Some Great Idea

by Edward Keenan

  Things were not unpleasant when we moved to Markham and Lawrence, but they were different. We had a backyard almost the size of that Boulton Avenue parkette that was good for kicking a ball around in, as well as a front yard and a grassy boulevard, too. There was a hundred-foot-long driveway that my brother and I played basketball and road hockey in, but we never made any friends who lived within pickup-game walking distance of our house. We had a big garage with a loft above it, and we had two bathrooms. The neighbours a few doors down had kids the same age as my two youngest siblings, and they’d all run around on the sidewalks playing together. The new subdivision of quiet, winding cul-de-sacs and crescents was a far superior bicycle joyriding course to the congested streets in the city. Most notably, I did not have to share a bedroom with my two brothers.

  But there were downsides. The trip to my Catholic high school on the Scarborough Bluffs involved twenty minutes of walking and a fifteen-minute bus ride. A trip to the variety store was best made in a car. We were on smiling terms with our immediate neighbours (and one of them was on lecturing-about-our-leaves-blowing-into-his-backyard terms with us), but the relationships were more civil than social. When, as a teenager, I got involved with a girl who also lived ‘at’ Markham and Lawrence, the walk to her house (which I made three or four times a week until she got a car) took about forty-five minutes. I have a lot of very happy memories from the time I lived at Markham and Lawrence, but unlike my memories of earlier childhood, very few of them are tied to anything about the neighbourhood we lived in outside the walls of my parents’ house. (Exceptions: the ravine nearby was an excellent spot for underage drinking and budding romance, and I had fun at one of my first jobs at National Sports Centre in the Cedarbrae Mall.) And a huge number of my memories of that time, good and bad, involve long, lonely walks into the wind, impatient waits for buses and extended interior monologues about the monotony of the suburbs.

  According to the City of Toronto, Markham and Lawrence is part of a neighbourhood called Woburn. The name was taken from the Woburn Inn, which stood at what is today Markham Road and Painted Post, just a little north of Lawrence. The Woburn Inn was the original site of Scarborough’s municipal government, chosen for its geographic centrality, though the area around it was almost completely undeveloped. It remained the town hall for seventy-one years, until 1921. That’s a neat tidbit of local history in a place that has little remarkable history at all, and no doubt worthy of commemoration. But the very idea of the neighbourhood of Woburn is fiction.

  For one thing, the city draws Woburn’s jagged neighbourhood boundaries at approximately Ellesmere in the north and the cnr tracks north of Eglinton in the south, at McCowan Road in the west and Orton Park Road in the east. That’s an area roughly fourteen kilometres square, or two-thirds the size of the former municipality of East York. It has a population just over 53,000, making it as populous as Fredericton, New Brunswick. To call an area that large a neighbourhood is simply absurd.

  Furthermore, if you ask people who live near Markham and Lawrence what life in Woburn is like, they will not recognize that you are talking about their home. Most would recognize the name as belonging to a high school a fifteen-minute drive north, but even there the name’s not commonly applied to the surrounding area. They just don’t call it that. In fact, they don’t call it anything, really, except Markham and Lawrence. The city’s Strong Neighbourhoods Task Force outlined this problem as part of their study of Woburn: ‘One resident noted that he did not value anything in the neighbourhood “because it wasn’t a neighbourhood.”’ He represented 25 per cent of the total resident respondents to their survey.

  The real neighbourhood around Markham and Lawrence – still large in downtown terms, but maybe a quarter the size of the city’s official demarcations – might be called Cedarbrae. The local commercial centre, to the extent that there is one, is Cedarbrae Mall. The local high school next door is Cedarbrae Collegiate. The busy library across the street is Cedarbrae Library. Still, no one I met while I lived there or afterwards ever called the neighbourhood that. Save for its street names, Markham and Lawrence remains, in effect, nameless.

  To fill in some details about what it’s like, though: outside of Cedarbrae, almost all of the commercial development is in strip malls with parking lots in front of them. There are several dozen of these. The significant geographic landmark is a sprawling forest and ravine – the Highland Creek – running alongside and across Markham Road south of Lawrence.

  The residential development is split almost evenly between detached bungalows and high-rise apartment towers. The blocks immediately north and southwest of Markham and Lawrence are made up of winding roads lined with modest, fully detached bungalows and the odd split-level home. These homes are on uniformly large lots with yards both in back and front. The uniformity extends to the architecture of the houses, which varies imperceptibly, if at all, from house to house.

  To the west, along Lawrence, and to the southeast, the blocks are made up of clusters of concrete apartment towers built in the unremarkable late-fifties brown-box-with-balconies style. These are also situated on winding streets and most are surrounded by lakes of green grass stretching out to chain-link fences that meet the sidewalk, giving the drab towers an isolated feel even in a densely populated block. These towers are home to the most impoverished and low-income residents, those most drastically affected by the neighbourhood’s increasingly evident drawbacks. Many have rents that are government-subsidized. This is true especially of the southeast block, which was among the census tracts identified as being ‘at risk’ in the 2004 Poverty by Postal Code report.

