Television crews come to Kensington! John Catucci is in the neighbourhood shooting an episode of his show, “You Gotta Eat Here!”
This crew was on location at The Oak Tree, filming in and around 10th Street for an upcoming episode.
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“They have a big dog racing industry in Mexico. It’s a huge industry down there but illegal in California. We rescued him when we lived in L.A.
He never raced. They’re bred and trained to race, but if they don’t come in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd, they euthanize them. By two years-old, most of these Grey Hounds are put down. Rio is eight years-old.”
I’m often asked how I keep this project up, how I continue to shoot and post photos every day.
My answer is, “Just keep it up for one more day.”
“I’ve been an MLA for eleven years. I give all credit to Ralph Klein for getting me into politics–he fired me in 2002 for criticizing their party’s lack of action for climate change.
What do I like about this community? Hmm… I love our connectedness. There’s a lot of coming and going, and even so, there’s a lot of stability with our neighbours, despite all the new development, that gives us a sense of community that lacks in other areas. I can bike around from the office to where I meet people around the constituency. Take this office for example: we’re on a busy thoroughfare of 14th street, but we’re next door to the Calgary Mental Health Association and affordable housing.
My family lives near New Edinburgh park because our children attended the Waldorf School. We chose this place because the Waldorf Academy was teaching out of the Sunnyside School, that’s how we ended up here.
New Edinburgh park is a great asset to the city. In the summer time it’s full of kids playing. In the wintertime it’s flooded and frozen over for a skating rink. It’s so nice to have everything nearby: Prince’s Island, Eau Claire, the river, the cycle paths… It’s a lovely part of Calgary.” Dr. David Swann, third term MLA of Calgary Mountain View.
Everybody loves pie, arguably one of the greatest and most versatile food structures known to mankind. Sweet, savoury, filled with gravy or sauce, pies come in all shapes, sizes and flavours.
January 23rd marked International Pie Day which was lovingly observed at Kensington’s own Pie Cloud where they serve savoury and sweet pies, along with all kinds of upscale diner fare and a fantastic breakfast on the weekends!
“Hey, you know what you should do? You should go out and shoot a photo that looks like one of those shots from the late 1970’s. You know the ones that are all grainy, underexposed,kind of like they’re from a noir movie? That would be really cool.”
Here you go, the first ‘Commission’ of Sunnyside365.
“There’s poetry in the passage of time, and beauty in watching old give way to the new. But if you look to hard, you won’t find it. If you try to hard to understand it, you never will.
When you get to my age, it seems like everybody is too busy to just shut the fuck up and listen–including me!”
“You know, I’m not going to say that this kind of thing doesn’t occur in other parts of the city, but nobody looks twice when it happens in Sunnyside. It doesn’t surprise me that somebody uses a unicycle as a method of transport, or that they even have a specialized off-road terrain version of one. Hell, it doesn’t matter that they’re unicycling in the winter.
What I am actually surprised about is the fact that they used a shitty lock to chain it up with. C’mon people, bike thefts are at an all-time high.”
The Black-billed Magpie is a member of the Crow family. These birds are synonymous with their urban environments, as they’re known to thrive wherever humans tend to settle. As well, they’re one of very few North American birds that builds domed nests.
Magpies are also known to a habit called ‘Scatter Foraging’ and will often hide excess food in small caches around the vicinity of their homes, poking holes in snow or dirt with their beaks and pushing bits of food down the cavity they make. However, always the opportunistic scavenger, other Magpies keep on the lookout when members of their species are hiding goodies under the snow for them to steal.
In Calgary, Magpies used to be colloquially called ‘Cowpies’ because of their habit of flipping over cow and horse poop to snatch at the grubs and bugs underneath.
Over a hundred years ago, the area of Sunnyside and Hillhurst was a swampy area consisting of run-off sloughs from Hounsfield Heights, North Hill and Crescent Heights. Many parts of what we now call Sunnyside and Hillhurst were difficult to traverse and, as a matter of fact, had to be carefully navigated when navigating the shore of the river to the banks of the bluffs.
However, years later, there’s still evidence of the what the pioneers who settled in the area, and the First Nations that came before them had to deal with.
Take for example the natural dip in the terrain between 10a and 11 Street on 3 Ave. The homes had to be built with a natural descent in their grade to the back alley to allow for drainage.
The seemingly bizarre angle of Gladstone Road is a larger remnant of the topographical history…
The road was originally a part of a trail used by the Blackfoot Nations as a foot path from the bank of the Bow River. They used to bring their canoes to shore at an inlet on the Bow just by the 14th street bridge and walk the trail (now Gladstone Road) to ascend the bluff to hunt game. Even part of 4th avenue, as you cross 10th street is part of this Blackfoot Nations shortcut to the McHugh bluff. Although it probably wasn’t called that when they used to use it.