On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 4:30 PM, Bob W <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Interesting shot. I've seen stuff like that in Romania, Moscow and, > believe it or not, Zanzibar. It's very weird to see them in a tropical > paradise, but they were a fraternal gesture of Socialist friendship > from the people of East Germany; the Zanzibaris were so overcome with > gratitude they stuffed all their people into them. Horrible places.
The area I used to live in here in Toronto is called St. Jamestown, and it's reputed to be the most densely populated neighbourhood in the country, with some 20,000 people on about 100 acres: http://pricetags.files.wordpress.com/2006/07/st-james-town.jpg I suspect no one really knows how many people are here, as there are many illegal immigrants; I've also heard a "real" population of about 24,000. About the only difference between this neighbourhood and the Stalinist masterpieces we've been talking about is the difference in architecture of these early-sixties monstrosities, and the fact that they're privately owned. At least they ~were~ privately owned - most are now owned by the city as public housing. I lived in one of the last three or four buildings that were still privately owned, and they weren't bad, but the publicly-owned ones were real slums. They sometimes went days or even weeks without hot water (or any water at all), and the elevators (all of them!) often broke down for days at a time - not a good thing when you live atop a 25 storie high-rise! The hallways featured bare lightbulbs (most of them out), filthy carpets and walls and there was a distinct odor of stale urine and faeces in the air. Pretty icky places... cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
