Windsong

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Hendrix

Recorded with friends during an overnite up at a cottage, exposed to the elements off Georgian Bay, I have since been searching for an image to pick up on this evocative acoustic rendition of some Hendrix. With the reference to wind in the lyrics, what could be better than the University of Toronto’s Old Meteorological Building? No, this is not a ‘negative’ image, just the haunting effect of the new lights from a refurbished Varsity Centre.…excerpted from the above link:

Toronto has been the site of meteorological observations — volunteer and official — since the early 1800s, when it the British government decided that weather and climactic obesrvatories ought to be established throughout the British Empire. An officer of the Department of Ordnance was dispatched to Canada to establish a national meteorological observation headquarters in Montreal.

As luck would have it, Montreal had precisely enough magnetic bedrock to skew the chance of any reliable readings — not only were some of the instruments magnetic, the military was interested in how the variaton of the earth’s magnetic fields affected weather. Montreal would simply not do, and the site was instead built in Toronto.

The first weather station was built temporarily at the Bathurst Street Barracks, on the lands we now know as Old Fort York, where regular observations began to be taken on January 1, 1840. In September of that same year, observations moved to a new facility, the Toronto Magnetic and Meteorological Observatory, a log cabin built on the less muddy grounds of King’s College.

By the 1850s, a new stone observatory was built in its place — and still stands today behind Hart House, albeit without the weather instruments, which were packed up and moved a few times until 1909, when the new Meteorological Service Headquarters was established at 315 Bloor Street W.

The move came about after after much complaining by the then director of the Meteorological Service, Sir Frederic Stupart, who lamented, “the encroachments of the University on our property have ruined the old site as a suitable exposure for meteorological instruments.”

“…the broken pieces of yesterday.” – Hendrix