Thursday, June 29th
Stroll - Leslie Street Spit
This week's Stroll column in Eye is about a midnight bikeride down the Spit -- Toronto Psychogeography entries on the Spit can be found here (by Laura) and here (by Jason) and here (by me, with picturesof Spit Ice).
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Leslie Street Spit
BY SHAWN MICALLEF
Eye Weekly June 29/06
Three of us went for a midnight bike ride out on the Leslie Street Spit, a wild and thin piece of artificial land that sticks out of the eastern port lands five kilometres into Lake Ontario. We rode together in the darkness, encountering a handful of other cyclists and walkers at first, then nothing but the open road. For a while we separated, and I rode with no hands, enjoying the slightly out-of-control feeling of nighttime bike rides.
About halfway up the Spit, we started to hear an awful Hitchcockian sound: thousands of cawing buzzards. Soon it was all we could hear and we abandoned our bikes and walked down wooded footpaths toward the sound, now in congress with an overwhelming fishy stink worthy of the Digby, Nova Scotia scallop fleet -- though here the Bay of Fundy was replaced by the Toronto skyline, obscured by the silhouettes of circling birds. The vegetation became stunted, trees leafless -- victims of a fowl strain of herbicide. We only had our LED bike-lights with us, useful more for avoiding bird corpses than finding our way. Then, like the final interior scene in The Birds, a hidden flock suddenly spoke up in unison, all around us. We retreated quickly, only then noticing that in the darkness we had missed signs warning us of this environmentally sensitive area.
This wilderness was unplanned. The Toronto Harbour Commission began building the Spit in the 1950s as a breakwater for an expected boon in shipping after the St. Lawrence Seaway opened. The steamers didn't come though, but Toronto kept growing, and all the rubble and waste of our city-building was dumped here. As it grew, the Spit was colonized by cottonwood and poplar forests that include some 400 plant species. By day, it's obvious that those terrible buzzards are just cormorants, gulls and some 300 other species of birds, migratory and resident.
In 1976, a plan was floated to build a $26-million aquatic park with marinas, an amphitheatre and even a waterskiing centre. Soon after, the "Friends of the Leslie Spit" was formed, lobbying to keep the space public and turn it into the nature preserve it has become, one that changes and grows with every new truckload of debris. It was named Tommy Thompson Park, after the former Toronto Parks commissioner responsible for those great "Please walk on the grass" signs.
The Spit ends at Vicki Keith Point, where Keith began and ended some of her marathon swims across the lake. It's a jagged place littered with twisted metal and chunks of Toronto's buildings and sidewalks. The kind of place you could hurt yourself, the kind adventurous kids find so magical. So did we.
Posted by Shawn Micallef on 06.29.06 @ 12:13 PM EST [link] [No Comments]
Tuesday, June 27th
Stroll - Corktown
Eye - June 15, 2006
Stroll
BY SHAWN MICALLEF
Irish eyes were smiling
The superheated day the TTC went wildcat, I spent the afternoon following Dennis Keliher around Corktown, circa 1890. He's the sole character in A People's History Distilled, a wonderful, historically based mobile play that has Keliher lead an audience on a walking tour of the Distillery District, where he worked, and out into Corktown, where he lived.
And it's when the play ventures outside the preserved Distillery confines that this necessary Toronto mythologizing gets exciting. At Mill and Cherry Streets, we encounter the unrelenting green wall that surrounds the West Don Lands. The wall went up seemingly overnight, and everything inside of it is being removed for a new community. Keliher mentioned living here, a nod to this area being residential over 100 years ago. If the Toronto Fire Department has its way, new streets will be a lot wider than they were in Keliher's day to accommodate our massive fire trucks. But narrow, intimate streets make for better neighbourhoods, so why not compromise with smaller trucks?
The Don Lands regeneration is 20 years in the making. In the late '80s, the St. Lawrence Square scheme -- later renamed Ataratiri -- was a proposed affordable housing development that saw $300 million spent on a project that didn't happen. Planning fetishists can visit the St. Lawrence Library branch and look through report after report on Ataratiri: "Social Structure Analysis"; "Noise and Vibration Study"; "Soil Analysis"; "Flood Protection Options" -- reading them is like listening to George and Martha talk about their son who doesn't exist in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
Before the fence went up, Bayview and Front met in a derelict Detroit-ish place where one could dump bodies unnoticed in the darkness at the edge of town. Outside, in Corktown, there is an element of fleeting dereliction that is rare in Toronto, like the unkempt urban prairie that grows between Richmond and Adelaide, super-arterial roads that cut through the heart of Corktown in the 1960s.
Later, I revisited the area alone and wandered the streets, going up alleys, finding original Corktown cottages and sneaking under flying roadways where film crews store New York City cabs. Getting lost and a little dizzy, I repeatedly forgot I was in Toronto until I'd turn a corner and the electric skyline, always so sheer when viewed from the east, came into view.
