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11/11/2005: "Stroll: Wychwood"
This week's Stroll column is about Wychwood Park. We've gone on a few walks through there, as the "society," and I've gone a lot in the past year or two because it was directly between M@B's house and mine, so there were many late night walks down the hill, with the skyline poking through the trees. Below is a slightly longer version of what I wrote in Eye Weekly (minus the lovely picture of a rusting bird on a wrought iron gate found in Wychwood. Go to the Eye site to see that.
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Artists at the gates
BY SHAWN MICALLEF
Toronto, thankfully, doesn't welcome gated communities, but Wychwood Park is the exception we can live with. This bucolic historical anomaly is hidden between Christie and Bathurst, climbing up the shore of ancient Lake Iroquois, the escarpment that runs across the city just above Davenport Road.
Unless you look for the "Wychwood Private Road and Park" sign, you're likely to mistake the two entrances for somebody's driveway. The circular road climbs up through a forest of old trees and multi-million-dollar homes. When it's icy, I've slid down the steepest part of the road, by the only ultra-modern home in the park, with its low, horizontal windows that afford a perfect view of the owner reading in bed.
The park was settled in the 1870s as an artists' colony by Marmaduke Matthews (landscape painter for the CPR) and George A. Reid (did murals in old city hall and Jarvis Collegiate). It's the only place where Toronto's long-buried Taddle Creek is still visible. A pond, thick with algae and quicksand, was created by damming the creek. Descendants of goldfish deposited by Matthews' grandson on the eve of his departure for World War I still swim it.
Toronto's finest have lived here, including Marshall McLuhan (at #3). I imagine people leaving his cocktail parties, getting lost along the dark road, highball glasses in hand. Just outside the north gate, at 41 Alcina, lived York Wilson -- he did the Seven Lively Arts mural in the lobby of the Hummingbird Centre.
Some of Wychwood's residents seem to have forgotten that artistic heritage. When Artscape proposed turning the TTC streetcar barns to the north into an artists' centre, a group called "Neighbours for a 100 per cent Green Park" mounted a ruthless campaign against the plan. Their true colours were apparent when Elaine Waisglass, a Wychwood resident, told the National Post in 2002: "What if my friend Fran wants to have a dinner party? Where are her guests going to park?"
There must be something about the altitude up near St. Clair that makes people go into a car-crazed frenzy, opposing artists and streetcar right-of-ways. While some of Wychwood's current residents might be out of touch with what it means to be a Torontonian, the rest of us are free to walk around their patrician neighbourhood and pretend it's still full of Marshalls and Marmadukes.
