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01/08/2006: "Stroll: Eaton Centre"

For some reason this Stroll column didn't make it to the Eye website over the holidays. But here it is.

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On a rare family trip downtown in 1982, by the northern exit of the Queen TTC station, a clown was handing out flyers. Her makeup was happy but her real face was very sad – so sad, that I started wondering why she had to hand out flyers. I thought about her for years, and can still see her expression perfectly. I think it was my first urban experience that had a hint of unpleasantness attached. That it happened next to the Eaton Centre, a place I thought was the most futuristic place on Earth, was an added complication.

Certainly an eight year old's vision might be a bit suspect, but the Eaton Centre is an abrupt shift from the wilds of public space to a quasi-public private space. Inside, Toronto's quick urban pace slows to an insufferable suburban waddle. I want to yell "we're still downtown, get moving" but at most I just make loud, equally insufferable sighs. Perhaps that it was modeled after Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II shopping arcade causes people move at a slow, European speed. Michael Snow's famous hanging geese – "flight stop" – are entirely Canadian though, and not just for their fowl content. With Snow v The Eaton Centre, a lawsuit triggered by the red ribbons the mall tied around their necks one Christmas, a landmark intellectual property decision that upheld an artist's moral rights to his or her work was established.

The original plan was even bigger and would have destroyed Old City Hall and Church of the Holy Trinity. Sanity prevailed and the centre was scaled back, but it could still boast the 18 screens of the now closed Cineplex cinema, the largest multiplex in the world at the time. Toronto did loose Terauley, Louisa, Downey and Albert – streets and lanes that live on in our right to cross through the mall 24 hours a day where Albert Street once existed, mitigating, in a small way, the dead no-go zone mega block developments can become.

Though one of Toronto's top tourist draws (a million people a week), the brochures don't mention it's utility as a fine public bathroom. The fifth floor of the Bay has a first-rate old fashion men's toilet with nice floor-length urinals (I expect somebody to start shining my shoes when I'm in there) while the Sears nee-Eatons store has modern loos on each floor (the higher up you go the less used they are). However the whole thing really is, in the words of U of T geography professor Ted Relph, "a machined designed to take money out of your wallet".