Not exhaustive, nor complete, this map is a work-in-progress, documenting a community in-transition. For one afternoon in February 2010, we gathered together with a group of community members to create two distinct lists: Sites of Apology and Sites of Hope.

The locations identified as part of these two lists were noted as being places for which we, as a community, might need to apologize to future generations, or places for which we might hold some particular hope of their role in creating a better city for future generations.

Over the following weeks and months, we gradually visited every site on the list to (un)officially recognize it, demarcating it with a large ribbon and saying a few words about its designation. We encourage you to make your own visit to these sites.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the list and had such an incredible and engaged conversation with us that day. This map is long overdue, but we hope it was worth the wait.

You can download the Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope Map (11″x17″).

The text above is from the map itself. We’re hoping to gradually distribute these in print.

The map went through a lot of design iterations, though we feel that this version best presents the sites — that is, as places to explore, connect, and demarcate for yourself, rather than documenting our process of demarcation with the ribbons. We recognized these sites in just one way of many, and if you take on exploring these sites yourself, please let us know!

And here’s the listing of sites… Sorry they’re not noted as being either a site of apology or site of hope. If you’re really curious, you should download the PDF.

1. Forgotten Street Car Rails / 2. Sandwich Post Office / 3. Forster High School / 4. Huron Church and College Avenue Intersection / 5. University of Windsor Parking Lots / 6. Indian Road Neighbourhood / 7. Indian Road Houses / 8. Assumption Church / 9. Eco House / 10. Atkinson Park / 11. Grace Hospital / 12. Empty Lot Beside Art Gallery of Windsor / 13. Art Gallery of Windsor / 14. St.Clair Centre for the Arts / 15. Downtown Bus Terminal / 16. Canderel Building / 17. Charles Clark Square / 18. The Old Bus Terminal/ 19. The Old Bus Terminal Being Used for the Downtown Farmers’ Market / 20. Phog Lounge / 21. Artcite Inc. / 22. Capitol Theatre’s Potential / 23. Capitol Theatre Being Closed / 24. City Hall’s Inaction / 25. City Hall’s Occasional Good Decisions / 26. Windsor Workers’ Action Centre / 27. The Clock Being Invisible / 28.The Armouries / 29. Glengarry Avenue and Assumption Street / 30. Houses East of the Casino / 31. Riverfront Ampitheatre / 32. Tim Hortons / 33. Jackson Park / 34. Erie Street Business District / 35. Motor Burger Transitioning from Noi / 36. Made in Windsor (RIP) / 37. Peabody Building Closed Down / 38. Windsor Pride / 39. Taloola Cafe / 40. Artist Studios Lost in the Fire / 41. Drouillard Road / 42. Former School Building Converted to Housing / 43. Epic Buildings Boarded Up / 44. Pelee Passage Light House / 45. Ganacho Trail / 46. WFCU Centre / 47. Zalev Brothers Scrap Yard / 48. Devonshire Mall / 49. Dense Suburbs / 50. Walker Road Big Box Stores

And here’s the map layout for 18″x24″, of which we’ve made a few prints.

Below are most of the photos from our gradual demarcation activities. There are a few site photographs that were pulled from screenshots of old iPhoto libraries, and a few others that are entirely MIA. We thought about going out and reshooting them, but the fact is that we already visited those sites and we recognized them, and now, we’re really hoping you’ll do the same.

So, presented in the order that we demarcated the sites (and not in the order as they appear on the map, which is west to east), without further adieu, the Sites of Apology and Sites of Hope of Windsor, Ontario as determined by a small, but dedicated group of Windsorites back in February 2010.

The Ecohouse

Assumption Church

Indian Road

The neighbourhood around Indian Road

Sandwich Post Office

Forgotten streetcar tracks

Forster High School

University of Windsor parking lots

Atkinson Skate Park

Downtown Bus Terminal

Community Museum

Canderel Building

St.Clair College downtown renovations

Phog Lounge

The Capitol Theatre

Artcite

Windsor Workers’ Action Centre

Windsor Pride

Old bus station

The Armouries

City Hall

Charles Clark Square

The hidden clock

Vacant Tim Hortons

Jackson Park

Riverfront Amphitheater

Burned down studios

Erie Street BIA

Drouillard Road

Big box complex

Devonshire Mall

Zalev’s scrap yard

Endless subdivisions

College Avenue and Huron Church

Grace Hospital

Converted buildings (old schools to lofts)

Ganatchio Trail

East Riverside buildings

Glengarry

Made in Windsor (RIP)

Broken City Lab: Save the City was generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

We’ve been lucky over the last week or so with some surprisingly agreeable weather. The had humidity lifted and with it, the temperature scaled back considerably. So, it’s been pretty much the best time all summer to do some exploring on foot (and sometimes on bicycle) at a pace that really allows for a different kind of engagement with space.

