Some Great Idea

by Edward Keenan

  Toronto is the setting for my biography, but as I suggested earlier, it’s more importantly also a character in it, as it is for millions of other people. Toronto’s the place where all those biographies intersect, where personal narratives become social ones, where all our stories come together in one larger story that contains tragedy and comedy and ecstasy and heartbreak. It is our mythology. And we’re still writing it.

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  One of the first articles I wrote when I landed a job at Eye Weekly was about an unusual, monthly storytelling salon called Trampoline Hall. It was a lecture series, to be precise, but the people giving lectures were not experts on the subjects they addressed, and the narrative of the night was controlled by a scruffy, besuited host named Misha Glouberman who joked about the process of the event (‘This is the pre-show part of the show, in which you talk amongst yourselves in anticipation of the beginning part of the show …’). The audience question-and-answer period was often the most interesting part of the night. It was a big, alcohol-soaked group conversation that was co-founded and run by the novelist Sheila Heti.

  Trampoline Hall became phenomenally popular among the literary crowd quickly after it began in 2001. The air in the smoke-filled backroom of the Cameron Housae every month was charged with self-aware cleverness and a search for larger meaning. It felt very much at the time like a part of Toronto discovering itself. Something about the way the event deliberately lacked polish, and depended for its worth on how the audience supported or antagonized a speaker, its conscious eclecticism and interactivity, made it feel particularly suited to this city. Glouberman told me it had been planned from the beginning to be more than just a series of events. ‘We were creating a scene,’ he said. And a particular kind of scene, based on getting people together and interacting; the audience was always part of the show, not merely a witness to it. ‘Trampoline Hall is about the city,’ Glouberman said.

  It was at a Trampoline Hall event at the Gladstone Hotel on Queen Street West in November 2003 that something about Toronto crystallized for me. It was just a few weeks before the municipal election, and then­–mayoral candidate David Miller had suddenly taken a lead in the polls, a development that had awoken a wave of enthusiasm among young, downtown creative types. Here on the edge of Parkdale, in a neighbourhood that had become a hive of independent art galleries, in a historic hotel whose restoration had made it one of the trendiest drinking destinations in the city, Miller joined a panel for a discussion of beauty.

  Specifically, the topic was ‘Beauty and the Aesthetic City,’ a theme selected by Heti. Although the event was run in coordination with the Miller campaign, Heti insisted that in keeping with the ‘non-expert’ mandate of the event, the candidate could not give his stump speech, make reference to his platform or ask for votes. Instead, he sat on a panel with Jane Jacobs (who used an old-fashioned ear trumpet as she fielded questions from the audience), playwright Deanne Taylor and novelist Nino Ricci.

  Ricci spoke about his experience of Toronto as the child of immigrant parents from Italy. He said he’d grown up feeling a bit like an outsider in Canada, not a ‘real Canadian’ like those from more established families, because his familial identity was still tied to the culture of Italy. But when he went to visit Florence, he found he was an outsider there, as well, too Canadian to be a real Italian. But, he said, he found in Florence an astonishingly rigid definition of what it meant to be Italian, and what it meant to be Roman or Sicilian or Florentine. Thousands of years of carefully recorded and preserved history had gone into creating that identity, its customs and architecture and art and literature, its cuisine and politics. ‘The mythology of Florence had already been written,’ he said. It was an atmosphere he found suffocating. Nothing one could do would have the smallest hope of contributing to or evolving the cultural life of the city or the country; Florentines, like people from many of the most storied cities in Europe and across the world, were engaged in a process of preservation, not creation.

