Secret City

Imagining Toronto

From the Introduction to A City Becoming 

I often think of the city’s tourist destinations as impostors – institutions that have been pretending so stridently to be the city they have almost obscured what the city really is.

Our house is tall, and narrow, and made of brick that, like much of the red, Victorian fabric of Toronto’s downtown,  was quarried and kilned beside the Don River.  The valley, one of the largest of the many ravines that wind their hidden way below the grade of Toronto’s streets and sidewalks, used to be a dramatic fall of wilderness between the city and what would become its eastern flank.  Today there are bike paths and hiking trails, and the valley is popularly known as the home of a long-neglected river and  a desperately overused highway.  But toward the end of the 19th-century, it had a kind of Shire-like peacefulness.  There were a few mills along the willowed banks,  a few small settlements, winding dirt roads, swimming holes, and, rising from the chimneys of the brick works, the curling smoke of a growing city’s requisite industry.

Our home was built in 1887 by a developer – a gentle precursor to the condominium builders whose glass-lofted towers are so changing the face of Toronto today.  He built our house on the corner of what is still a surprisingly quiet downtown street.  He lived here, but used his residence as a model for the houses he offered to build for purchasers of the various lots he owned along the block.  He must have done well – judging from the number of nearly identical houses I pass as I head eastward, on my daily walks through the University of Toronto.

We live only a few blocks from the downtown campus.  As a result, the sidewalk that runs directly along the western edge of our property, just beyond our garden fence, is well-used.   So is the scruffy alley directly to our south.   This must be one of the few areas in the city where there are more shoes than tires going by.

But it is the fact that we are on a corner that most distinguishes us from the majority of downtown Toronto houses.  We have good light.  We have exposure on the south, the north and the west  sides – something that many of the city’s tall, narrow,  semi-detached Victorian houses cannot boast.  But this also means that we are not tucked away.  We have no mystery to our back.

There are back yards in the downtown – behind modest and grand houses alike --  that are secret groves.   Like the city’s ravines,  they are not obvious to outsiders.   They have always been one of the things I like best about Toronto, but my affection for them feels private.  It’s as if they are too modest an attraction to mention.  There must be visitors to Toronto who never guess at their presence -- who, having taken-in the destinations that are listed in the tourism brochures in their hotel rooms, wonder why anyone thinks of this city as being other than ordinary.  

That might be because they do not know that Toronto’s neighborhoods are where the city’s real beauty lies.  Or because they have not been told where to slip from the street-level of neighborhoods, down to the cool, wooded other-world of  the ravines – the hidden places that the distinguished writer, Robert Fulford, has called the “shared subconscious of the municipality”  and that the architect, John Van Nostrand, calls the “Other Places.”  

The city’s hidden downtown gardens have the same effect.  Behind their rickety fences, under their canopy of  maples, beside their shadows of lilac and bridal wreath, they reveal an aspect of  Toronto’s personality that is not apparent in the Eaton Centre or on the observation deck of the CN Tower.  Often, the gardens feel old-fashioned – which is another way of saying that they naturally reach back into the brambled generations of the city’s history.  In fact, as a Torontonian, I often think of the city’s tourist destinations as impostors – institutions that have been pretending so stridently to be the city they have almost obscured what the city really is. 

More-so than in most other cities,  tourists aren’t privy to what the people who live here know about this place.  Torontonians seem to be reticent about these things – a civic shyness that is not without its charm, as the author and professor, Richard Florida has noted  – but that sometimes undermines our ambitions and that tends to keep private the deepest pleasures we take in our city. 

No-one is likely to tell out-of-town visitors that they should make a point of watching the sun set at the end of College Street on a late-winter evening as a snowstorm is clearing.   There is no song, or poem, or accumulation of repeated opinion that lets tourists in on the fact that the streaked purple sky behind the tower of the Bellevue fire station is a beautiful sight.  Nor does anyone advise them to stroll up and down the streets of the most ordinary and un-picturesque neighborhoods in order to see, at first hand,  what the Globe and Mail  city columnist, John Barber, calls the triumphant experiment of Toronto.

The term, world-class, used to be trotted out by gung-ho journalists, bureaucrats, businessmen, and politicians whenever the subject of the Olympics, or an NFL football franchise, or the SkyDome’s retractable roof came up – at least, it was so-trotted until the groans of embarrassed Torontonians became too loud.  But Toronto’s real relationship to the world is apparent,  not in what is usually a cavernously-empty sports facility, but at modest meeting places such as the corner of Vaughan and Oakwood:  in the Nova Era Bakery, and the Eritrean Orthodox Church, and the Istanbul Bazaar, and the York Italian Hunting and Sports Association, and the Mt. Zion Bible College, and the Oakwood Baptist Church, and the Chinese grocery stores, and the Portuguese grocery stores, and the Caribbean grocery stores, and the Brazilian Sports Bars.  No tourist will likely be told that the “world-class” place to be in Toronto is the perfectly ordinary park adjacent to Riverdale Farm in Cabbagetown on a perfectly ordinary Sunday afternoon in June.  There,  Canadian families from Pakistan, and Jamaica, and Nigeria, and Ukraine, and Indonesia, and Chile can be seen picnicking, playing, strolling, relaxing. 

