About

I'm walking every street in Toronto and photographing what's there.

That's 8,852 streets and 34,668 blocks across the 158 neighbourhoods the city officially recognises. The whole list is on this site from day one, walked or not, so you can see exactly how far I've got and how much is left. Mostly left, at the moment.

A street counts when I've walked all of it. Not driven it, not looked at it on a map. Walked it, at the speed where you actually notice things. The sidewalk stamp from 1961. The porch nobody has touched in forty years. Four houses that were clearly the same builder and a fifth that clearly wasn't.

Why

Toronto gets photographed constantly and it's almost always the same dozen spots. The parts where most of us actually live get caught by accident, in the background of something else, or by a survey car driving past at eleven in the morning.

So this is the opposite of that. Slow, on foot, and I'm treating a street in Rexdale exactly the way I'd treat one in Roncesvalles. A neighbourhood is a chapter and it closes when I've walked all of it. No skipping the boring bits, because the boring bits are most of the city and they're where people live.

It'll take years. That's fine. The point isn't speed.

How it actually goes

I walk early, usually alone, sometimes with a baby strapped to me. I photograph the fronts, the doors, the ground, and the long view down the block. Somebody comes out to ask what I'm doing roughly every second morning, which I've come to enjoy. Sometimes that turns into a proper conversation about what used to be on the corner, and if it's a good one and they're happy for it, it ends up here.

The numbers come from the city's own street data, not from me. Which means I can't quietly adjust the denominator when it starts feeling like a lot. What counts explains how it's measured if you're the sort of person who wants to check. I'd probably check.

The real estate thing

I sell real estate. This isn't that. There are no listings here, nobody can pay to get their street walked sooner, and I'm not going to knock on your door afterwards. If you want to think about it as a guy who likes this city taking a very long walk, that's about right.

Prints and cards might show up eventually, and a book if I last that long. Hard drives cost money. None of it changes what I'd have photographed anyway.

Come say hi

If your street has something worth stopping for, tell me. The order I walk in is a rotation rather than a ranking, but knowing there's a reason to get somewhere does move it up. There's a form, or just come out and talk to me when I'm on your block. That's how most of this happens anyway.