  Glenn De Baeremaeker, the city councillor for the part of the area west of Markham Road, acknowledged to me in 2007 that the neighbourhood is a planning ‘disaster.’ De Baeremaeker is a man who rides his bicycle for an hour and a bit to city hall every day (he may be the only such man in Scarborough). ‘Urban and intense and beautiful and charming,’ he said, ‘all the things that we would want today in a neighbourhood, it is not.’ And yet, in the next breath, De Baeremaeker went out of his way to point out that it is not a neighbourhood of automatons: ‘In a lot of ways, it is a strong neighbourhood. The vibrancy that’s here is amazing.’

  To see that vibrancy, you need to get away from the broad roads and parking lots. You need to get inside. Five years ago, the available retail options were dazzlingly eclectic and multicultural. At the Soon Lee Supermarket in the super-strip mall on the northeast corner, for example, there was a bustling Chinese grocery, stocked with all manner of exotica: bitter melons, which look like cucumbers cross-bred with porcupines; malanga lila, like turnips with hair; dried seaweed; exotic dried mushrooms; and pickled bamboo shoots. The aisles were constantly full of people, and at the checkout local newspapers were available in five non-English languages. The shops neighbouring Soon Lee included Spice It Up Caribbean Cuisine, the Bollywood 4 U video shop and East End Beauty Supplies, which specialized in straightening products for black women’s hair. In the Danforth Food Market, an outlet for South Asian and East and West Indian food, aisle three was designated ‘Yam/Cane Food/Oil/Sugar/Hot Sauce/Soap.’

  Down south of Lawrence, in another strip mall, there was an Islamic store-of-all-trades advertising Afghani bread for seventy-five cents. Inside there was a halal takeout counter, a butcher, a film processing window, a grocery store, as well as china, rugs and non-representational art. A block east, in another strip mall, there was a large sari boutique, its windows filled with bright, shiny orange, green and pink fabrics.

  To be sure, there were plenty of corporate chains – three Tim Horton’s franchises and two Dollaramas within a block of the intersection, for example, and two Telus mobility shops inside the mall alone. Cedarbrae Mall, to be honest, was fairly pathetic by mall standards, especially in its four-shop food court. It had evolved from a long narrow strip plaza, and it remained little more than a long, narrow hall of stores, with none of the fa
ux landscaping or constructed commercial squares and fountains of places like the Eaton Centre. But the Loblaws, for all that it was just a Loblaws, dwarfed the locations downtown and offered organics, health foods and a truly impressive fresh fish counter.

  In the foyer of Cedarbrae Collegiate just south of the mall, you could see and hear students from more than sixty countries, wearing not just the baggy-jeans uniform of teenagers across the continent but also turbans and, in a few cases, a full niqab. The school had a football team like most, but it also had a translation club, made up of students who translate school documents into more than twenty-five languages.

  You could, and can, as De Baeremaeker says, find a thriving culture. And the people inside the shops and schools and restaurants seem to be parts of thriving ethnic subcultures, everyone a short drive from a community they feel a part of. Yet the scale and layout of the neighbourhood means you don’t find what you don’t know you’re looking for. To get to the Chinese supermarket, say, you need to get in your car, parked in your driveway, and drive to a parking spot directly in front of the store. There is very little of what Jacobs called the ‘random interaction’ of the urban environment. Everyone is separated by lanes of cars and acres of barren space. It’s segregation by suburban design.

  The joint United Way–City of Toronto Strong Neighbourhoods Task Force report that studied Woburn at the end of Lastman’s term reads like a catalogue of desolation: ‘As part of their explanation of why they did not feel Woburn was a neighbourhood, participants described some general characteristics of a neighbourhood. They described neighbourhood as a place of belonging, an area where people knew one another (or knew of one another). Neighbourhoods implied familiarity and relationships. Neighbourhoods were seen as areas where people walked and where local services, like schools, neighbourhood parks, banks and local food stores, were available.’ Markham and Lawrence failed on almost all counts.

  There’s more. The report describes it as a neighbourhood with few, if any, focal points or public spaces. Despite statistics that say otherwise, many residents feel as if they live in a crime-ridden, unsafe ghetto. The neighbourhood’s two parks – one of which sprawls thirty-one acres along the ravine and features picnic grounds, toboggan runs and volleyball courts – are assets. But they’re hidden, accessible only by pathways through residential subdivisions, and function primarily as yards for those whose houses back onto them. Similarly, outside of a city-run crafts workshop on Confederation Drive, culture has little ­presence here. The lone movie theatre closed down in the great ­multiplex purge of the 1990s; there are no galleries, theatres, music halls or even dance clubs. The nearest athletic recreational facility, containing an ice rink and a rec pool, is a fifteen-minute drive away. There’s nowhere remotely close, even by Scarborough’s elastic definition of that word, where a gymnasium is available for public use. When I investigated in 2007, the nearest public health office was twenty minutes away by car (double that by public transit). The nearest Canada Employment office was at the Scarborough Town Centre, a half-hour trip by transit (if you’re lucky and the bus connections work). Worse, for an unemployed single mother (just under a third of Woburn’s families have only one parent) with no car, the closest Ontario Works (that is, welfare) office was at Finch and Neilson, a trip that can take more than half an hour by transit. Community service organizations intended to serve the neighbourhood’s population were only located in other regions of Scarborough, thirty to forty minutes away by public transit.

