Streetcars have rolled in Toronto for almost one hundred and fifty years - the first horsecars entered service in 1861, the system was electrified thirty years later, and it has continued on ever since despite all attempts to shut it down. It's one of only a handful of North American streetcar systems that survived the dark years of the mid-20th century, and aside from New Orleans it's the only one that retains the standard 19th century operating practices - and New Orleans' system was pared down to a single line before it could rebuild again.
Over the last two years, I've been photographing streetcars with the ultimate intention of taking a picture of every single one the TTC operates. This slideshow video incorporates some of them. I hope you find it interesting. The audio track is a piano arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon in D, and it can be downloaded from the Internet Archive.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.
The Presidents' Conference Committee streetcaris the Toronto streetcar - everything else is just filling its void. Back in the day, hundreds of PCC cars rumbled across the city, and at one point Toronto's fleet of them was the largest in the world.
Today, the TTC retains two of them, the rest scrapped or sent to museums, but at least the ones still in the city aren't decaying in a carhouse. Between May and Labour Day of 2009, subject to availability, the TTC has been running one of these streetcars along the 509 Harbourfront route, from Union Station to Exhibition Loop.
I had a chance to take this video of PCC 4500 yesterday, moving south down Bathurst Street and turning east onto Queens Quay. It's something else to see it actually moving.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.
More personal disclosure time: the sort of thing I wrote about on Monday most definitely leads to me taking a jaundiced view of what I'm writing about today.
Back in 2007, a colorful piece of Disney futurism called Magic Highway U.S.A.made its wayacross the internet. First broadcast in 1958 as part of the Disneyland series, it looked forward from a time where the Interstate Highway System was just beginning to transform the way Americans travelled to a perfect retrofuture where the roads were wide, journeys swift and the automobile king.
A good way to gain insight to a specific point in history is to look at its futurism, its science fiction. Nineteenth-century Britain's preoccupation with a rival European power found expression in invasion literature such as 1871's The Battle of Dorking, and a century later Japan's seemingly invincible economy saw science-fictional works predicated around the United States eclipsed by the Rising Sun.
In the 1950s, everything was swell, so long as you weren't black, a woman, an atheist, a communist, a beatnik, or any kind of minority, and were American. The Second World War was over and America was stronger than ever, ready and able to spread freedom, democracy, and Mom's apple pie to every part of the world, thanks to the twin fists of Prosperity and Science. Magic Highway U.S.A. reflects that postwar optimism and forecasts a world in which great highways "link together all nations, and help create a better understanding among the peoples of the world... and a better way of life for the future."
In this Magic Highway U.S.A. reflects the boundless, triumphal optimism of a country that had not yet learned to fear the Soviet nuclear threat, and had not been humbled by Vietnam. The highways would be laid down, the people would be free to drive where they pleased, and everything would be awesome.
Another truth about science fiction is that one can learn nearly as much from what isn't said as what is. Take a look at it yourself, if you haven't; I've found it here on YouTube, but there's no telling if this is authorized by Disney, and so I offer no guarantees as to whether this video is actually live as you read this. If so, you're missing out - but I do have a couple of stills from the movie below, as well.
Magic Highway U.S.A. stresses scale. Bigness! The highways themselves are massive, the network is massive, and the machines that build it are massive, from mobile bridgebuilders to the monstrous roadbuilder, which devours the land with a toothy maw and lays down road like some tremendous steel behemoth. It's suggested with such casual flippancy that I somehow doubt there was much in the way of an environmental impact assessment before it rumbled through. What we don't see are the prefabricated suburbs being flown in from roaring factories, slung below a fleet of carrier helicopters each with blades the breadth of a football stadium, but that would hardly be out of place in Magic Highway U.S.A.'s vision of the future.
"In one sweep, a giant roadbuilder changes rough ground into a wide, finished highway."
The film's vision of a country "[decentralized]... into vast urban areas" is a simple extension of the suburban impulse which was, in 1958, still in its infancy. Our perspective changes from a tightly-packed labyrinth of buildings without a scrap of ground or grass visible, to a few stands of towers that stretch toward the horizon, linked together by wide roads almost free of traffic and standing largely separate from one another.
They tried that once in North York, by the by, with a new model suburb based around tall residential towers isolated from each other by wide-open areas. Today it's called Jane and Finch and has some of the highest crime and poverty rates in the city. I'm not saying that correlation equals causation here, but for me it's hardly a stellar advertisement for the concept.
These "urban areas" look far less like cities than they do farmers' fields that yielded a bumper crop of skyscrapers. The only allowance for pedestrian travel we're shown is in a shopping center, where "moving sidewalks make window shopping effortless," and "escalator ramps carry office workers from level to level."
At no point in Magic Highway U.S.A. is anything non-mechanical ever depicted as moving. Motor cars and moving sidewalks are the arteries of this world of statues. Nor does it acknowledge that anyone gets around by any method other than a car; obviously, the General Motors streetcar conspiracy was only the beginning in this future. Even freight trains have been replaced by "truck trains," which "combine railroad volume with highway flexibility."