  Toronto, by contrast, is a young city in a young country, famously grappling with its identity. It’s populated by an ever-swelling collection of first- and second- and third-generation immigrants from other cities and provinces and countries. This is what Ricci found exciting about it. ‘Toronto is still deciding what it will be,’ he said. ‘We’re still finding out what it means to be Torontonian. Our mythology has yet to be written.’ And in that room, among people who maybe had the feeling they were involved in writing a chapter of the city’s emerging mythology, or might one day be characters in it, I realized that a quality of Toronto long thought to be a fault was, in fact, one of its greatest assets. It was echoed in something David Miller said at the event, about how he saw his role as a leader in a city of citizens. ‘I think being mayor is not about what I can do for you, but about what we can create together,’ he said.

  Toronto writer Doug Saunders, author of Arrival City, a justly celebrated 2010 book about urban globalization, was asked in an interview to compare London, England, where he was stationed for the Globe and Mail, to Toronto. ‘There’s so much invention happening in London,’ he said, ‘but there’s still an undertone of English culture, like the city doesn’t belong to everyone. In Toronto, it feels like everyone is building the city. The most dramatic parts of London’s history are in the past, but in Toronto, the next hundred years will be the city’s most exciting.’

  This is a big part of the story of Toronto, and it’s inscribed right into the streetscape on Queen Street East. Eldon Garnett’s Time: And A Clock consists partly of an archway that looms over the bridge spanning the Don River, and in eighteen-inch-high stainless steel letters, it spells out, ‘This river I step in is not the river I stand in.’ (A twist on a sentiment expressed by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who said, ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice,’ but a particularly Toronto twist, for reasons I hope will shortly become clear.) It’s part of a meditation on time; the river is constantly moving, the water that’s there one moment flows on and is replaced by fresh water from upstream, and the act of stepping in the river alters it further – you are now a feature of the river, the water and whatever animals or other things might be in it behaving differently to accommodate your presence. The river is ever changing, and you participate in that change by wading in and getting wet.

  As with the river, so with the city. The GTA has, for a few generations, grown by about a million people per decade – a number of new residents in the past ten years that’s equivalent to about a fifth of the total population – and more than half the current residents have come here from somewhere else. One of the more obvious and noteworthy effects of this steady growth through immigration and in-migration is that the city is constantly redefining and reinventing itself.

  So getting a handle on exactly what characteristics define a Torontonian or the Torontonian attitude is notoriously difficult. Of course, the country as a whole has a pretty storied history of neurosis over the elusive ‘Canadian identity.’ (Everyone agrees it’s not American, and maybe has something to do with health care. And perhaps Mounties. Beyond that, there’s a lot of debate.) While it’s not surprising that Canada’s largest city displays a bit of the same syndrome, it’s not necessarily something you see in other big cities: Calgary’s a boastful boomtown defined by swaggering energy-industry cowboys, Vancouver has elevated smug granola-crunching to an art, Montreal tangos on the Main in two languages with a bagel in one hand and a rose in its teeth, while the capitals of the East Coast embody a long-suffering I’s-the-B’y earthiness. In all those places, they complain about Toronto, but good luck getting them – or us – to tell you what exactly Toronto’s all about.

  I don’t need to go into all the ways in which our cultural output has reflected this. You’re likely already familiar with how you can’t wander a block through downtown without strolling onto a Hollywood movie set; Toronto is always dressed up to play someplace else onscreen (New York, Chicago or, in the
case of the old Police Academy movies, ‘unnamed American city’). Or how our best actors and directors and writers and musicians have tended to move to Los Angeles or New York or somewhere else. Or even how the most celebrated authors who live here tend to set their books elsewhere – the group of South Asian immigrant writers once identified by The Atlantic as the ‘Toronto School’ largely write about the places they came from, like India and Sri Lanka.

  And by now we’re all familiar with the complaints about the shabby, makeshift quality of Toronto’s street architecture, the little Victorian and Edwardian houses rubbing up against mostly newish and undistinguished commercial buildings. People call the city ugly, and lacking central landmarks and gathering spaces that define the community – as if our lack of shared history and cultural mythology has been made physical through an architectural absence of heritage and monumental definition. It’s an undeniable misconception – go to the Toronto Islands or Nathan Phillips Square or High Park or the Toronto Reference Library or St. Lawrence Market and then tell me how there are no great cultural gathering spaces in the city.

