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11/30/2004: "DownsviewYorkFinchJaneCreekDownsview"
The ride to York U is long but not long. I wouldn’t want to do it during the day when it’s packed with terrible students and their backpacks, but at night you can sit quietly at the back, like Chris and I did and watch the space go by. Downsview is one of our better spaceport TTC stations. It’s a bit of Montreal in North York. Nice blue tiles. There is constant movement out there too. I went on a tour of Scarborough City Centre recently, led by a U of T architecture professor, and he said “Cities are all about movement, but it’s only out here in the suburbs that you see that movement”. Since I’m hardly there, Downsview gives me the feeling that I'm in another place - a non-every-place like an airport. Downsview might as well be LAX. The busses take people to the farthest reaches of Toronto. It's not like Dupont Station at all - where I feel as close to those orange tiles as I do my own bathroom tiles (I like to keep a bit of distance from both though).
I think with all the intense construction, York has lost some of its Soviet coziness that I had often heard about. The wind swept vistas, at least around the Commons where the bus drops you off, were a little more cramped than I expected.
The tunnels Derek took us through seemed to go deeper and deeper into the York underbelly. I felt like we shouldn’t have been there. It smelt like pot. There were primitive cave drawings of poor crucified monkeys and a comic strip made using electrical boxes.
The art school was all right. Ever since I finished grad school I get impatient in academic spaces. I don’t know why. Student sweat, or something. Maybe too many mod robes pants. Still, there are some good views, and some art laying around. Dale seemed to think it was ok, as did Derek.
As we wandered West, it did get a bit more late-Khrushchev, with big cement buildings sitting on the hill tops. Right before the land sinks down to meet the Black Creek, you can see for miles. The high rises stretch to the horizon – Jane and Finch – Rexdale – Mississauga and whatever madness lies beyond. The flights into Pearson are constant as well. There is a lot to look at.
The Black Creek itself is like a tiny Mississippi in the way it meanders around the floodplain. We did indeed find the most wonderful badly built beaver-cum-Huck Finn bridge that we all crossed safely, including flash blinded Chris and Laurel.
As Derek and Dylan wrote, the approach to Jane and Finch is full of high rises and a surprising number of single-family homes. Weird, tiny, single-family homes.
The Jane and Finch street signs don't get any special treatment like they do downtown. The area itself is all empty space and high buildings and the discount-heavy Jane Finch Mall. The lack of physical structures at this, in Toronto terms, mythic corner, is a bit jarring. You expect more...something. Jane and Finch is certainly a Place in the Toronto psyche, but as Gertrude Stein said about Los Angeles, "there is no there, there". Not at this corner, anyways. Everything is in the distance, and the sky is as big as Montana. The rents don’t seem terribly cheap either. We stood around there for a bit then kept moving south. Along Jane Street somebody in a car yelled “Walkers!” at us and kept driving.
We turned east into a housing development that was sort of Clockwork Orange crossed with a quaint English village. Hardly anybody was around – it was like we had the run of the place. Lots of fences blocked our path, and we had to go back out to Jane and go further south before we could continue east. A few blocks later we found even more sprawling housing - big Italian North York looking semi’s, some getting ready for Christmas. With the thick snow falling, it was warm and quiet and peaceful. Some residents were probably Chinese because we could see those red-lit shrines they have in their living rooms.
A few blocks away from where we were those awful kids open fired on the Wilson bus yesterday. I know bad things happen at Jane and Finch, and it’s mostly stuff I’ll never know about, but I can’t help thinking it’s mostly the way we found it. It’s also startling how quickly the half million dollar homes lining the rim of the Black Creek ravine start after leaving the Jane and Finch intersection. The proximity of wealth and the “notorious” under classes are to each other in Toronto is often surprising - like the transition from St. Jamestown to Rosedale. It’s also nice how quickly you can escape the endless pavement and parking lots by going down into the moonlit ravines we found.