Environmental consequences? What environmental consequences? For that matter, what environment? The use of cantilevered skyways above the sort of desert where Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner dueled is framed as preserving "the beauty and grandeur of mountain travel," not the beauty and grandeur of nature itself. While I'll admit that highway networks do go a long way to bind together peoples and countries, they're hardly the unalloyed good that Magic Highway U.S.A. represents - at the least, with present methods, they encourage negative impacts such as carbon pollution. In this future, they certainly don't have a problem with building highways straight through equatorial rain forests.
To be fair, Magic Highway U.S.A. doesn't assume that the internal combustion engine will reign supreme forever, and this is one point where I wish it had hit the mark. It posits automobiles switching first to jets, then to nuclear power, and finally "the sun-powered electro-suspension car, which needs no wheels."
Yes, of course! All we have to do in order to have Hover-Boards is to make sure they're solar-powered! Mattel's only got six years; they'd better get cracking!
"These spectacular conceptions will lead to new dimensions for the American highway." And, one would hope, perfectly reliable cars...
At the time it was made, Magic Highway U.S.A. was earnestly showing a world that was supposed to be pleasant and full of promise, a utopia that we could all look forward to. Fifty-one years later, it looks to me more like a roadmap to social breakdown. Not only does its world of the future encourage sprawl and dependency, it practically makes them mandatory. It is so married to the concept of the personal automobile that there is no allowance at all for their absence. In this world of the future, people would probably think they were better off dead than have their driver's license revoked. Personally, I can only be thankful that the techno-utopian excesses of Magic Highway U.S.A. did not come true.
You can learn a lot about a city by the nature of its street life. I understood that much after the last time I went to Buffalo on a Saturday night and found its downtown utterly deserted; a circumstance which I'm told many American cities hold in common. Toronto, from what it seems to me, stands apart from the "dead downtown" syndrome. Four kilometers away from Yonge Street, the main street of the megacity, Queen West is one of the more transpiring neighborhoods you'll find.
This video was taken from the window of a TTC streetcar rolling east toward Yonge through part of Queen West, and the view is of the north side of the street. As warmth has only recently come to the city in force, everyone is still getting used to it and spending as much time out in it as possible. This part of the route, between Gladstone Avenue and Ossington Avenue, passes by sites such as the Gladstone Hotel, the Drake Hotel, and - surprisingly enough - only oneStarbucks.Quite a few appliance stores, though.
The wind didn't sound nearly as loud when I was filming it, either.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.
Every once in a while, between the past and future, Acts of Minor Treason takes time to look backward at some of Toronto's history - preferably the parts of it that haven't been bulldozed already.
The buses don't loop at Otter Loop anymore, and you've probably never heard of it. Once a northern linchpin of Metro Toronto's surface transit network, the evolution of the city through the 20th century transformed it from a suburban gateway to a mere redundancy. It's no longer even TTC property - the City of Toronto owns it now, and since 2006 there's been a slowly simmering plan to transform it into a park. Whatever its future might be, for now Otter Loop remains.
Otter Loop, at the foot of Kimbark Boulevard and Otter Crescent in the elder, affluent suburbs of Lytton Park, was served by the TTC as early as November 14, 1936, when the Eglinton/North Toronto bus route was redrawn to terminate there. This service continued until March 1954, when that route was replaced by the 61 Nortown electric trolleybus - the pole at the center of the loop once held up the trolleybus wires. Otter Loop then became the northern terminus of a rush-hour route that ran between it and Eglinton station, the true suburban gateway of the 1950s, which lasted until the TTC put its trolleybuses to pasture in 1992. That route became the 61 Avenue Road North, which still runs along Avenue Road today. As I said, though, it doesn't loop at Otter Loop anymore.
Part of this owes to its surroundings. It sits in what the City of Toronto recognizes as Bedford Park-Nortown, a neighborhood where, as of the 2001 census, 62% of households were single-family, with nearly sixty percent of those occupying individual houses, and wealth is the word - more than 35% of its households and over half of its 5,495 families pulled down in excess of $100,000 a year in 2001, with another 20% or so falling between $60,000 and $99,999 per annum. Rich neighborhoods, in my experience, don't tend to have much truck with transit; it's the reason the 162 Lawrence-Donway is the only bus route that cuts through the Bridle Path, and probably why there are no stations on the University-Spadina line between St. Clair West and Eglinton West - Forest Hill is between the two.
When the City bought the loop for a dollar, as the TTC no longer had a use for it, the plan was apparently to convert it into a heart-shaped urban park with the oh-so-creative name "Heart Park." Considering that all the details I can find of this initiative date from 2006 and that Otter Loop is still intact, it's fair to say this project hasn't really got off the ground. Otter Loop is, however, going into the ground. No one appears to be maintaining the structure. Some of the brickwork has crumbled and one of the signs identifying itself as "MUNICIPAL PROPERTY OF THE TORONTO TRANSIT COMMISSION" has been left to weather and its paint allowed to run.
