Crestwood Preparatory College | 5 February 2010 Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 1...

Crestwood Preparatory College | 5 February 2010

Imagining TorontoCopyright © Amy Lavender Harris

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The Imagined City

Imagining TorontoPresentation to “Reading Toronto” ClassCrestwood Preparatory College, Toronto

5 February 2010



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“Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.”

Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1987



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“The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”

Jonathan Raban, Soft City. London: Collins Harvill, 1988.

There is no city that does not dreamFrom its foundations. The lost lakeCrumbling in the hands of

brickmakers,The floor of the ravine where light lies

brokenWith the memory of rivers.

Anne Michaels, “There Is No City That Does Not Dream” from Skin Divers (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999).



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“I loved the river even here. I loved how dark it was, how it held its secrets with the dignity of the damned. I loved how grass and even small trees managed to sprout out of the concrete that held it captive. …. I loved the sounds, even if they were the sounds of man rather than the sounds of nature. I loved the rattle of the old bridges as the streetcars went over them. I loved the lap of the water as it licked at concrete. I loved the wind in the slim weeds that grew between the railroad ties. I even loved the sound of the rush-hour trains, the buzzing traffic, the sound of my own feet on the asphalt path. I think what I really loved in those moments when I was cupped in the hand of the city was life.”

Rosemary Aubert, Free Reign (1997: 104-105).



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“Nothing in a city is discrete. A city is all interpolation.”

Dionne Brand, 2002. Thirsty. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.

“There is a vast part of this city with mouths buried in it …. Mouths capable of speaking to us. But we stop them up with concrete and build over them and whatever it is they wanted to say gets whispered down empty alleys and turns into wind. People need to be given a reason to listen.”

Michael Redhill, Consolation (2006: 263).



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“[Toronto is] a score of cities joined together by geographical propinquity which has resulted in a bizarre incestuous relationship between the Junction and Rosedale, Cabbagetown and Forest Hill, etc., etc.”

Hugh Garner, quoted in The Underside of Toronto (1970: 12).



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“Cabbagetown was a strange hybrid of a community in the urban core of Toronto. It wasn’t more than a mile square. The streets were narrow and tree-lined, and the architecture Victorian in style, if not uniformly in vintage. Whatever else it was, it was old and quaint and well-situated. It had become a slum when the middle class had fled to the suburbs but now it was undergoing a renaissance as a new middle class flooded back into the city’s heart. The houses, grand or ramshackle, row or detached, were being resuscitated. The results were mixed: some fine homes were artfully reclaimed to a serviceable beauty, grander homes refurbished to something of their erstwhile splendour, and some less noble shacks given a glamour far exceeding their original value. Propped and stayed, their faces lifted like vain dowagers, the ersatz competed with the splendid, and pretension sidled up to good taste hoping to be mistaken by the uninformed. […] Cabbagetown wasn’t merely housing, it was something of a movement spearheaded by the historically minded, the community spirited and, not least of all, the speculatively shrewd.”

Tim Wynne-Jones, The Knot (1982: 23-24).Crestwood Preparatory College | 5 February 2010


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“Toronto’s a place where the climate’s unkind, / where the people are dismal and narrow of mind, / where an antique administration rolls on, / like a bunch of small villages rolled into one.”

The Brothers-in-Law, “Toronto the Good.”



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“Sixty-nine Rosecliffe Park. The name still sounds romantic, exotic, out of a storybook or a film. Sometimes it’s hard to believe you are here, at this address, sitting inside, thinking these thoughts. [...] But then you step out in the common corridor with its all too real down-to-earth sights, sounds, and smells, and you wonder: This, Sixty-nine Rosecliffe? And you realize that you’ve not left Dar far behind. “Twenty floors.” Nurdin once did a small calculation for his wife. “Twelve homes in each—you have two hundred and forty families—that’s three good-sized blocks of any street in Dar.” Except that the variety found here at Sixty-nine would not be found in any street in Dar. Here a dozen races mingle, conversant in at least as many tongues.”

M.G. Vassanji, No New Land (1991: 59-60).Crestwood Preparatory College | 5 February 2010


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“The title of my article came to me immediately:WELCOME TO TORONTO

I wondered if the title was part of the overall word-count. If it was, I’d just made three dollars in about ten seconds. I could get used to this “buck a word” business. A buck a word. In other words, if I wrote: “Toronto is an interesting city,” I could buy myself lunch. If I wrote: “Toronto is a very, very, very, very, very interesting city,” I could buy myself dinner.

Unfortunately, though, Toronto isn’t all that interesting a city, and after the title I was stumped. One of the things I love about Toronto is how dull it is. […]

At night, after walking five, six, seven hours at a stretch, I’d open my notebook to find maybe two lines of notes: “Toronto – city of neighbourhoods?” Or: “Toronto – flat, dull suburbs.”

David Eddie, Chump Change (1996: 106; 116-117).



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“While she had been at Waycroft her life had been divided into two separate sections as definitely as the city itself was divided by The Hill which was far more than a simple geographical line of demarcation. To live below the Hill was, metaphorically, to live on the wrong side of the tracks [….] Karen had always liked living below the Hill, and had never made any secret of this. It was only below the Hill that you came into direct contact with the core of vitality that was the true essence of the city. Here you were acutely and excitingly aware of the steady heart-beat of a really great metropolis, fresh blood continuously pumped into it from the four corners of the globe.”