  But there is some truth to the hodgepodge image. The central city – the pre-amalgamation City of Toronto – was, and is, improvised. Cabbagetown, the Annex, Parkdale, Chinatown, the Junction, the Beaches, Forest Hill, Yorkville: all were developed separately, essentially as suburbs on the edges of what was then Toronto, by people escaping the city in the pre-automobile era. Each compact neighbourhood had its own miniature, self-contained downtown. Toronto grew by absorbing these distinct places into itself and, essentially, becoming what Saunders once called ‘a place with no distinct core, no symbolic heart, only an evolving and colliding set of human trajectories.’

  We are left with a city not of significant focal points but of layers. Layers of successive building trends and uses, immigrant settlement patterns and neighbourhood characteristics, all constantly shifting as new generations and immigrants build their own stories on top of the ones that came before. Suddenly you can see why Saunders and Richard Florida and journalist Robert Fulford all cite Kensington Market as the essential Toronto neighbourhood, and why it’s served as the setting for two CBC television series. The oldest institutional structures (fire halls and churches) sit side by side with hand-built vendor stalls tacked onto row houses; it’s a place that’s housed (and still houses) Christian, Jewish and Buddhist congregations and whose evolution and character has been defined, redefined and refined by waves of European Jews, Hungarians, Portuguese, Asians, Latin Americans and Caribbean people, each adapting the previous group’s footprint to its own. The Market is an aggressively unattractive place, one that’s magnetic and appealing because of how the people who inhabit it interact with each other rather than how it looks.

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  Around the time I was in Grade 7, I got a job – or what I considered a job – over the March break volunteering for a charity called the Inner City Angels. They funded various projects for youth that today we’d call ‘at risk,’ and to raise funds for those projects, every year they’d hold a balloon race at schools across the city. Kids would solicit pledges and then, depending on how much money they’d raised, they’d get to release a number of helium balloons from the schoolyard, balloons that would fill the blue sky with a kaleidoscope of colour as the ever-smaller orbs became dots and finally receded from view. The balloons had return-to-sender tags attached so that whoever found them when they landed could mail them back, to tell the kid who’d released it how far the balloon had travelled. It was intended, I assume now, to symbolically reach out to a great big world beyond the marginalized neighbourhood, and illustrate the distance goodwill can take you. Some kids would get their cards returned from Vancouver or South America. My own cards mostly never came back, although I once received one from the faraway suburb of Mississauga, a half-hour drive to the west.

  A few of my classmates and I had the task of cutting the lengths of string that would be attached to those balloons, as well as the blank tags that went with them. As payment, we received streetcar tickets to get to and from the office, as well as a couple bucks every day for lunch. Lunch was maybe the best part, because my pals and I would have an hour to wander around the Eaton Centre, find some nourishingly greasy fast food and then window-shop at Club Monaco and Beaver Canoe.

  The office itself also seemed to be the coolest thing. It was in a tiny yellow-brick Victorian house standing next to an equally tiny yellow-brick church, in a discrete courtyard bounded by the glass and steel of the Eaton Centre and a couple of adjoining office towers. The mall had actually been built around the house and its church, a piece of local history cradled by this huge modernist monument to the chain-store, indoor, commercial present. The imposing, recent buildings appeared to be huddling around the older structures as if to protect them from the harsh, dangerous traffic of contemporary life – a calm, secret, historic preserve for these frail remnants of the past. And my friends and I had become insiders in that preserve, volunteer employees in the storybook house tucked away amid the relentless, hustling activity of the city.