Now armed with an iPhone 4 for an upcoming project, it’s easier than ever to take pictures on a casual exploration. Something like a dérive, though admittedly a little more aimed at looking for some new potential project spaces than a completely free drift, last night was a perfect time to play with thinking about a variety of spaces, slowly.

These slow explorations really give the time to notice and attempt to unfold the curiosities all around the city. A sign like the one above, “PUBLIC STAIRWELL,” notifies passersby that this space is publicly accessible and annotates something unseen, behind the door. I wonder what else we might be able to annotate with the same authority as this sign that could be suggested as being both public and understood as normally hidden (at least in terms of its use by a public).

Night’s like last night continue to instill a sense of hope for this city — people are out, people are downtown, there are moments when this place looks a lot less broken. In that spirit, I started to wonder about the kinds of spaces that people wouldn’t normally look at as being “broken” in any sense of the word. Sure, there are at least a couple parking garages that have seen better days, but what about the one at the Canderel building?  I had never been through it, so I walked up to the stairs to the top floor and saw this bit of annotation.

I presume this to be some kind of skateboarding reference, seeing as that space would be rather perfect for just that. It’s boxed in, you can’t see the street on either side, and thus no one could see you from the street. There are cameras, but I’m not sure whose watching. I like the turkey hand the best.

Back on the ground floor, a shot from inside that unbelievably huge space in the Canderel building. The Investors Group is going to take it over in the next couple of years(?), but in the meantime, there’s just a long diagonal carpet leading you from the bank to the Keg. It’s a totally strange place, considering this view and its vast emptiness.

And then there’s this — that desk that is apparently sometimes occupied. I sat there for a while, it made me want to just set up a work station there. Thinking about both Andrea Carvalho‘s and Sara French/Norman‘s contribution to SRSI, it would just seem to be a lovely thing to work here until someone said no.

Out on the street, wondering what this extruded brick is about — someone knows, right?

And across the street, more architectural braille. Leftovers from some sign that offer a potential to install something else there — those are holes with threads.

Visible at the outdoor information area at Windsor’s Community Museum (the Francois Baby house): a picture of an incredible Albert Kahn building that was torn down for Casino Windsor (now Caesars Windsor). It’s strange how there’s a sense of defeat and sadness that reads so apparently from this image, which is at a city-owned space. Almost as if there’s a real “we only realized once it was too late” sensibility.

And then there’s this shopping cart also drifting. There was someone sweeping up around this pavilion , though I imagine this remains there. Why don’t we write a story about this shopping cart and put a plaque over it?

And that empty lot on the east side of the AGW — Andrea and Simon‘s planters are still there. This is amazing, because they’ve even begun to cut the grass around these.

Some planters are doing considerably better than others.

I’m also beginning to wonder what else to do with this space. It’s location is unbelievably great and it’s just a big vacant lot with a big blank wall… hmmm….

Next to the bus terminal, old signs make me wonder about what remainders we’ll leave for ourselves 10 or 15 years down the road.

And the vacant storefronts and offices across from the recently renovated St. Clair Journalism building. All those blank sign spaces are calling out for some help.

The Downtown Windsor BIA put up this series of posters a little while back — they kind of feel a bit depressing in the same way as the little picture and caption from the Community Museum (above). This poster seems to say to me, “we used to have a cross-border ferry and a vibrant downtown, and all we have now is this poster.”

And finally, one more really, really large sign with four (possibly) illuminated faces. I think we need to put together a project proposal for this building and try to get access to those light-sign-boxes… could be a very fun project!

Back in January, we asked nearly 40 people two questions: Why did you first come to Windsor? and Why are you still here? We asked those questions at an event called, Listen to the City, which was the first part of the five-month long project, Save the City. It was an incredible night.

The answers we got over the hour and a half we spent together at Phog Lounge in downtown Windsor presented not just answers to those two questions, but sprawling conversations about what it means to live in Windsor, how we’ve shaped this city, and how it’s shaped us.

The five-minute edit you can listen to below is just a slice of everything that was talked about that night. Initially, we thought we might be able to cut a lengthier audio documentary together, but there were pragmatic implications that kept us from doing that. Hours of audio with conversations that covered more ground than we could have ever imagined meant that it was a lot more difficult to piece something much larger together.