Phyllis Brett Young, The Torontonians (1960: 148).



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“A city with a future, like an individual with a future, could never remain static for long, could not afford to expand indefinitely along the lines of least resistance. The suburbs, as they now existed, were the city’s lines of least resistance. The towering buildings to the south were the real yardstick of its stature.”

Phyllis Brett Young, The Torontonians (1960: 319).



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“Toronto has an ambience like a civilized dinner party where all the best people are invited, all the guests go home early, and there isn’t too much to clean up in the morning.”

David Eddie, Chump Change (1996: 140)



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“This is my refuge. It is where I can be invisible or, if not invisible, at least drunk. .... The smell from the market doesn't bother me. I've been here before, me and the old lady. We know the price of things. Which is why I feel safe in telling stories here.

Dionne Brand, "At the Lisbon Plate“ (1989).



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“Every city has a self-image, and every city’s self-image is almost precisely a representation of what it is not, what it is least.”

Noted Canadian sociologist John Seeley on “Toronto the Good’ quoted in The Underside of Toronto (1970: 9).



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“We moved into a flat in Rosedale, on Standish Avenue, backed up against the CPR main line. It’s not a Rosedale Street, Inspector, if you know what I mean. The rich people in their mansions lived farther south, away from the main line railway track and the constant noise of passing freight trains. But it was Rosedale, don’t you see? That’s what made it important to her.”

Hugh Garner, Death in Don Mills (1975: 282).



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Our arrival at the convergence of St. Clair Avenue and Keele Street was heralded by a horrific stench. A stench that even overwhelmed the occasional whiff of our squealing cargo of hogs.

“What on earth is that odour?” enquired Gerry, sitting at the truck’s window seat.

“Ah,” replied Archie of Acton, “that’s the smell of money my good friend. That’s the big C.P.”

“C.P.?” I asked.“Yep. C.P. That’s Canada Packers lads. Biggest goddamn

meat packer in all of Canada. You’re smelling the start of some damn fine eating. Makes you wanna grab a pork chop dripping in fat, don’t it,” laughed Archie. […]

After bidding thanks and farewell to our benefactor from Acton, we walked east along St. Clair until we found a small park with a couple of shade trees. It was boiling hot, the humidity suffocating, and the smell of animals being transformed into human fodder, nauseating.

Matheson, Hogs and Cabbagers (1996: 105-106).Crestwood Preparatory College | 5 February 2010


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“Tuyen’s family is rich, newly rich. They have a giant house in Richmond Hill, where rich immigrants live in giant houses. Richmond Hill is a sprawling suburb where immigrants go to get away from other immigrants, but of course they end up living with all the other immigrants running away from themselves – or at least running away from the self they think is helpless, weak, unsuitable, and always in some kind of trouble.”

Dionne Brand, What We All Long For (2005: 54-55).



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“[t]hey are all walkers, and their tread along the city’s streets is intent and focused, We see them moving at the pace of dowsers looking for streams buried beneath the pavement; and dowsers they are, these seekers for the fugitive urban imaginary in the solid matter of the city.”

John Bentley Mays, ‘Walking off the Map.” The Walrus, May 2006.



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“We live in Parkdale, a village in the west end of the city of Toronto, made up of Victorian mansions that used to border the lake. Women with parasols and bathing suits down to their calves, women with consumption, walked the beach, Sunnyside Beach. Now the highway sits on top of us, a beleaguered crown, turning Parkdale into a tired beauty queen. Feathers in her hair. Crinolines in a knot. She is grand. She is slumped. She is a rooming house with clapboard siding, transoms, cornices and turrets. Her voice is parched and playful. She is all invitation. She will take you in when nobody else will.”

Claudia Dey, Stunt (2008: 19).



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“If it is true that forests of gestures are manifest in the streets, their movement cannot be captured in a picture, nor can the meaning of their movements be circumscribed in a text. Their rhetorical transplantation carries away and displaces the analytical, coherent proper meanings of urbanism; it constitutes a “wandering of the semantic” produced by masses that make some parts of the city disappear and exaggerate others, distorting it, fragmenting it, and diverting it from its immobile order.”

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984: 102)



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“Walking then is a spatial acting out, a kind of narrative, and the paths and places direct our choreography. This regular moving from one point to another is a kind of mapping, a kind of narrative understanding. Paths link familiar places and bring the possibility for repeated actions. Different paths enact different stories of action. Walking is like a story, a series of events, for which the land acts as a mnemonic.”

Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (2001: 138).



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“If you lay your ear on the tracks you can tune into many of the different conversations that are happening on the various streetcars, the talk reverberating down into the seats, into the wheels, then shaved and sent spinning into the tracks which zip them back, forth, up and down the city’s streets. The loudest of the conversations manage to reverberate themselves further, up from the rails into the wheels of other vehicles, further, even, into the bodies of the passengers.”

Darren O’Donnell, Your Secrets Sleep With Me (2004: 57).



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“The literature is still catching up with the city, with its new stories.”

Dionne Brand, quoted in Vanity Fair, 2005



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