Project History

Toronto, apart from being a "city of neighbourhoods", is also a city of *former* neighbourhoods, villages, hamlets, towns and townships, boroughs, business districts, and whole other cities - all brought together (in some instances quite recently) with varying degrees of overlap. This, coupled with a long succession of haphazard replacement programs, abortive re-branding initiatives, and general standardization procrastination, has conspired to leave Toronto with one of the most charmingly convoluted assortments of signage anywhere in the world. Fitting, then, that procrastination has also played a significant role in the development (or lack thereof) of this very website. Here's how:

TSSDB founder Evcco got his first camera (a Blacks Easy Load 135) in 1993, and began taking snap-shots of various urban subjects quickly thereafter. It was not until around 1997, however, that he took his first picture of a street sign - and it was another six years until he took his next, and his first in the city of Toronto.

It was not the sign itself that initially drew Evcco's interest, however, merely the location - a strange name in a far-flung corner of his newly adopted city; taken, like so many pictures are, as simple proof of being there. But all this was soon to change. At this point in time Evcco was working as an editor and photographer for the website Skyscrapers.com, helping to create a visual database of every high-rise building on earth. In the course of completing the Toronto section of this project, Evcco quickly became acquainted with the vast array of signage marking the municipal landscape and, as something of a frivolous side-project, began taking photos of all the different varieties he happened upon along the way. As it turned out, such frivolity was not without purpose. In 2004, the site added an option to connect photos to individual streets. As it is somewhat difficult to encapsulate an entire thoroughfare in a single photo (or even a series of images) Evcco figured one way to tackle this problem was by using his now rather substantial collection of street signs pics to create collages of the various types of signs found along each of the city's major street. The photos for these collages were the seeds from which the current TSSDB would eventually grow.

By now Evcco was also employed by SEDERI, the community organization responsible for putting up the Old Town Toronto series of street signs across the southeast downtown area. Although these signs were already up by the time Evcco starting working there, he conducted a photographic survey of those signs now in need of replacement, and older model signs which were never replaced to begin with (many of which, at the time of writing, still haven't been). Unfortunately, SEDERI closed shop in 2005, and shortly thereafter Skyscrapers.com (now Emporis.com) put an end to street images on the site, meaning the collages disappeared from public view. It was these incidents which sparked the first vague notions of starting a website devoted specifically to Toronto's street signs. While nothing ever came of it (at least, at that point), Evcco kept collecting and collaging, though now out of purely personal interest - and with a focus back toward the names of the streets as opposed to the types of signs they appeared on (some examples of such work can be viewed over here).

During the course of creating these new collages Evcco chanced to discover even more varieties of signs. Meanwhile, the city began replacing much of its old stock with new Astral Media signage, thus providing an extra impetus to document as many remaining signs as possible before they were lost forever. By 2010 Evcco had finally decided to share his efforts through a thread on UrbanToronto.ca, attempting to pool the considerable civic knowledge of this online community and establish, once and for all, a definitive inventory of the city's signs. This approach proved relatively fruitful for a while, even garnering some local media attention, with mentions and articles in the National Post, Metro, BlogTO, and an interview on CBC Radio's Here & Now program. Plans were once again in the works for a separate, dedicated website, but time and resources were unfortunately not equal to the plentiful supply of Toronto's signs - and so, once again, those plans were put off.

Now cut ahead to May of 2018 when, in either a fit of late spring cleaning or early summer madness, Evcco, on nothing more than a sudden whim, began creating the infrastructure of the wiki you're currently at; adding, over the course of roughly a week, some 330 separate signs, together with more than 500 individual images, all collected over the span of nearly two decades. But while Evcco may have been long on street sign photos, he - like most other citizens of Toronto - has always been rather short on any other information about them. It is thus the hope of this site that, by utilizing the power of wiki-technology, we might now pool the knowledge of the entire internet to record, at last, the complete story of the signs that make wayfinding in this city such a fascinating experience.