Hey, man, sometimes you just want to take pictures of flowers.
Little libraries and resource boxes of the neighbourhood. They’re, uh, more understocked than I feel they usually are. I didn’t set out to do Sad Photo Series #37. Maybe there’s a seasonality to this. Maybe our capitalist billionaire-fever-dream dystopia is manifesting in new and horrible ways. I dunno.
My new friend, Rick Cigarettes:
Faded Spongebob:
This Telephone Pole Will Change Your Life… Twice
Dumpster Claw
Big Crane on Campus
Best Shawarma In Town
Stauffer Library’s Architecture Makes No Goddamn Sense And Looks Kind Of Like A Hat For Those Game of Thrones Frozen Zombie Things
My Friend Bébé Danger, On Our Garage Roof (1-2)
Pop of colour
Community Garden
Tug!
Who Gave Their Lives for the Empire
Sleepy Gatehouse
Sunflowers
Night Crane
Bumblebee Rental (edited to obfuscate phone #)
Before the Sidewalk Cafe Opens
Why the scare quotes?
Utility Sunflowers
Glorious Shitbox (edited to obscure plate)
Private Parking, Public Art
My Dick Stinks
Red Wall
Approaching a Rabbit
Windowboxes 1-3
Lost Garage
Well, That’s A Technically Accurate Thing You Can Call A Junk Shop, I Suppose
Marie Antoinette Exhibition July 18 (zoom in, and yes, it’s a real thing, I checked)
My New Friend Sheriff Sharky Tremendous
Lil Dog
Door Roses
Back Wall
Mr. Brightside Meets the Cardigans
EWL RENO A ED R S FREE NT BREAKFAST
Mom, Where Do Baby Carts Come From?
Weird Stump
Missory
Pained Man
Crack Batz
Canada Tile
Caged Heat (Pump)1I know it’s not a heat pump
- 1I know it’s not a heat pump
Forlorn Boots
Flower Tricycle
Park Plinth 1
Park Plinth 2 (Inscription – Man, That Minister Sure Died Young)
Artistic Anchor at Dawn Shot
Three Cruise Boats
Drinks Door
Ivy Wall
Funky Smokestacks
Sidewalk Raspberries
Churches in the NOP area of Kingston today.
Without going full CLA$$WAR, the difference is striking: the historically wealthy downtown features stately limestone churches; in the traditional working class North of Princess ‘hoods, it’s all wood frame or brick buildings, and/or converted houses or other buildings. The exception being St. John, the only legit large limestone church more than a stone’s throw from downtown, at Patrick & Quebec St., in the formerly firmly working-class Skeleton Park / “The Boys” neighbourhood.
St. Paul’s (below) is technically NOP, but by one block, so it’s here for accuracy but doesn’t really alter the general pattern of big, fancy downtown churches and scrappier churches in the lower-income areas. Even among these, our Lady of Fatima is a legitimately impressive brick Portugese church, and St. Luke is a more traditional brick church.
But the others are pretty divergent.
For instance: Bible Baptist Church is just a “LIVE BAIT” style yellow light-up sign outside somebody’s brick house (there’s a ramp and a different entrance at the back, but to take a photo I’d have to get super intrusively up this person’s driveway, which I’m not comfortable with 1and, I mean, they’ve turned their home into a church, so maybe they should be okay with it, but it’s a testament (ha!) to the ‘house-ness’ of it all that I feel really weird about walking up the driveway and similarly, PREPARE THE WAY/International House of Prayer is a sign on the side of a post-war frame home; Zion is the basement of a seniors’ complex (also owned/run by the United Church, IIRC). I didn’t photograph former churches, of which there are also several.
Further north and west, the Kingscourt > John Counter neighbourhood has more churches, much more in the ’80s-onward Pentacostal “big low brick buildings” style, but this was already a 1-hour-plus ramble.
- 1and, I mean, they’ve turned their home into a church, so maybe they should be okay with it, but it’s a testament (ha!) to the ‘house-ness’ of it all that I feel really weird about walking up the driveway
Big churches of downtown Kingston. At some point soon, I’ll start covering the more modest churches North of Princess (NOP) here in Kingston — much more interesting, IMO, in their variety and scrappiness than these stately limestone churches.
