The former Bata shoe factory in “Batawa” – a company town located in southern Ontario – forged fine footwear for footloose Canucks from 1939 to the year 2000.

Kickoff

The Bata Shoe Company was founded in 1894 in Zlin, Austria-Hungary, by Tomas Bata and his two siblings. By 1932 the company had grown to become “shoemaker to the world”, boasting 16,560 employees, 1,645 stores, and 25 other non-footwear enterprises. That same year, an aircraft crash took the life of Tomas Bata, leaving the company’s fate and fortunes to his brother Jan Antonin and his son, Thomas John Bata.

Czech Your Privilege

The new generation of ownership continued to apply Tomas Bata’s proven business plans by expanding the firm’s footprint both in Europe and around the world. One of the company’s most innovative practices was the establishment of local “Bata-villes”. These vertically-integrated company towns had their own schools, grocery stores, and subsidized employee housing, all owned and operated by The Bata Shoe Company.

”A Place to Grow”

In 1939, with the clouds of war massing on the horizon, the firm built Batawa – a company-owned planned village situated on the northern shore of Lake Ontario in what is now the city of Quinte West, Canada. Bata chose the location purely for economic reasons: it was close to navigable waterways, a railway, a highway, and an airport.

Sole Purpose

As was the case with other Batavilles, Batawa’s heart and “sole” was the shoe production factory. The state of the art (for 1939) five-story-tall facility dominated the peaceful southeastern Ontario countryside while enabling the firm to dominate the Canadian market for affordable footwear.

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Footloose Canadas Abandoned Bata Shoe Factory

Manually chipping away at rock for hours, two cave explorers have discovered a massive, previously unknown system of prehistoric caves beneath the streets of Montreal. Estimated to be around 15,000 years old, the Ice Age cave network was found about 30 feet beneath the city’s Pie-XII Park adjacent to the St. Léonard cave already popular with residents and visitors. These shafts tunnel almost 700 feet into the earth – most of their depths filled with water, and thus, pretty hard to fully explore.

Cavers Daniel Caron and Luc Le Blanc say they’ve suspected the existence of these caves since 2014, and spent much of 2017 exploring St. Léonard, which is already mapped, to find potential openings. They came across a narrow opening in the rock face that looked promising, but it was too small to enter, so they stuck a camera inside and took some photos of the chamber on the other side.

The cave explorers used hammers and cordless drills to break the wall down and get inside, finding a cavern with impressively high ceilings that leads to an underground lake. According to the Quebec Speleogical Society, Montreal was built right over this entire system without anyone ever realizing it was there, and Caron and Le Blanc may be the first humans ever to enter the newly-discovered areas.

Many cities all over the world are built right atop underground wonders, from quarries and catacombs to bunkers and smuggling tunnels, but the foundations of many others remain a mystery. Many of us likely walk over secret worlds every day without ever realizing it.

Not just cold comfort, these portable shacks designed to be towed out onto frozen lakes come in a variety of forms, from the practical and resourceful to the funny and artistic.  These ice fishing hut designs demonstrate how surprisingly warm and cozy the simplest of shelters can be – and prove that people who live in the world’s coldest climates (happily spending their spare time engaging in recreational outdoor activities in subzero temps) are way hardier than the rest of us.

Fishing Hut & Hot Tub Combo

A group of local anglers in Calgary came up with a pretty brilliant way to stay warm while out on the ice: a towable hot tub, which they pull out onto frozen lakes alongside their fishing hut. It takes a couple hours to heat up, but the waiting time has got to be worthwhile once you get in. “We weren’t catching any fish, so we thought we’d do something else,” says the tub’s creator, Scott Chesterman.

Ice Fishing Hut with Frozen Walls

Rather than hauling a pre-made hut out onto the water, you could work with what’s already there. This mobile fisherman’s hut design by Norwegian architecture studio Gartnerfuglen is made of a wooden frame and wire mesh, used as a form for ice. Once the walls freeze into place, the inside is insulated. In the summertime, it can be used as a garden shed, with the wire supporting climbing plants.

The Art Shanty Project: 8 Creative Hut Designs

Is this the polar opposite of Burning Man? Over 1,000 artists have designed and built creative ice shanties for the annual ‘Art Shanty Project’ over the last decade, covering the frozen surface of a Minnesota lake like an iced-over version of the popular desert festival. The creations include wooden stick-framed shacks, geodesic domes, tipis, sculptural structures and mobile shanties of all kinds, put on display for thousands of tourists to see for an event that’s uniquely Minnesotan.

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Angling For Warmth In Winter 21 Ice Fishing Hut Designs

The new Freezeway pilot project now live in Edmonton aims to draw residents out of hibernation, encouraging them to skate along an iced trail system slated to double as a seven-mile commuting corridor.

What started as a landscape architecture student’s conceptual project has already become a 1,300-foot ice pathway in winter that also serves as a bike route during the summer.

The vision is well-adapted to the conditions of the city, which faces below-freezing temperatures for up to five months out of the year, and has been nicknamed Deadmonton for its lack of wintertime outdoor activity.

The opening of the first stretch of Freezeway has been accompanied by a disco-style light show of rainbow colors projected onto the frozen path.

From the designer: “This project is not meant to be a tax payer’s burden. The Freezeway is meant upgrade city infrastructure for a multitude of uses, potentially doing wonders for the redeveloping City’s core, our international reputation, as well as attract investment into the City. The proposed route exists entirely on existing City infrastructure; the land is already secured. The numerous character areas along the route could be developed in phases, lending themselves well to private funding/sponsorship, like Calgary’s GlobalFest, or Vancouver’s Festival of Light fireworks shows, funded by donations of over 1 million dollars annually.”

Powered by solar panels and sustained by a half-acre plot of farmland, these 12 connected buoyant platforms together form an autonomous off-the-grid dwelling for the couple that built the complex over the course of more than 20 years.

Located off the coast of Vancouver Island in Canada, Freedom Cove, as it is called, has everything one could wish from a dream home including pools, beaches, gardens, greenhouses, galleries, towers, workshops and guest rooms

Its creators, artists Wayne Adams and Catherine King, spend their time painting, writing, carving and making music as well as entertaining guests – visitors are welcome in the summer, but can only reach this remote location by chartering special boat taxis.

Like the science-fictional floating city of Armada in China Mieville’s novel The Scar, each piece is tied together and seems to have been accrued almost organically over time.

Living off the land (and water), the couple fishes for food off the sides of the platforms and grow their own vegetables and fruits in a half-acre farm area above. An array of solar panels provides energy with generators used for backup.

“A retired ballerina, Catherine maintains these floating gardens while Wayne’s incredible sculptural talents support them. The gardens host frequent visits from whale and bear watching groups in the area. Guests leave with a candle casted from the moulds of various sculptures. They live on a very meagre annual income. “