There were many voices that we unfortunately couldn’t include in the edit below, but only because of the amazing conversations those folks had, which in turn didn’t offer the kind of brief samples similar to those that we cut together. We added some music and tried to capture a general direction of conversation that we gathered from gradually listening to all of the conversations (Danielle took on the considerable task of doing just that and creating the assembly edit of this excerpt– hours and hours and hours of work, but we’re so excited to finally be able to share this).

So, while this excerpt in no way does justice to the range of conversations that we had that night, we hope it might be a good introduction, or a good marker in time, of what a group of 40 Windsorites thought about this city at the start of 2010.

Listen to the five-minute excerpt: (updated – thanks to Stephen Surlin for finessing our mix)

Download audio file (ListenToTheCity-20100826-SurlinMix.mp3)

Or you can also download the MP3 of Listen to the City.

For good measure, we can also provide the original recordings in their entirety in a zip file if you’re interested. We make no promises about the audibility/legibility of every minute of these recordings, but if you have the time, they’re worth listening to as a whole. However, the zip file is over 700mb and so not easily uploaded to our servers. However, as promised, we will be officially handing over a copy of the five-minute excerpt and the raw audio files to the Windsor Archives soon.

We need to sincerely thank everyone who came out that night and shared with us.

Broken City Lab: Save the City was generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

We’ve been quiet on the blog, but not because we haven’t been busy. I’ve been working away at the final touches for the maps for Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope, which while taking longer than I had anticipated, was well worth it. The map looks great, we’ll be posting it on here soon and distributing physical copies.

Meanwhile, work continues on our cardboard letters…

This week, Josh was on tracing.

We finally got some tape to hold the letters up while tracing.

We finished tracing all the letters this week from the projector, which is great!

Rosina and Danielle took on cutting out the letters.

Danielle was doing the first cut from Josh’s traces, then Rosina cut from Danielle’s cut.

Danielle practicing not so safe cutting procedures.

A pile of finished letters. Left on the to-do list is to finish the extrusions, do a layer of papier mâché, paint, and seal. Miranda has done some tests with encaustic, but it looks like boiled linseed oil is going to be easier and faster.

Rosina took some letters home to start working on the extrusions. Danielle had finished the extrusion on the letter A as well.

Rosina’s take-home package at the end of the night.

I’ve been using good old InDesign for the map, and I’m beginning to realize how absurd it was to do work like this in Illustrator in the past.

The map went through a few revisions…

For a while, I had a grid of images of the sites with the ribbons on them from our demarcation ceremonies.

And while I had initially designed it for a 24×18″ print, the cost ($20 at the cheapest) was too high, given that we could do 11×17″ prints for $1 each.

So, to adjust the dimensions for 11×17, I added the title strip on the right-hand side.

It also serves as a folding guide to make this map into a pocket-guide.

And, while all that was happening, we were also working through another grant…

…and putting together another exhibition proposal. Being busy is amazing fun!!! More ahead next week, it’s going to be great!

I’ll be spending most of the week finishing up a couple lingering parts of Save the City: assembling the maps for Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope and putting the final touches on the edit from Listen to the City that Danielle assembled.

The audio documentary is going to be an overview, or maybe like a trailer — it’s about 5 or 6 minutes long and will only sample bits and pieces of conversations from the hours of recorded audio from Listen to the City. However, we’ll be posting the unedited clips for download alongside the trailer as well as submitting the trailer and unedited clips on CD to the Windsor Archives.

As well, some very preliminary test maps for Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope. These will actually be 22″ x 17″, but also made available for download. Above are just some sketches, but I showed some of these to Danielle and Cristina — they liked the red map, but I think we’ll go with something like numbered dots to demarcate the sites. Or, potentially, there will be two maps.

Work like this is fun, but a bit of a long road. I suppose I’m being overly cautious to make sure that these are moving in the right direction before committing and doing a complete version, but ultimately, patience now will make it worthwhile not having to redo it later.

We were only about half strong this week, but Josh, Rosina and I plowed ahead on the letters, this time focusing on just the front and back faces of the letters K, A, E, T, and I. We figured that since we had the projector set up anyways, it was worth doing as many faces as we could. Filling in cardboard with extrusions later wouldn’t be so hard.

We’ll continue those adventures next week.

Meanwhile, we’re doing some visual research into new sites for projection and trying to figure out how best to turn our Imaginary Platform into something very distributable. More soon.

We’ve updated our imaginary campaign post to reflect some recent (positive) changes:

Our projects try to work around the realities that we encounter in Windsor on a daily basis. We address these realities creatively, and so the ways in which we address them don’t always translate to solutions. We usually try to suggest the change we’d like to see, albeit on a small scale. So, in continuing with this work, we offer the following:

We’re little less than 3 months away from the 2010 municipal elections here in Windsor. We’re not sure what to make of all the candidates entirely at this point, though it’s encouraging to see so many people entering the process.

