A Beautiful Day Of ComeUnity

The sentiment that best described this weekend's ComeUnity Festival was put forward to me by a local writer named Tobin, with whom I had the pleasure of strolling and chatting on what was an unseasonably warm Saturday afternoon.  We were speaking of the ongoing gentrification of downtown Toronto neighbourhoods and the upcoming condominium development down the street, and he wisely noted that bringing people together for a common, vital cause (such as neighbourhood beautification) had little dependency on area or "demographic", as some would term it.  I then offered the analogy of plants pushing through the cracks in the sidewalk and pavement - despite the seeming inevitability of our technological development and the often disturbing trend toward personal insulation and even isolation from society, it turns out that a show of enthusiastic, creative energy is really all that's needed to bring people from all walks of life together, both as observers and active participants.

What went down in the alleyway between Dundas Street West and the Keele Station parking lot can only be described as remarkable, and there's little doubt that the end result of the festival will make this little strip a go-to destination for quite some time.

I could easily prattle on with a detailed description of the day, but T snapped some great photos that will put the ComeUnity Festival into much better perspective than words ever could - take a looksee...


















































Probably the most refreshing aspect of the festival was the void of corporate presence, a presence that has come to be the rule-du-jour for so many Toronto community events.  While its understandable that a healthy injection of corporate funding is often needed when presenting a large scale event such as Nuit Blanche or Luminato, a grassroots and very locally organised undertaking such as the ComeUnity Festival easily showed that the usual saturation of big-business booths, banners and sample handouts might instead be much better off as the exception.

Props and gratitude to Rouchos and gl.tch for dropping the choicest of cuts all afternoon, to the volunteers who helped us haul a ton of gear down to ground level and back up again, and especially to Jose and his crew for planning and putting all of this together!

T and I are documenting the stunning array of graff work as it progresses - expect more photos within the next day or two...