At St. Paul Catholic School on Queen at Sackville, hundreds of Irish refugees from the Great Hunger in 1847 were buried. Today, they're underneath a paved playground, complete with a baseball diamond nobody would ever want to slide into home on. Corktown itself isn't dead, but you have to find it in between all the concrete.
Posted by Shawn Micallef on 06.27.06 @ 12:00 PM EST [link]
Saturday, June 10th
Strip malls and electrical fields
Thursday night's walk through Wexford, in Scarborough, started inauspiciously but wound up epic. At Sean's suggestion, we got on the 54 East bus at Eglinton Station, and got off near Victoria Park. We had a couple of new people with us: Camille, a poet I met at Lexiconjury, and frequent Squiddity commenter Liav (who came straight from a job interview, and was wearing a tie & carrying a portfolio of architectural sketches in a tube). When we alighted in the middle of a featureless commercial zone, they looked a bit disconcerted: this was not the interesting cityscape they'd been expecting! But the night was young.
Sean wanted to see some of the Points of Origin murals, which he'd read about in the latest issue of 54 East Magazine. We found those, and we also found a bizarre mural on the side of a halal butcher shop that showed a train going through mountains, people in rowboats on a stormy sea, and some kind of neo-classical temple; also some cedars in pots. Then we found a very pastoral mural advertising the Wexford Restaurant.
The restaurant is in the Wexford Heights Plaza -- see above photo. We dawdled outside. They were just closing, and a woman who worked there came out & chatted with us. She told us the restaurant has been right there, in that strip mall, since 1958, and she gave us all copies of 54 East. The Wexford Heights Plaza also features an adult video outlet and an Islamic SuperStore -- two doors apart. I imagined the respective proprietors of these establishments periodically stepping out onto the walkway and just glowering at each other.
We wandered off the main road, past a huge Ontario Hydro facility, and into an electrical corridor. There was a bike path in the corridor, so we walked down that. It was very quiet, and I thought I could hear the wires above our heads crackling faintly. We wondered what aliens, or archaeologists from a far-distant future, would make of the solemn silent rows of immense hydro towers, marching endlessly from Pickering. As we got closer to Kennedy, we had an amazing view: a jumble of towers, transformers and wires in a wide field, and behind them the lights of all the highrises of Scarborough. "You couldn't make this stuff up," said Camille.
We reached the tracks of the Scarborough RT, which Camille, Liav and I had never ridden; Sean and Himy enthusiastically insisted we had to try it. We walked to the station and got on. It's true, the RT is like a tiny toy subway! It's the cutest transit in the GTA.
Flickr photoset here.
(This entry cross-posted from squiddity.)
Posted by Nadia on 06.10.06 @ 11:44 PM EST [link]
Sunday, June 4th
Community of Strangers
After five months in the downtown core, I finally get out of Toronto, first to Buffalo where I've started in on some college courses, and then to New York, where I pay Loungeman a Memorial Day visit.
Twelve days away, and I'm driving the QEW back to the city. It's late, and I haven't eaten since a five dollar Laguardia muffin. I try to consider restaurants, and speculate that the best thing about Toronto is the Chinese food. I call up my cousins, but they're done with dinner, and then my friend Jonny, but he's out for coffee. I decide that soloing it in Chinatown's how it's gonna be, and so I park on Spadina, in front of the place with the green and white sign.
I tell the maitre'd that I'll order it to go, and as I sit with menu, trying to choose from one of the three hundred dishes, I hear my name called. "Hey, Rose." Coming up the bathroom stairs is GG Judelman, and he says that he's just finishing, that we should take a walk.
Even though I'm tired and hungry, I'm more interested in company, and we walk through Kensington to College, where he calls a friend about a late night stop-by. On our way back to the car, we pass a crowd outside the ElMo, and Judelman wonders what's happening there tonight. This prompts me to ask the group for details. There, a girl recognises me from a party a few weeks back, and she's all friendly and shiny and I tell her charming things that make her smile and she says the DJ'll be great and we should come in. I say sounds fun but we're committed to a friend, and pretty soon her back is turned and then it's off to the car and done for the night.
Later, I'm haunted by her invitation, her saying come have some fun and I'm all squared in by plans. I haven't even been back two hours and I'm already trapped by life at home. What of other possibilites? In New York, it's conversations with whoever, wherever, because no one is familiar and there's no supposed to bees. Maybe that's what I was feeling on my drive in, a desire for something familiar and easy, some comfort in company.
But living in the city is all about life with strangers. Many of us live apart from family and roots and the people closest to us were once complete unknowns. As someone with a sense of what he wants and where he's going, it's often impossible to stick with the group. By letting go of what's past, to look around and touch base with the constant stream of people, that seems a good way to experience the city.
The next day after work, I leave my boss' Forest Hill home and walk to Spadina House, where the Spacing folks are hosting an afternoon event. It's my first time here, and the grounds are immaculate and lush. Feeling the weight of my two week tour, I find a spot in the grass, more interested in the sweet spring smells than in the podium presentations.
After the last of the speakers, I say hellos to the few folks I know, and then start wondering about dinner. There's nodded interest in food, but too many people and possibilities, and I decide to make my own way. Down the Casa Loma stairs, food then bed seems to be the call.
