Egg Hunt

Right in the middle of a four day weekend, the inhabitants of one street in Kingston gather to let over 100 kids run over their lawns for 23 minutes every Easter Saturday.

The crowd gathers: mass quantities of caffine consumed in preparation for the sugar rush

This took an amazing amount of time, 1500 eggs being filled Friday and spread out over 40 front lawns at 6:45 am. Some sort movies here:

80 pounds of candy for about 80 households worth of kids.

Wellington at Clarence

smokes, money and guitars

Smokes, money and guitars. This block between Clarence and Brock on Wellington holds a Cuban cigar shop, a currency exchange and, on the corner, the Kingston Guitar Shop which is a wonder to behold and the present home of my future axe to practice my Dick Dale licks on. Or perhaps a 3/4 double bass. I have played a double bass. I married the daughter of a man who played the double bass. I could do it. Bongos for Portland and a double bass for me.

Updates

The following updates to recent posts are available for your viewing pleasure:

  • From 18 March 2004, that smokestack or chimney is now contextualized in its alley. I am sure it is a holdover from some sort of earlier build.

  • From 25 March 2004, the carriage way arch at the Royal Tavern is clearly there in the light of day and the site of “The Carriage Way Beadery”. Apparently the pub is mid-1800’s and has cobbled or slab stone floors or at least did when a co-worker was in undergrad.

The Royal Tavern

My days of bar hopping are long past. The five and a half years of rural life which wrapped up a year ago did its best to kill the habit geographically as did the advent of kids. There are, however, things that are habits and things that are personality traits and I think that the architecture of bars will always interest me. One class could be called the hard little place, that is not a sports bar, not a pub, not a road house. It might be a neighbourhood bar if you didn’t like the neighbours. The old Victory Lounge, formerly in the Lord Nelson Hotel in Halifax, Nova Scotia, or The Green Dory in the Halifax Shopping Centre come to mind as examples as does The Hillsborough Hotel (aka “the hug and slug”) in Pembroke, Ontario. I may, with such an introduction, be slandering the Royal Tavern on Princess street on one particularly non-gentrified block but the place simply does not invite. I would be interested in being proven wrong.

Do you really want everyone to know your name here??

I thought that the adjective “Royal” was not permitted except with government permission. Indeed, as no doubt you all shouted as one at the screen ust now, look up section 10(1)(a) of Ont. Reg 122/91 which makes implying a connection to the Crown a dodgy matter. Did the Queen Mum put in a good word? Maybe she stopped there once in 1937. Most likely the name is saved by section 12(1) and the grandfathering clause for pre 1991 uses. Glad we cleared that up.

Tap Room

The phoney Dickensian touches on the exterior, like the Ye Oldie font illuminated “Tap Room” sign over the door, are intriguing but you can bet the inside will disappoint, that the only thing on tap might be Labatt Blue. Actually it kind of looks like a location for a meeting of toughs on Canada’s first coroner TV drama from the late 60’s, Wojeck.

I prefer the part-licensed spotsThe mock ecclesiastical glass and angled door, detailed below, are interesting but somewhat weird touches. I will have to look again but it appears that to the left of the building there is a filled in carriage arch which would have led to a back stable. There are still a number of these arches around the town. There is one great one in Charlottetown, PEI in a wooden house on one of the streets behind the former The Harp and Thistle.

pipe smokers lounge?

Later: The carriage way is confirmed and even advertised. Apparently the place is very old on the inside even having cobbled or stone floors.

the beadery next door

imaginative name

Could it be clearer?

Back door to the Royal Tap Room

The other day I went back to get the exterior of the rear and was glad to see that the old limestone and double dormers are still there. At City Hall, there is a framed 1875 business directory map of the downtown which shows the building as having the twin dormers and an enclosed walled space out back. From the view below of the inelegant car park you can see reminants of the old walls to both sides of the property with the capping of the wall to the left apparently still intact. Likely it was for horse barns and other out buildings, it is kind of nice to imagine a walled ale garden circa 1840. Come to think of it, though, it is three dormers I am looking at with the one to the right being over the carriageway. The carriageway now feeds into the lean-to like addition to the right of the picture.

What is left of the walled garden

Men’s Clothing

stylish

Across from this view on Brock is this one – a men’s shop in an asymmetrical high contrast 1885 brick building. I don’t buy clothes at men’s shops. They exude things I can’t pull off – style, tailoring, funny swirly design sweaters for $165.00. I also have 37 inch arms that none of these shops can fully cover – “it’ll look great if you roll up the sleeves”. I am a LL Bean seconds-shop kind of guy. Too bad. You imagine that in some of these olders shops there are spittoons in the change rooms, boxing magazine subscriptions, supplies of subdued colognes named like “Bermuda Gentleman”.

Scandal Solved

This movie was really just for Jon and Wally – a VIA intercity train leaving Kingston Station. A real hog of a file at 12.5 Mbs.

Then I realized I had hit upon something. I found the sponsorship money! At 50 million a “Canada” sign or Canadian flag – surely that is market value – it’s all there. Money well spent. If the Federal Liberals had not ensured trains had the name and flag of my country on it, I can only imagine I would have confused myself for an Albanian one day.

The Size of Places

I remember during the Bosnian war in the mid-90’s being amazed at the small scale of the places involved in our news. I would listen at 7:00 pm to Hrvatska Radio from Croatia on the shortwave and try to follow where Canadian troops from my then neighbouring base CFB Petawawa, some my clients, were involved. Bosnia and Herzegovina has an area of just over 50,000 square kilometres or 5/7ths the size of New Brunswick.

Today, I read about more deaths in Gaza as I have heard about for much of my life in the news and wondered how large it was. Just 360 square kilometres according to Wikipedia. The Population Resource Centre in error has it as slightly larger than Delaware [which actually has a land mass of around 5,000 square kilometres]. Al Jazerra is in agreement with wikipedia as is the Guardian Unlimited. It is about half the size of my City with over ten times the population.

At 9,984,670 square km, Canada could hold 28,527 Gaza strips or around 200 Bosnia and Herzegovinas.   PEI could hold 16 Gaza strips.