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12/29/2004: "Windsor Report: Citybreaking"
I’m in Windsor for Christmas. I drive a lot when I’m here. It’s the only way around. You can drive, then park, then walk a bit, then get back in the car. I wanted to go read at my old university library, but it was closed for the week. I had to resort to the Starbucks downtown, a relatively new outlet on Ouellette Avenue, the main strip. It’s also the place that most reminds me of Toronto. Starbucks-like atmospheres are ubiquitous in Toronto, but in Windsor they’re hard to come by. Watching yourself slide into a self-hating Starbucks person is no fun, but it seemed safe and familiar.
I sat in the window. I could see the downtown theatre complex from my seat. It closed for a few years – Windsor people could only see movies at the mall or out at the Silvercity on Walker Road - out by the Costco, out by the PetSmart, out by the 401, out by the Windsor Christian Fellowship (God even comes in big-box format now). My mom says when you drive down Walker Road, you don’t feel like you’re in Windsor.
I walked down Ouellette north, towards the river. I forgot how many abandoned buildings there are. I think when you live with something everyday, you ignore the sore spots. It’s like living with a bad knee - people just sort of work around it and ignore it in order to get along. The Bank of Montreal is still in a fairly nice old 1960s building. I think this is where the biggest ever bank heist in Canadian history happened, somewhere around 1971. The thieves got away with more than $1 million in cash - money that had just come in from the Windsor Raceway (harness racing). Maybe these details are wrong. It doesn’t matter though – when the Windsor Star ran a retrospective of the event, it made it seem like this event was Windsor’s coming of age in a mythic sense. All the danger and badassness was romanced away.
I walked down to the river to look at Detroit. It was from this vantage point that me and Dreadlock Melissa watched Detroit’s Hudson Building implode in the late 1990s. The building was so solid we could feel the ground shake even on our side of the river. One recent edition to the skyline is the GM logo they slapped onto the Renaissance Centre. It ruins the clean lines of the John Portman glass tube (the same glass tube makes up the Peachtree Centre in Atlanta). It’s looks crappy now. As crappy as the new BMO logo on First Canadian Place in Toronto. There are many reasons why I’ll never buy a GM car, but my official line is that it’s because of their careless use of their logo.
Dieppe Gardens stretches along the riverfront . We used to watch the annual Detroit-Windsor fireworks display from the ”Welcome Centre”, built in 1957. Windsor was on the move in 1957. The city used good fonts (contrast it with the horrible sign underneath the original “Welcome”) and things were built, well, with some sense of style (contrast the Welcome Centre with the crappy blue and white casino tower rising in the background). Windsor was all about full employment, a real, functioning downtown, and people from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia (the great Canadian migration) moving here to work at Ford or GM or Chrysler or Hiram Walker. My dad’s family made the move from Malta (the great European migration) in 1964, and my Nannu got a job at the Chrysler assembly plant. When I was a kid, Windsor seemed so civilized and urbane and right and good. I was always excited to go downtown. I try and imagine it without being nostalgic, trying to appreciate the things that are there now, but it’s difficult. Even the public washrooms are closed. I hate it when conveniences like these are closed. It’s like the city became a deadbeat parent, though they do provide a sign indicating where the nearest operating washrooms are. I think some of them are far away. Hopefully nobody has to go very badly, but I suppose it’s assumed everybody has a car.
In honour of Chrysler’s importance to Windsor development as fine and good place, the city expropriated an entire downtown block (the only remaining 19th Century block in the city), a block full of independent businesses (places like: The Spotted Dog where the Windsor art bands played; the Windsor Press Club where you could push a doorbell on the bar that made an “applause” sign light up above the bottles; 13 Below, a bar owned in part by Ritchie Hawtin where you could hear the best DJs play, for free) – including the last and best of Windsor’s bookstores, South Shore Books (the “Pages Books” of Windsor) where I bought my first Camus and my first Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In place of all this the city allowed developers to build the Daimler Chrysler Building. Today it sits, half empty, 4 years later. There is no life there, not at 1am or 2pm, and you can see right through the building and out the other side. It’s like they salted the Earth and nothing will grow here. Next door to the Chrysler Building is the CIBC Building, where my dad was made a Canadian citizen in 1980. There is an identical CIBC building in Halifax, and it looks a lot like the ugly Toronto Star building. Same era I think, late 60s early 70s. Maybe the same sad architect.
