[PHOTO] Sixteen photos of the Pillars Picnic (#pillarspicnic, #keepthepillarsTO)

I got late Sunday night to the Pillars Picnic, delayed by an unexpected partial shutdown of the Yonge subway line and by a necessary stop at the Black Eagle for burger and friends. The Pillars Picnic had been advertised in a NOW Toronto article, as a musical bidding farewell to the pillars in a patch of waste ground at Queens Quay and York Street in Harbourfront. The plans of the city of Toronto to build a Claude Cormier-designed park here for this burgeoning condo neighbourhood meant that these pillars, legacies of a York Street on-ramp for the Gardiner, were to go. I personally like the pillars–they evoke for me, in miniature, the modernist Stonehenge Confederation Bridge assembly yard in Amherst Point on Prince Edward Island–and supported the campaign to keep them. That campaign failed, sadly, but at least there was the concert.

(The artists performing when I arrived were Ivy Mairi backed by Matthew Bailey. They put on an excellent set.)