  ‘The sad part of this is that this wasn’t created this way by mistake or by neglect,’ De Baeremaeker told me. ‘These were purposeful decisions by the smartest, brightest urban planners of the 1960s. We purposely did this, and now we’re saying, “My God, what a disaster.” At the Cedarbrae Library, when I visited in 2007, they sold several volumes of local history. (If you asked to buy one, the librarian looked at you as though you’d asked for an order of fish and chips, and joked about the dust as she finally handed you your selections.) One of these, A History of Scarborough, published originally in 1965, contained side-by-side aerial photos of Markham and Lawrence from 1954 and 1962. In the 1954 photo, there are thirteen houses and what appears to be a church within a block of the intersection. These scattered residences are surrounded entirely by farmland. In the photo taken eight years later, the area looks very much like it does today. There’s Cedarbrae Mall, and the school and library; there’s the semicircular strip plaza on the northeast corner and there’s the gas station. The winding subdivisions of housing are complete to the north and southwest. Six of the eventual dozen apartment towers are already up. While there are still patches of green in the photo that have been paved or built on (or both) in the decades since, to an astonishing degree, the neighbourhood in 1962 was as it is today. The photo evidence shows that, eight years before the Beatles’ first single, a rural farming community was entirely erased and replaced with a fully formed suburb.

  The book’s prose is breathless about the transformation: ‘With the close of the War in 1945, the return from overseas and marriage of men of the Armed Forces, and the influx into Canada of hosts of immigrants from Europe, Scarborough opened a new and amazing chapter in her history. During the next twenty years farm after farm was quickly devoured by the bulldozers and subdividers; row upon row of closely packed houses and towering apartment buildings took possession of the former wide fields; great factories sprang up in green pastures.’ Scarborough, a sleepy township of 25,000, became ‘Ontario’s fifth largest municipality and one of the great industrial and commercial centers of Canada, enriched by the skills of men of many nations … Where the white frame house of Scarborough’s first Reeve, Peter Secor, stood amid open fields as late as 1959 at the junction of the Markham Road and Lawrence, today great plazas, lit with brilliant neon lights, are thronged with thousands of shoppers every Thursday and Friday night.’

  There are pages devoted to the structural, administrative and financial resources that went into meeting the challenges of the exponentially multiplying population: the infrastructure building, the reformation of the tax code and structure of municipal government, the massive investment in schools. (‘No effort or expense was being spared in the attempt to provide [youth] with the best modern educational opportunities possible.’)

  It was built as a suburban paradise, according to the planning orthodoxy of the time (clear separation between commercial and residential areas; wide major roads to allow for high-speed travel; winding subdivisions with limited access to major streets to prevent through traffic on residential roads). The result, as De Baeremaeker said: ‘I think if you were able to go back in time to 1964 and talk to the local city councillors and city planners and local merchants, they’d all talk about how magnificent it was. The people who built that were proud of what they did. There was a suburban dream where the car was a saviour. It’s almost a monument to the automobile. A very ugly monument, but a monument nonetheless.’

  Such planning has, of course, been discredited for its ­environmental crimes and isolating effects, and the market’s demonstrated a preference for a downtown model. Today, a three-bedroom house in High Park costs far more than a mansion on the Scarborough Bluffs. When I spoke to the mayors of the GTA suburbs of Markham and Ajax in 2011, they told me they were moving to pedestrianize their cities. Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion has called the car-centric planning of the city she’s ruled for decades a mistake, and the mayor of Vaughan, Maurizio Bevilacqua, loudly trumpets the parking-free development springing up around the planned subway stop in his suburban municipality’s new downtown core. A 2012 study by the Royal Bank and the Pembina Institute showed that 80 per cent of GTA residents would prefer to live in a modest dwelling in a walkable area than in a large house on a large lot in a car-dependent area. (Why, then, does suburban sprawl continue? Simple: ‘79 per cent choose to live where they do based on the cost of the home.’)

  But the original population moving into S
carborough in droves bought into that 1960s dream, and for a time it served its suburban purpose. But the problem is, it’s not a suburb anymore.

  ‘[These neighbourhoods] have a weakness,’ De Baeremaeker said, ‘and that weakness has become overtly glaring in the last twenty years … If you’re renting in a high-rise building and you don’t have a car and you don’t own a cottage for your kids to go to in the summer, then what’s here? We are becoming a more urban place and it’s not working. And we need to change it.’

  But it’s easier to build a community in eight years than it is to unbuild it in twenty. The commercial developments are owned by landlords who have invested millions and are making millions more. The apartment towers are by now mortgage-free and generating huge profits. Those inconvenient, winding subdivisions are, as always, filled with people who are happy to have been able to afford a patch of green where they can barbecue on the weekends. Turning this suburban community into what De Baeremaeker envisions as an ‘urban village’ will take significantly longer – twenty-five to thirty years in his estimation. And that’s if the residents there ever agree that such a transformation is possible – or worth it.