds on Weds blog post continues the theme from last week's introduction to "Toronto-style" (or "ramp style") sidewalks, which, you will recall, are continuously flat with only the section nearest the curb ramping down to meet the curb at driveways, like so:

I'll be limiting this week's entry to how we got to this design, which unfortunately requires a lot of text from City meeting minutes (ahem, back when they had text minutes you could search and skim instead of audio recordings you need to pore over and transcribe). You'll have to wait for next week for the well-illustrated post about criticisms and issues with Toronto-style sidewalks, which you won't have to read in the same blog post as this largely technical post.

An interesting element of the story is that it starts in 2001, as the Transportation & Transit Committee for the first City Council for the newly-amalgamated City of Ottawa considered its very first budget (or in this case, reviewed the budget prepared by the Ottawa Transition Board).

2001:

The 2001 budget documents aren't online, but the minutes of the April 18, 2001 Transportation & Transit Committee budget meeting make reference to what is presumably a project to develop new sidewalk standards, and Councillor Clive Doucet moves a motion to delay sidewalk projects until the standards are written:

Peds on Weds: Toronto-style sidewalks part 1

For quite some time now, I've wanted to do a thorough writeup on what in Ottawa traffic-geek circles is referred to a "Toronto-style" sidewalk design. People love them and hate them, for reasons that I'll discuss over the next three weekly pedestrian-themed "Peds on Weds" posts, starting here.

The sidewalk seen below is an outstanding example of what people I know call a "Toronto-style sidewalk". I've no idea what people in Toronto call them, and for all I know the title might be apocryphal. The term refers to is a wide, flat surface for pedestrians, and the crosspath is ramped only to the minimum extent required for motor vehicles to get up to the height. This example is on the east side of Bronson looking north from Somerset to Cooper Street in August 2013, not long after it was installed. Pardon the spray paint markings:

The benefit is for pedestrians, but this is anathema to the car-centric roadbuilders who install them, as Eric Darwin described in a West Side Action post about the installation of the sidewalks on Bronson:

"I talked to the project / concrete foreman on the site [Bronson west side, north of Gladstone]. I complimented him on keeping so much of the walkway level. He, however, was much more interested in pointing out how gentle the motorists’ slopes were, so there wouldn’t be much of  bump for them."

The ramp is what gives the design its official name in the City of Ottawa, which has been the official standard in the City of Ottawa since June 2006: the "Ramp Style Vehicle Access Crossing" (being a traffic department term, naturally the title refers to its relationship to vehicles rather than to pedestrians or sidewalks). There is a gradual 2% grade over the flat part of the sidewalk to drain water away from the road (2% is not as steep as depicted here) which must be at least 1.05 m wide, and the ramp is 75 cm wide, assuming a curb height of 12.5 cm:

Peds on Weds: Context is a rookie mistake

On Monday, the Canadian Museum of History (i.e. the former Canadian Museum of Civilization) tweeted a photo of a wood carving, remarking at how large a carving it was, considering it was made from a single block of wood. I pointed out that there were no visual cues to give the viewer an idea of its scale, which is an important detail when you're discussing an object's size!

That night, as I was searching for a quick subject to post for today's Peds on Weds post, I found this photo from this past March, of a metal plate embedded into the sidewalk with bumps on it, a.k.a. tactile paving for the visually impaired.

It's outside the Centrepointe theatre at Ben Franlin Place (former Nepean city hall). I noticed two things about it: first, that the bumps were chopped off, presumably by snowplows, and second, that I didn't recall having seen them in Centretown. I presumed that the two observations were related. I took a photo, to file away in case it becomes relevant.

Fast forward to August, when I'm walking into Jack Purcell Recreation Centre off of Elgin Street at Lewis Street (technically on Jack Purcell Lane) and I saw one of these plates at the entrance. As is my habit, I took a photo of it.

Unfortunately, when I went to put this into a blog post, I realized I had made a rookie mistake: I photographed the plate, but I didn't take a second photo that illustrates where the object actually is. There's no point describing a piece of infrastructure if you can't also describe where it is situated in relation to the building entrance and, in this case, the curb depression.