It’s essentially a given that we’ll have the same mayor for a third term (or maybe not?), but we’ll likely see a number of new councillors. This is, in large part, due to the new 10 Ward system along with promises from councillors to not run again.

In hopes of imaging a greater city, we’d like to propose the following platform. It has gaps, it’s biased, it’s potentially unfundable, but it’s a list of ideas that we think could make Windsor a better place to live:

• Have at least two open-air city council meetings at Charles Clark Square, encourage a large audience, showcase democracy in action.
• Find a private partner and retrofit the Armouries tomorrow: get the WSO their permanent venue, renovate smaller spaces for artist studios, and keep larger rooms for small theatre performances.
• Sort out the Capitol Theatre appropriately. Clear the way to make it easier for WIFF to do more screenings, for Artcite to stay put (if they want to), for community theatre groups to do more performances, and to give Media City a consistent and reliable venue.
• Partner with the University to put a large multi-department Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences building in that parking lot across from the AGW and the downtown bus depot.
• Raise the cost of keeping buildings vacant. Do this immediately.
• Encourage small businesses to locate downtown by offering free-rent for the first 6 months they’re in business. It didn’t take long — some folks picked up on that idea. Offer rent at 50% for the following 6 months if the business hires to 2 of more employees in the first 6 months.
• Connect Transit Windsor with Tecumseh and the county with express buses, and do a better job at integrating with Detroit, get aggressive with promoting the use of public transit for everyday commutes.
• Commit to planting more trees on those barren stretches of sidewalks. Who wants to walk next to 4 lanes of traffic in the baking sun?
• Get bikes lanes in that make sense, ask the everyday riders where they go and how they like to get there, cross-reference that information with new public transit plans to make it easy to bike short commutes and dead simple to connect to the transit system for longer ones.
• Initiate an aggressive campaign to retain talent that graduates from the University and St. Clair. It’s unacceptable to sit idly by as our best and brightest move to bigger cities. Short-term subsidies to start a business fresh out of school, 6 months of free studio / rehearsal space for artists, musicians, and performers. Tell the world that we are doing this.
• Empower and fund people at the city like Jim Yanchula to act on their ideas.
• Give the Cultural Affairs Office the resources to do good things and help that office to understand the needs of the arts and cultural community.
• Commit to acting on Community Improvement Plans with an actionable to-do list over the 4-year term.
• Create an international competition to design gateways for our city (at the border and from the 401 at the least), then make sure there’s money to actually build these gateways. Advertisements should not be allowed.
• Start an innovation prize by partnering with Essex County and appropriate Economic Development entities to solve large problems and reward real innovation happening here.
• Convert 30% of riverfront and other key city-owned spaces to naturalized areas.
• Make the deep and rich histories of this region a part of everyday life — provide artists, community leaders, local historians, and elders resources to demarcate small and large historical occurrences.
• Own and embrace that we are an international city with an unbelievable wealth of multi-cultural communities.

If you’re running for council, please steal these ideas.

In what feels like the first time in months, we got together and worked on making something (that is, as opposed to planning something). We’re getting started on what is going to be an epic project, time-wise. We’re making a bunch of large 3D cardboard letters.

Collaborative Apartment Studio is very fun.

Danielle and I had a ton of cardboard from our recent move, so meeting at our new place was really convenient since all of our materials were right there.

Materials is one thing, but tools are another. However, it became obvious pretty quickly that we’d need another utility knife and a hot glue gun.

Michelle took the first shot at editing the beginnings of our Grant Report for Save the City.

Danielle and Josh got to measuring out some test letters.

Also on the to-do list was scanning in these micro-toolkits that we handed out during our How to Save the City event.

Danielle cut out a few different Js.

I took on putting together an exhibition proposal.

Cristina tried to find some quiet space to edit a draft of that proposal.

Rosina and I went to Canadian Tire to get some extra supplies and when we returned, she got started on a test O.

Danielle putting the finishing touches on the J.

This kind of hands-on research is crucial — that is, considering the majority of us in BCL think through doing, it’s always really productive to do things like playing with materials, making scale models, etc.

Danielle examines her J…

This method for creating 3D letters is pretty much how we moved forward. Two faces, plus the extrusion, which is attached basically as a capping. There aren’t any brackets on the interior for reinforcements because we anticipate strengthening the letters with an exterior shell of paper maché.

Rosina working on an O.