Still, the transit shelter is intact, spacious, roomy, and would be a comfortable place to wait for the bus. Time was that shelters like Otter Loop's dotted Toronto, only to be torn apart by the rising tide of modernization that saw so many other pieces of city history ground to pieces. As far as I know and have read, the transit shelter at Otter Loop is the only one of its kind still in existence. That's enough reason, I think, to preserve it. History is history, no matter if it's a skyscraper or a bus shelter.
I'd rather have more spaces like Otter Loop than those damn new Astral shelters, anyway. They're all metal and glass and plastic - no character to them at all. Here - take a tour.
LOCATION: 1400 Avenue Road, south of Lawrence Avenue West, North York.
HOW TO GET THERE: The 61 Avenue Road North bus goes directly past Otter Loop, and is probably the most direct way to get there. Going north from Eglinton station, the cloest stop is at the far side of Glenview Avenue, and is practically just across the road. From the south, you'll find that though the buses no longer loop at Otter Loop, they do still stop there if the cable's pulled at the right time.
Otherwise, it's a brisk ten-minute-or-so walk from Lawrence station on the Yonge subway line. 52 Lawrence West buses run regularly and stop at Avenue Road, only a couple of minutes' walk north of the loop.
See it for yourself, I say. There aren't very many pieces of ordinary history left standing.
POSTSCRIPT - APRIL 14, 2011: This really is history now. Otter Loop was demolished in late 2010 to make way for the Heart Park project. Bit by bit, the past disappears.
If I tend to disparage North York in this weblog, it's because despite its pretensions of urbanity, to me the City that Mel Built represents some of the worst things I got away from up north and the poor strategies that continue to be followed throughout the developed world. The chain of gleaming steel-and-glass spires between Sheppard and Finch may constitute Metro Toronto's second downtown, but stray much more than a block to the west or east and you'll find yourself drowning in suburbia.
Back in 2006, James Bow put together a compelling travelogue of Yonge Street, which is frequently bandied to be "longest street in the world," even though not even its alignment is continuous to Rainy River as that sidewalk map at Yonge and Dundas suggests. In particular, what fascinated me about his journey was the transition between Toronto and North York, the switch from urban center to suburban sprawl. It wasn't until today that I was in the area and motivated to investigate it for myself.
Until January 1, 1998, Toronto ended at Yonge Boulevard. Before the Yonge subway was built, and for a few years afterward, the Yonge streetcar and, later, trolleybus looped for its southbound journey at Glen Echo Loop, now the parking lot of a Loblaws grocery store. Yonge Street as a pedestrian destination, built by a long tradition of reliable surface transit options until the 1970s and resilient enough to survive the tracks being pulled up, simultaneously continues and ends there today. North York's limits begin at the north end of the boulevard, and from there to Steeles the suburban ethic had free rein. Witness this video, also embedded below, of the wide divide that separates the two cities with a deep corridor of green. I love the flexibility video provides.
Part of this is due to geography. Yonge Boulevard is a natural border; just beyond it the terrain dips into the valley carved by the West Don River, and it does not climb out of it until beyond the footprint of Highway 401. Terrain separated the core of North York from Toronto in its early days, and with no continuous urban footprint as can be found along Yonge Street today, North York was free to invent itself along the lines that were dominant in the postwar period, when a township of connected villages and farmer's fields spread into the semi-urban conglomeration of today.
It's rare in Metro Toronto for natural geography to so bluntly determine the nature and fate of cities. Etobicoke is separated from Toronto by the Humber River, a boundary historically simple to overcome and thus contributing to a more gradual shift from urban concentrations to suburban constructions as one travels westward. In the east, Victoria Park Avenue represents a wholly artificial border between Toronto on one side and Scarborough on the other. York and East York have historically been so close to Toronto that it's difficult to tell when you've left one and entered another.
Here, though, it's different. Yonge Street has always been the core of Toronto, and this discontinuity as it dives into the West Don valley and Hoggs Hollow may have played a major role in the difference between the historical development of the two cities. The subway runs north to Finch now, and may soon extend to Richmond Hill, but it tunnels under patterns that were long determined before the first shovel was sunk into the dirt.
If not for the geography of the Don, I wonder what sort of city North York would have turned out to be.
That isn't a typo - it does signify a lapse of judgement, though. I've had my current camera - an Olympus FE-310, with eight megapixels of beauty and wonder - for more than a year now, and I've only just comprehended that I can take videos with it as easily as photos. Sure, I always knew that I could, but I never really did.
Some things are just captured better in motion. So, I give you the first in a series of Public Domain Videography.
Today's video was filmed a little more than an hour ago from Aylmer Avenue, where it crosses the subway tracks of the Yonge line, and looking into the TTC's Rosedale subway station as a northbound train to Finch departs and a southbound train to Downsview arrives. Back in the 1950s, when this portion of the line was built, some of the stations between Bloor and Eglinton resembled Rosedale in terms of the tracks being on the surface. Much of the line has been roofed over since then, and today Rosedale is one of the few stations for which a perspective like this is possible.
I have to wonder if the driver of the southbound train was honking at me.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.