Here's the best I could do. The yellow plate is just barely visible at the far right in the middle of the photo between the front bumper of the beige vehicle and the white stripe on the Pay & Display machine:

This phenomenon is actually pretty common among people who aren't in the habit of photographing things as a hobby. I've on many occasions had people tell me about a curious road or sidewalk situation (such as a pothole) and they'd send along a photo of the object (and only the object), sometimes from many different angles, but all too close to get an idea of where the heck it is.

And now I've done it to myself, too. Oops!

[Tune in on Wednesdays at noon for a new pedestrian-themed blog post. View the Pedestrians label for previous Peds on Weds posts]

Peds on Weds: the first sidewalks in Centretown (Updated)

I was doing some research for a post about sidewalks that I'll hopefully pull together one of these days, when I came across this entry in the 1896 City of Ottawa by-law book, "to provide for borrowing money by the issue of debentures secured by special rates, for the construction of an artificial stone sidewalk as a local improvement on Elgin Street in the City of Ottawa."

While many of the by-laws of the era barely filled a single page of the annual consolidated by-laws book, this one, and others with the same purpose in other parts of the city, takes five pages to go into great detail about how the funding would be structured for a two-block section of sidewalk "on that part of the west side of Elgin Street, lying between Maria Street [Laurier Avenue West] and Cooper Street in Central Ward, in the City of Ottawa."*

There are a few things that get my geek on with this: The first is that this is the same section of sidewalk where two squares of sidewalk survived until just a few years ago. In the other blog post, I said that my friend (who now blogs himself) recalled that sidewalk having a plaque dating it to 1905. I am not sure if perhaps he misremembered the year, or if the sidewalk was re-done in 1905 (the by-law books of that decade didn't give any clear information).

Another is just the tremendous detail to which the financing arrangements are described in the by-law itself. It essentially starts with first principles and works each step toward the conclusion. Nowadays, the by-law would have very little information, the report surrounding the by-law might describe in vague terms how much it would cost, but the details about how much would be assessed to whom (setting aside the fact that we don't finance things this way anymore) wouldn't be available to anyone except with some tooth-pulling from the city bureaucracy and possibly an MFIPPA (freedom of information act) request)

I'm composing this far too late to type out the entire thing, but if anyone wants to do it and put it in a comment, I'd be happy to add in the text.

*EDIT: Owing to the aforementioned late hour, it was pointed out to me that the 100-year-old sidewalk was on the next block down, between Somerset and Cooper. Here are the by-law pages for the construction of "an artificial stone walk [i.e. concrete sidewalk] six feet in width on the west side of that part of Elgin street, which lies between Cooper street and MacLaren street in Central Ward". This will cost $671.58, "of this amount the City disburses the sum of $297.78, being the cost of two feet in width of the said sidewalk [which is the portion of sidewalk that will be on City property]. Like the first one, this took three pages of the by-law book in the form of by-law No 1618, "Given under the Corporate Seal of the City of Ottawa, this 4th day of November, A.D., 1895. Certified [by] JOHN HENDERSON, City Clerk [and] W. BORTHWICK, Mayor.":

[Tune in on Wednesdays at noon for a new pedestrian-themed blog post. View the Pedestrians label for previous Peds on Weds posts]

Metropolitan Centretown

Looking south at Bank and Gladstone on a rainy dusk in early September. (Sigh, at a quarter to 8pm!)

I'm not particularly fond of the development here, nor the way the former Metropolitan Tabernacle's façade has be entirely de-animated as it has succumbed to death-by-Shoppers. But because the building is so close to the street, the developer was forced to bury the power lines. That on its own is a plus, but in addition it has meant full-fledged streetlights instead of the light heads tacked on to wooden hydro poles.

I suppose that arguably there is a pedestrian component to that to warrant adding "Peds on Weds" to the title of this post, but really I just wanted to post this picture because I like the colours.

[Tune in on Wednesdays at noon for a new pedestrian-themed blog post. View the Pedestrians label for previous Peds on Weds posts]
[Look for more one-photo posts under the label Singles]

Peds on Weds: Sidewalk parking fit for Queen?

Finding room for all road users in the constrained area of an existing road allowance is tough. Especially on streets in the downtown core, north of Laurier. When Light Rail is built, the station entrances will dump thousands of passengers onto Queen Street's sidewalks, where presently these cohorts are distributed among Albert and Slater. So how do you fit all those people onto Queen Street's "meets the minimum width for City standards so they're fine" sidewalks?

