Every Saturday at noon, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters"good and bad"that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today.

"Breaking Ground," a commemorative quilt by Laurie Swim hanging at York Mills subway station. Photo by Rmi Carreiro/Torontoist. This week saw the installation of a quilt at York Mills subway station to honour five men who lost their lives in what became known as the Hoggs Hollow Disaster. The deaths of Pasqualle Allegrezza, Giovanni Correglio, Giovanni Fusillo, Alessandro Mantella, and Guido Mantella while working on a watermain under the Don River on March 17, 1960, and the press coverage of the exploitation of their fellow Italian immigrant construction workers led to the strengthening of Ontarios labour laws. Work conditions for the thousands of Italian immigrants who laboured during Torontos postwar suburban boom were anything but ideal. While union-fought guarantees of lunch breaks and certain safety requirements eased the workday of those

Image courtesy of the City of Toronto. During the climactic men's hockey game at the end of this winter's Olympics, Toronto was united by a lot more than enthusiasm for sports. As this graph of the city's water usage during the game clearly shows, Torontonians were also remarkably synchronized that night in the timing of their trips to the washroom, with massive spikes in water consumption to coincide with each intermission in play and a huge dip in usage following Sidney Crosby's winning goal. This was almost certainly due to toilets, citywide, flushing, and not flushing, in unison. Bladders were straining together all over Toronto. It brings a tear to the eye. Similar graphs showing water usage in Edmonton and Winnipeg have already made the newsbut this graph, from Toronto Water, our city's water-supply agency, is the first evidence we've seen of game-time washroom synchronicity specifically in Toronto. We imagine a graph of beer consumption during the game would show pretty much the inverse, if what h

Bad Rabbits Kick Off US Tour Electro House Music As rare as flawless gems, booty with brains and defrosting filet mignon, it is not often that a band breaks out with a powerful sound deserving of an entirely new genre. That is exactly the case, however, with Boston five-piece collective BAD RABBITS and their debut offering, Stick ...

It’s been scarcely a year since Parisian electronic producer / visual artist Raoul Sinier released his Brain Kitchen album and its accompanying Huge Samurai Radish remix collection on Ad Noiseam, but this follow-up Tremens Industry, his fourth album in total, represents a considerably different proposition. While Brain Kitchen saw Sinier out to scramble the listener’s synapses with some of his most complex and highly-edited productions to date, the thirteen tracks on Tremens Industry see him aiming more towards constructing actual ’songs’, with the aid of his self-constructed guitar (whose construction is documented on the accompanying DVD), drums and other live instrumentation. It’s an approach that results in a refreshing new level of warmth and accessibility, where Sinier’s previous works have sometimes been more cold and forebidding, and indeed all of the tracks collected here carry an emotional tone to them often missing amongst Brain Kitchen’s digital hyper-dext

Jonny Trunk is a modern plunderer, a man who has obsessively collected sounds from hundreds of music libraries over the years, and this album is a distillation of some of those ideas, as Jonny puts it, those tracks that are barely still alive. He wants us to think this all about him, but he would be quite happy for us to drop the S in the title, and call this Crapbook. My guess is that this is in fact the Jonny Trunk humour, as Scrapbook is a rather wonderful collection of musical sketches, vignettes, mock-ups, unfinished musical passages just waiting for the right visuals. This has to be the definition of a modern day library record, full of moods, music that can stand up on its own, but at the same time is crying out for some b-grade experimental cinema to add that last shot of life. Jonny is an obvious obsessive, hes plundered and mined so many different styles from funk, and jazz, and he must have listened to every soundtrack ever composed, the detail in the tracks prove he is knowledgeable. Jonny

So, what’s a pirate’s favorite whompadelic glitch monster? You guessed it! BassnectAAARRGGHHH! We have a couple hot ones to drop on you today, first up Lorin’s first mixtape in over 2 years. This time, it’s for International DJ Magazine. Forty-five minutes of drop stop unreleased remixes, re-edits, and crazy samples from abroad, this mix is ...

Soho House soft opened yesterday for private parties, though the members-only club goes whole hog next Monday. As previously reported, the venue claims the top two floors of Luckman Plaza on Sunset Blvd, here now a few more details. Chef Matt Armistead plus staff has recently relocated from Cecconi's to head up the Soho House kitchen and prepare a California-inspired menu with French influences. As for the interior, here's how the space breaks down. The top penthouse level houses the restaurant and club lounge which includes a pond (the whole pool thing didn't work out) and soaring palm trees (how did those get up there!?). One floor below exists the sitting room plus private rooms for high rollers.

·Soho House Opens March 8 at Luckman Plaza ~ELA~