Toronto Photography Meetup Group

So I was walking around Kensington Market today, and noticed one of those bollards that I would have normally just walked past without even thinking about it.

There was this piece of steel that was fastened down to the top of it, with some engravings. Closer examination looks like it is some sort of marker for a guy named Victor, born 1946, died 1996.

Anybody know the story of this person?

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mike-tan/3824626517/" title="who is Victor? by mike.tan, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3580/3824626517_46eb1d192d.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="who is Victor?"></a>

Anybody have any ideas?

been randomly googling it.. and I feel like I have padawan google skills cause I couldn't find anything

I'm totally stumped on this one... I've googled everything I can think of and got nothing. Maybe an amish person made it and therefore the story wasn't uploaded to the internet and will remain a mystery until the amish break their silence one day in the far future via the interweb.....

lol I dunno but let us know if you find out

I am going to take a big guess here... but based on its location... I would say that the person was the victom of an MVA. Whether they were a pedestrian or not.

Could be a memorial to Victor Murray; a homeless man who died in 1996.

More info:
The location of this marker is the southeast corner of Kensington Ave and Baldwin St, near the couple of Jamaican stores:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source= ... 8&t=h&z=19

I suspect you're right, Rob; I think Victor could be someone who use to hang around Kensington Market? But how did you guess this, or do you know something of the history around there? How did you know Victor's last name?

Torontopedia has an entry for Victor Murray who died in January 1996 (in winter- it must have been horrible). But it has no birth date on it, so it might only be coincidental, there is nothing to confirm if Victor used to hang around Kensington Market, or where he died:
http://www.torontopedia.ca/Toronto_Homeless_Memorial

holy crap that list is huge. it's sad to see so many John Doe's on there

I assumed that it was a death marker so I knew the approximate date of death, and just applied my internet search skills. It seemed the most likely result. Unfortunately there isn't much done to track the deaths of homeless people and you'll find the exact same list, virtually text for text, on something like 5 different websites. I turned up nothing in searches for newspaper articles.