In reality, there is nothing ordinary about this.  In a Toronto park, many are enjoying freedom from sectarian strife and violent crime, freedom from poverty and disease and environmental degradation, freedom from political oppression and class injustice.  This spectacularly un-spectacular scene – the snoozing Dad, the romping kids, the women chatting at the picnic tables – is freedom  that an enormous percentage of the earth’s population would give anything to share.  And this is what is so very odd about Toronto these days: a scene that, at first glance, seems as unremarkable as a pleasant Sunday afternoon, takes on global dimensions when cast against the invisible, distant, and often-horrifying context that created it.

To some considerable extent, tourists will entirely miss the point of Toronto: because they are not told stories we hardly tell ourselves.  Figuratively as well as literally, they are rarely given the opportunity to sit up late in back gardens that seem a world away from the bright, noisy city that presides out front.  

Downtown gardens are about illusion.  This is especially true in Toronto.  Large or small, they conjure something that isn’t rural exactly, isn’t pastoral exactly, but that is tucked-away and that is slightly anarchic.  Toronto’s private, modest little gardens – higgledy-piggeldy or obsessively manicured,  blousy and overgrown or trimmed and precise --  are the unregulated expressions of individuals in a city of individuals.  They somehow stand in opposition to the super-sized gas stations, the stingy sidewalks, the architectural blunders,  the swaths of concrete, the screech of subways, the often-nasty weather, and the week-in, week-out regimen of work that is so often Toronto’s most obvious presentation. 

In a city that seems often bleak, there is something subversive about these little green patches of flower-beds and vegetables  and bushes and  trees.  In their way, they are “off the grid” – to use John Van Nostrand’s term --  which may explain why they are so removed from the city’s boosterish and frequently idiotic public swagger.  The booming, hectoring, profoundly irritating commercial voices that won’t let baseball fans alone for a between-batter instant at a Blue Jays game, find their very opposite in the tinny little radios that are on in the secret backyards where, for generations,  Torontonians have cut the grass, or done the weeding,  or had a beer, while listening to the ball game.

But a secret place is not a possibility where my family and I live.  In our  downtown, corner, back-garden, you can read a book by the light of a streetlamp.  You can smell the cigarettes and (with un-American frequency)  the marijuana of people on their way to the College Street bars.  The bounce of basketballs and the gravelly rush of long-boards interrupt our conversations.  For the duration of about a dozen steps – the length, more or less, of our back property --  passing discussions are clearly, sometimes regrettably audible.

Cars park just a few feet beyond our fence: their stereos, their slammed doors, their not-always cooperative ignitions, and their (insert string of expletives) alarms are a presence in our lives.   When we eat outside on a summer evening, our table is as close to the curb as a fire hydrant would be.  As a result, there is nothing abstract about our objections to idling cars and trucks.  The solid, eight-foot high wooden fence is a barrier, but it can’t make us feel farther away from the street than we are.  Our garden is never capable of pretending that it is anywhere other than exactly where it is.

In fact, the only time the back of our house gives way to illusion is early in the morning.  We have large windows that look out, to the south, over our garden, and  I sometimes sit there with coffee as the sun is coming up.  To the south-east  are alleys, garages,  and the unpainted brick-backs of old houses.  There are fire-escapes, sheds, and parked cars.  There are trash cans, bits of old bicycles,  a rusted refrigerator door, scraps of lumber, concrete blocks,  graffiti, sewer grates. 

But this is not my view.  Not at all.  Our fence and the roofs of two of my neighbours’ garages cut off the scrappy, dusty reality of what I’m looking at.  From where I sit, there  isn’t a split garbage bag,  a broken sherry bottle,  a rusted-out hibachi, or an old tire in sight.  What I see for the most part are the trees that are there – the upper branches of trees that grow between the parking pads, and the sway-backed sheds, and the old chain-link fences.   The distance between the far trees and the closest ones,  the range in size from high old maples to ironweed,  the shafts of morning light – all conjure a pleasant hallucination.  They convey the impression that I am not looking over an undistinguished  maze of asphalt and trash and parked cars.  Early in the morning, the trees and the generosity of space between them create the illusion that my view is of a leafy common garden.

This trompe-l’oeil happened without effort on my part.  I simply transposed  memories of civic gardens I have known onto what I can’t quite see.  There is a bit of Paris’s Bois de Vincennes in my imaginary landscape – or at least that’s where I think the pond and the paths and the footbridge come from.  And there’s some of Greenwich Village’s MacDougal-Sullivan Gardens in the civilized enclosure that I like to pretend is there.   Most of all, there is a common garden in London that works its way into my invented landscape  – a view that I knew very well from a year, long before Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts arrived on the scene, when I lived on the second floor, at the back of a rooming house in Notting Hill.

This is an occupational hazard of being a Torontonian.  For years,  Torontonians squinted at what was, and imagined what might be.  Why couldn’t we have wider sidewalks?  Why was it necessary to tear down so many lovely old buildings and raise so many ugly ones?  Does the flow of automobile traffic have always to be a municipal priority?  Why can’t  we have water clean enough for us to swim at our beaches?  And for years, all this squinting and imagining was thought to be the stuff of fantasy by the grey, sober, practical,  business-like, and decidedly dull presence that seemed to loom over the city.  A beautiful waterfront?  A thriving artistic community?  Imaginative architecture?  An opera house?  Until quite recently, these were viewed as the most impractical and frivolous pipedreams – much like the sleepily imagined common garden that I sometimes think I see from the back of my ordinary, red brick home.