Rosina has some extensive experience working with cardboard, having taken Zeke Moores’ intro to sculpture at the university.

Meanwhile, a proposal gets edited.

And then really edited.

And so, Cristina is an excellent editor.

After working through the proposal, Cristina takes on editing the Grant Report.

In the other room, the rest of the crew set up a projector so we can make a bigger letter.

And, in hopes of this first attempt actually working out, we start with the first letter of what we hope to write.

Josh, Danielle, and Rosina work on the letter.

Josh and Rosina hold up the cardboard, Danielle uses a ruler to trace it out.

Yes, that is an M in Helvetica Bold.

I think the letter is somewhere around 24″ – 36″ tall.

After tracing, back to cutting, this time with a mix of knives and scissors.

Cristina doing some more editing. I’m not sure if we were being particularly picky, or if we had just written it poorly in the first place, but there was a lot of back and forth on the proposal.

Reading more drafts.

The letter M!!!!

Danielle cutting some more, the second face of the letter M.

Cutting with the corrugation seemed to work better, but we’re still working from scraps, so it’s not ideal.

It’s really going to get challenging when we run out of the larger pieces.

Michelle going over her edge.

Rosina, Michelle, and Josh look for cardboard for the edges / extrusion.

Oh, Josh.

And then glue, a lot more glue. We imagined it being awesome to be able to shape the letter from one big cut (imagine the opposite of peeling an orange without breaking the peel), that is, without gluing the two faces to the extrusion, but impossible without some severe math.

Finishing the edging.

Gluing — the M is almost done!

Top face being inspected by Danielle and Michelle.

And, letter #1 is all finished!

The M. Next week, hopefully a few more letters. I think working through this will speed up once we get going. Meanwhile, our friend, Miranda is putting together some research on potential finishes, we’re hoping these can be weather-proofed to some degree.

It was amazing to get together again like this, already anxious for next week. So much gets done and it’s just a lot of fun to get to work all in one (or two) rooms(s). After hours of lots of cardboard, material research, and a lot of really productive writing and editing, we called it a night.

This summer, some friends and I have been looking for cheap or free ways to have fun. We recently got a hold of a giant parachute like the ones from elementary school gym class. We took it out to Charles Clark Square to have some fun on Tuesday night. Earlier on this month, we filled a spare bedroom in my house with balloons to play in.

The balloons started out as a surprise for a friend, then lead to a temporary playroom that lasted about a week. We used around two hundred balloons to fill the space, which took around five of us all day to blow up in shifts.

Three people could fit comfortably in the balloon room to play. The room had no breakables or serious obstructions other than this lamp and the bed.

The balloons went up to the waist while stagnant, but really filled the whole space when people started moving around, kicking and lifting them up.

On Tuesday, my roommate Kiril Lazarevski took home some outside toys from the YMCA where we works as a day camp councillor. We set up lawn croquet in our backyard and played until the mosquitos took over.

We also took out a giant parachute and played with it for a bit, quickly realizing that we needed a few more people to really get the most out of it.

We called up some friends and biked down to Charles Clark Square, an outdoor skating rink in the downtown core that could serve many other purposes during the off-season.

This location was ideal to play in due to the overhead lighting (which turned off at the stroke of midnight) and the large open space.

The preferred game to play was ‘parachute tent’, where everyone lifts the parachute up over their head, and then tucks it underneath them as they sit on it.

Lifting up the parachute takes a surprising amount of energy and is actually a pretty good cardio workout. Looks like our gym teachers knew what was up after all.

The parachute tent lasts a good 3 minutes before the air escapes completely. Assuring that there are no gaps between the parachute and the ground is essential.

The escaping air makes for some interesting shapes seen from both the exterior and the interior of the makeshift structure.

Some casino-goers crossing through Charles Clark Square stopped by and asked if we needed and help. They were keen on playing with us as long as it was classified as ‘help’ rather than ‘play’. They seemed to enjoy themselves nonetheless.

Shortly after the lights went out at midnight, we packed up and biked home. I wonder how much it would cost to purchase one of these parachutes? I was nice to have the ability to use one through Kiril’s employment connection at the YMCA. I am also wondering if it might be possible to make one?

It’s called the Let’s Colour Project.

Ok, it’s an advertisement for a paint company, and  it strikes me as being a pretty bad idea (in a long-term perspective, I kind of cringe when I see brick buildings painted here in Windsor). Inevitably, a bit history is being completely lost by painting over these walls.

However, the video is stunning and if for a moment we can forget the parts of it that make this a possibly poor long-term choice,  it does get my imagination going thinking about how we could repaint blocks of concrete in this city.

Danielle pointed this out to me.