One of the things that struck me as a bit odd in the City's Downtown Moves planning exercise was the prospect of reorganizing the downtown core streets (Queen Street in particular) such that the lanes which are used for parking outside of rush hour become sidewalk during rush hour. Imagine the parking lanes on the reconstructed portion of Somerset, except in the same brick as the sidewalk and with no curb, or at most a token separation of an inch or so.

Aside from skepticism that this will ever happen (no source of funding was identified for implementing DOMO's recommendations, meaning that post-LRT changes to the streetscape beyond road paint and signage are unlikely), I'm also skeptical to the practicality of this particular recommendation.

Exhibit A: O'Connor Street, east side, just south of Albert, next to the Sheraton:

I'd never noticed it before because I don't go that way often, and when I do there are usually cars parked over it. But in the space (which is signed as a "Hotel zone") you have a parking lane built in concrete like a sidewalk at the roadway surface level. Right where I was standing when I took the picture is a pinch point, and if you're walking southbound (toward the camera) there is a building that blocks your view of pedestrians coming in the other direction. I'd be interested to learn from people who walk this sidewalk regularly if this is indeed the case.

It's signed as a hotel zone, so parking is allowed there during rush hour too. This means that it isn't currently used as an 'overflow sidewalk', but the designs in DOMO for the part-time sidewalks looked pretty close to this. However, the curb made for a big difference: even though the space was empty, I instinctively hugged the sidewalk and avoided the step down the curb (though I might have been pushing my bike at the time...). I can imagine the psychological barriers to such a facility being practical, not to mention the fit the traffic engineers would have to put cars and pedestrians in the same place at different times!

If you eliminate the curb, would it be better? I'm not so sure. For walking on, perhaps, but have a look at Exhibit B: I was in Brockville to check out a park named for an ancestor of mine. Brockville's main street has a cobbled parking lane between the road and the sidewalk which swoops up to meet both of them at their respective grades:

This bears some similarity to 'naked streets', which is a philosophy I agree with in theory: you get cars, bikes, and peds all in the same space and everyone slows down and pays attention to what's going on. Eric happened to mention it in his latest.

In practice, however, I found this very unsettling—both as a motorist and as a pedestrian. I'm fine with parallel parking (though many aren't), but you're also doing it on an angle, which throws off some of your reference points, and there's no bump when you hit the curb to back you up if you went too far; you hit some piece of sidewalk furniture and potentially damage both it and your vehicle. (This is actually the point of naked streets, to some extent)

But as a pedestrian, I was surprised at how unsettling it felt to walk along a sidewalk with cars manoeuvering, essentially, in 'my' space. Because the sidewalk was flush with the slopey parking lane, it felt like people were parking their cars on the sidewalk. And it was equally discomforting to know that the motorist has no curb to bump into to let them know they went too far. Not only could the motorist hit a piece of sidewalk furniture (of which Brockville's main street sidewalks were voluminously supplied), but they could hit me!

Sometimes these things just take some getting used to, like how I've learned to relax when people walk in the Laurier segregated bicycle lane (making it a de facto overflow pedestrian lane when the sidewalk is crowded). But curbs are there to keep people from driving on the sidewalk, and if you take them out to let people walk in the 'car space', then it's hard to keep the cars from driving in the 'pedestrian space'.

[Tune in on Wednesdays at noon for a new pedestrian-themed blog post. View the Pedestrians label for previous Peds on Weds posts]

Bronson reopens for the last time

After two years of construction, Bronson Avenue reopens to through traffic today, whereas it had been closed between Laurier and Somerset (the headline of the linked PSA wrongly states Gladstone). I thought I'd post some snapshots to summarize the progress.

As with last year, the reopening isn't necessarily something to celebrate, as Bronson will no doubt return to its status as a traffic sewer for hasty drivers with little or no connection to Centretown, the roadway is the same width as before the reconstruction (despite the Community's strong desire to get it rebuilt otherwise), but without all the potholes to slow them down. There will hopefully be some degree of relief on the side streets which have been host to cut-through traffic when Bronson was closed.