  Later on I would learn that the temple in that courtyard was the Church of the Holy Trinity, a house of worship that was built in the name of service to the poor (and that today dedicates much energy to serving the homeless), and the house itself was Scadding House, named after the first rector of the church and occupant of the adjoining residence. Henry Scadding, an immigrant from England, was the first student ever enrolled at Upper Canada College, and besides the rectory near the Eaton Centre, his name is memorialized today by Scadding Court Community Centre at Dundas and Bathurst, and a residence at UCC. His dad’s wooden cabin home (unimaginatively named Scadding Cabin) is on display at Exhibition Place as the ‘oldest house in Toronto’ – it was moved to the CNE grounds from its original location on the Don River in 1879.

  Besides his work as an Anglican priest, Scadding was a writer and historian, and his favourite subject was the history of Toronto. In his capacity as one of our earliest historians, he gave us one of our fondest myths: the one about what Toronto means. When I say myth here, I mean it both in the sense that it’s factually inaccurate and also that it informs our lives and explains how we see ourselves and what we value. A good kind of mythology isn’t so much factual as it is true, and that’s what Scadding gave us. In his 1884 history, Toronto: Past and Present, he ventured that the name of the city came from the Huron word toronton, apparently meaning ‘place of meetings’ – a location for different tribes to gather. This is the origin of the name I was taught in grade school, and the one I would have given if you’d asked me while I was working in Scadding’s old house. It’s an impression of Toronto, and an interpretation of its name, that’s been persistent and widely repeated, despite the clarification from subsequent historians that the name of the city almost certainly comes from the Mohawk word tkaronto, meaning, ‘where there are trees standing in the water.’ The vision of those trees standing in the water, picturesque as it may seem, doesn’t say much to us about present-day Toronto. Whereas, even if it is inaccurate as history, the definition of Toronto as a gathering place for various tribes is great as mythology: it’s a definition that seems truer with each passing year.

  An update of that founding myth can be found in a factoid that many Torontonians thought true around the turn of the millennium: that the United Nations had declared Toronto the most multicultural city in the world. You would hear that honour cited in speeches by at least three Toronto mayors, trumpeted in the city’s official publicity materials, in federal and provincial reports, in both local newspapers and the foreign press, including the New York Times. Yet, as Ryerson geographer Michael J. Doucet detailed in a 2001 paper, no such declaration had ever been issued. The United Nations compiles no official ranking of the most multicultural places in the world.

  But it’s easy to see why the myth took hold: Toronto is certainly among the most ethnically diverse places on earth. (In 2004, after t
he ‘most multicultural’ claim had been debunked, the United Nations did compile a list of cities with the highest percentage of foreign-born residents; Toronto was second after Miami.) Almost 45 per cent of Toronto’s population was born outside Canada and, as of the 2006 census, 47 per cent of the residents were classified as visible minorities. The visible-minority population is diverse within itself. Just over a third of non-white residents are Asian, about the same number are South Asian, roughly one in six are black, with Arabs, Filipinos and Latin Americans, among others, rounding out the list. The 311 phone line run by the city offers service in 180 languages.

  So, UN declaration or no, Toronto’s still an incredibly multicultural place, and fairly harmoniously so, too. It isn’t like we’re a post-racial Shangri-La – foreign-born professionals still have a ridiculously difficult time getting their credentials recognized, for instance, and plenty of racialized residents, Caribbean blacks in particular, still experience a high degree of poverty, crime and profiling by police, among other things. And in Toronto’s city government, only five of the forty-four councillors are from visible-minority populations. But one can note the persistence of such problems and still acknowledge that by global standards, Toronto enjoys racial and ethnic peace. The sort of open opposition and ghettoizing one sees between white and black Americans simply doesn’t occur here; the sort of ethnic nationalism that’s caused recent wars in Africa and Eastern Europe is non-existent; the degree of otherness that characterizes immigrant populations in Japan, say, or that’s led to rioting and violence in France, is unheard of in Toronto. Casual racism, or even ethnic stereotyping, is among the ultimate Toronto taboos, and being from elsewhere is considered to be among the most quintessentially Torontonian qualities one can possess.