A few steps past Davenport, a woman in a lovely purple dress stops me to ask if she's missed the Taragon Theatre. I tell her she has, then realise I don't know where the Terragon is, and backtrack. Instead, I call my friend Mitch who'll know for sure, though his directions are too nebulous to pass along. I decide to chaperone this woman, aware of the fork I'm taking.
Her name is KC, and she's on her way to see flatmates from South Africa perform their dance routine. She's all springtime and smiles and stops to smell a particular pink flower, making sure I stop to smell it, too. When she invites me to join for the show, I think of the all reasons why I shouldn't, only to know that I should. So I do, two hours of dance and theatre by an ambitious cast with a few resonating moments, but otherwise challenging its audience to stay invested in the project.
Still, the cast includes one particular black man who moves like water and catches my attention every time he takes stage, and then there's the feeling of connection I enjoy with KC, when we spend the set break talking about yoga school and grant applications. Afterwards, I invite her for food, and she says okay, with four of the cast, including the man like water, joining along.
We walk south on Howland, where we pass a curiosity of household items left out on neighbourhood lawns; first a sofa, then a TV, later a computer keyboard and a VCR. Along the way, I learn that these actors are on a four-week exchange from Cape Town and KC is a Chicagoan on a two-week study program. Assuming the tour guide, I tell them that when someone moves into the Annex, their neighbours each leave something out, and that way newcomers can have a cozy home right from the start. I tell them that coming up will be a kitchen table and probably a chandelier, and KC laughs because that's what she does and Water Man seems to think I'm serious and one of the other guys in the group is now carrying the VCR in his arms.
We wind up at the Green Room, where the five out-of-towners seem comfortable and pleased, and I feel blessed to share in their company. When three excuse themselves to go smoke cigarettes, it's me and KC and Water Man, and KC says something about being "cheesey", and Water Man says he doesn't get this word, and I explain that for some people it's hard being genuine, when they say something they feel and they hear how it sounds, they sometimes think it's "cheesey". And then Water Man says he likes being cheesey and he smiles his perfectly white smile and he looks so beautiful and KC says that she's some kind of love bug and stretches her long arms wide to show the world how much love she has to share, and for the moment, we feel alright together.
Then it's back to Bloor, where I say my goodnights and pleased-to-meet-yous, and KC sends me one last smile and Water Man says we'll get together again, and I touch my heart and say, "always right there", and then I walk myself west, as my life through the city keepings rolling along.
Posted by Eric on 06.04.06 @ 12:50 PM EST [link]
Friday, June 2nd
Stroll - Nathan Phillips Square
This Week's Eye Stroll - June 1, 2006
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Back in January, at a presentation put on by Projects for Public Spaces -- a non-profit organization from New York "dedicated to creating and sustaining public places that build communities" -- they said, "Nathan Phillips Square, on a scale of 1 to 100, ranked zero."
They might have been playing the American dilettante, trying to shock us out of our provincial complacency, but there was a collective hiss in the room because the square works. It's a sacred civic space, perhaps the finest concrete manifestation of peace, order and good government in Canada. During the day, it's enjoyed by, seemingly, everybody: scores of office people sitting around, wayward hippie girls with backpacks twice their size resting, lobbyists on cellphones, some homeless folks on the periphery and a constant stream of people crossing the square on their way to City Hall. When Old City Hall was opened in 1899, then-mayor John Shaw said, "Great buildings symbolize a people's deeds and aspirations." He could have easily been speaking at new City Hall's opening 66 years later.
Ernest expressions of what it means to be a Torontonian are everywhere, like at the speakers' corner podium -- so wonderfully, frustratingly, officiously Torontonian that it includes a warning that, while dedicated to the concept of free speech, "speakers are reminded that the Criminal Code prohibits slanderous statements or statements promoting genocide or hatred against an identifiable group or race." By the pond, the middle "freedom arch" includes a chunk of the Berlin Wall on the southern side, which I dare anybody to resist touching.
At the Peace Garden, a very Torontonian plaque set in stone reads "CAUTION ETERNAL FLAME." It should read, "Caution, Peace Garden" -- a mistake that messes up architect Viljo Revell's original clean design. A lesser consequence of the cold war heating up in the 1980s was the desperate need for peace gardens. It's a cautionary tale for those involved in the current design competition to "revitalize" the square. Good intentions can run amok -- even when you get Pierre Trudeau to turn the sod, the Pope to light the flame with an ember from Hiroshima and the Queen to christen it. Calls to tear down the aerial walkways should be ignored, and instead they should be opened, or "freed," to keep with the area's theme.
The Projects for Public Space people encourage programmed human activity in public spaces, and see a modernist expanse like Nathan Phillips as empty and maybe even totalitarian. But we don't always need designed distractions when in public. NPS is alive and well, and should be handled delicately during this upcoming revitalization.
Posted by Shawn Micallef on 06.02.06 @ 12:13 PM EST [link]
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