There is a neat stone monument called Pray for Peace in the park. It was a centennial project, put up in 1967. When I was a kid I would climb up on the globe and pick out Windsor, Nova Scotia and Malta. Malta was hard because it wasn’t marked, so I sort of felt around underneath Sicily and guessed where it was. On occasion someone has defaced the faces with lipstick or whatever, but they’ve remained remarkably unscathed generally. Maybe people like peace, even the punks.
Not far away is the new Art Gallery of Windsor (AGW). It’s on the site of the temporary casino that opened in the mid 90s. The gallery was there, and then relocated to the mall so the casino could set up shop while their permanent thing could be built on the eastside of the downtown. During the new gallery’s construction in 2000, I saw a bunch of people get pepper sprayed and tear gassed by RCMP officers during the Organization of American States conference. It was the first time I experienced crowd control chemicals. Our eyes watered and throats hurt, and I was standing well away from the people who the RCMP were after. Nothing so festive now, just passing cars and empty space. The gallery building stands by itself, surrounded by empty lots to the West, South and South East. Next door to the gallery, directly east, there is a overgrown pit, meant for a condo development. I think this was started in like 1984. The hoarding is even falling apart. It’s funny how this image is the same as the images of Detroit in the 70s and 80s, where they would show the new Detroit rising above the old broken, burnt, and beaten down one (the Phoenix rises, that sort of thing). All the empty fields around the gallery used to be a dense commercial and residential neighbourhood. This area was also expropriated by the city in the late 80s for a proposed multiuse arena and convention centre that never materialized. We lost a part of the city. I remember reading article after article at the time about all the good that would come of this. When the temporary casino was there they turned it all into a vast array of parking lots, which now are largely empty and unsued – the casino is too far to the east, and casino patrons don’t like to walk. They did put up basketball nets in one of the lots though. That is nice.
Even this great old designated heritage building is empty. The space in front of it used to be a Canadian Tire. It used to have a cute restaurant in the basement. Windsor was full of this good stuff when I was kid. It was fine place, full of good buildings like the YMCA and good signage like at Lazares Furs. Now we’ve been left with parking lots and empty buildings and vulgar displays of shitty cool in the form of dancing hot peppers. Peppers Bar is a particular contrast with my old Windsor. On weekends, if you walk by the lineup waiting to get in the place, you can be certain you’ll be verbally accosted by the Abercrombie and Fitch date rape mob lined up out front. They come from Michigan, mostly for the lower drinking age, but maybe they stay for the wet t-shirt contests. This used to the Windsor Birks store, where blue haired ladies took home their blue boxes filled with blue tissue paper that held jewelry or whatever it is they were into. I don’t know where the blue haired ladies go now. Maybe they get rides out to the Costco.
I did go into the AGW yesterday, since I was walking by, and I was sort of cold and needed to warm up. I was surprised to find they have selection of Edward Burtynsky’s “Manufactured Landscapes” collection there, the one that was at the AGO in Toronto this past year. In contrast to the AGO’s packed and hot rooms, I was the only person in the AGW apart from the security guards. It made the pictures more sad and horrible and stark because there was nobody next to me to react to, or react for, or to share in my awe. The selections were mostly his Shipbreaking photos. Burtynsky took pictures of old ocean going vessels that had been dragged up onto the mudflats of Chittagong, Bangladesh, where they were systematically dismantled. Massive pieces of the ships are missing in the some of the photos. They seem mortally wounded and torn apart, but enough of the ship is still there so you can tell it was seaworthy at one time. The pictures reminded me a bit too much, and perhaps a bit too obviously, of what they’ve done to Windsor.