Recall how disruptive the closure was to road users of all modes. Not only did it disrupt the patterns of people who were just passing through, but when the intersection of Somerset and Bronson was closed, bus riders had quite a walk to get to the nearest bus stop. Customer traffic to the businesses along Bronson slowed to a trickle when Gladstone was closed. There were some attempts to maintain temporary sidewalks for pedestrians also, as seen here in the muddy mess of a street, looking north along the former east sidewalk:

Peds on Weds: What they were thinking

On Monday, Eric Darwin posted a rhetorical question on his blog—What were they thinking?—in reference to some sidewalk work at the Delta Ottawa City Centre on Lyon Street. As it happens, the question does have an answer, and it involves a deeper look (literally) than how the sidewalk looks now.

Here's a photo of the hotel in March 2012, seen from under the walkway which connects the East and West Memorial buildings. The building with the orange tarp in front, also reflected in the glass façade of Constitution Square, is the Delta Ottawa City Centre hotel, originally opened as the Skyline Hotel in 1967 and most recently known as the Crowne Plaza.

In September 2011, I had a post with my photos of the Crowne Plaza taken in recent years. This was in immediate response to posts on West Side Action (since removed?) and on Urbsite about the demolition that had just started on the entranceway. The Urbsite post has a rich history of the building, including construction photos.

The important bit for the purposes of this post, however, is that the entrance used to have a ramp to a second-storey doorway with a heavy canopy above it. The ramp went up from Albert Street and came down on Queen Street. If you zoom in, you can see the slope of the sidewalk along Queen Street:

Yellow dots are like loopy buttons for cyclists

(It's been a month since my last post; I'm slowly recovering from a long stint volunteering at RBC Royal Bank Bluesfest where I run the bike parking. This year we had record numbers again!)

A topic I'm eager to write about is the yellow dots on the pavement at intersections. You may recall my epic on pedestrian buttons, No Ifs, Ands or Buttons (and the follow-up supplementary post). Well cyclists have a way of activating the signals too, and what better place to describe it than the brand-new traffic control signal at Bronson and Arlington:

To recap the lowdown on ped buttons: when there is a traffic control signal with buttons, and there is a little yellow sign above the button, that means you must press the button if you want the walk signal to activate (though for some such intersections there might be some times of the day or week when the signal changes on a fixed timing whether or not the button is pressed).

Peds on Weds: Sidewalks for drivers

While attending the opening of the new O-Train pathway two weeks ago, Walk Ottawa co-chair John Woodhouse alerted me to a sidewalk issue on Young Street , the end of which was hosting the pathway opening ceremonies.

It seems that when the City switched from parking meters to Pay & Display machines a couple years ago, they repaved the sidewalk west of Preston on the north side of Young Street with asphalt, and put in pads at the road level for the P&D machines:

As John demonstrates here, you can't really get past that on a wheelchair. Not only isn't it wide enough, but it's so slanted he'd fall right into the machine.

Not that the sidewalk is good for anything but the car parkers. It ends before getting to the cul-de-sac, with a sheer curb..

Since it's the parking/traffic department that created this problem, we'll be following up with them to fix it.

More on the O-Train pathway is available on Eric Darwin's West Side Action, and on my blog series on the Somerset Street West reconstruction, starting with this instalment.

[Tune in on Wednesdays at noon for a new pedestrian-themed blog post. View the Pedestrians label for previous Peds on Weds posts]

Jane's Walks this weekend!

In case you haven't heard, Jane's Walk Ottawa happens this weekend. I haven't given any since the Rescue Bronson Jane's Walk I gave two years ago. It was fun, but a lot of work. So instead I'll try to go out on a couple of other people's walks. Here are some I'm looking at that are within Somerset Ward, with the description on the Jane's Walk Ottawa website linked to the headings:

Apt613 Blog Walk of Somerset
Saturday, May 4, 2013, 2pm-3:30pm
Meet at Dundonald Park, Somerset and Bay

Staying on the Bronson theme of my 2011 walk, Apartment 613 is holding a walk in Chinatown, whose businesses are suffering from the closure of the Bronson/Somerset intersection. This one has a neat format, where they'll interview some of the business owners in the same way they do interviews for their blog entries, only it'll be live and you'll be there!

Local Confectionaries
Saturday, May 4, 2013, 4pm-5pm
Meet at Somerset and Preston

A great segue from the Apt613 walk, local cartoonist/illustrator Colin White is giving a tour of the corner stores which feature often in his drawings. I don't think I've met him in person, but I like his depictions of familiar hyperlocal landmarks.