It's been a long week, and while it wasn't a particularly trying week for me until the very end, now that it's over I'm in the mood to celebrate the weekend, even though it's not a long one. Today I'm going to leave the news of the Toronto election and the rest of the world at the doorstep. It's too nice of a day outside to dwell. Instead I'm going to post another bit of creative work.
This bit is the first scene of a story, a science fiction Western set in 1876 Montana, that never went beyond the working title "Siobhan Super Adventure." It reads as having been modified last on December 22, 2006, and so it probably reflects a slightly more halting grasp of the craft than I have now. Could be that one day I'll decide to go back and give it a thorough rewrite, see what I can find that shines.
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Siobhan Cameron had never really known anger before the day they killed her horse.
The first shot went wide, and that was the only thing that saved her. A bullet that had probably been meant for her instead sliced through the air a few feet above her head, giving her a few precious instants to dodge Death's icy scythe. She threw herself off Brendan's back into the bushes that flanked the path, confident that a legacy of gunfights had taught her horse to get out of harm's way when the gunpowder burned.
There was another crack of artificial thunder, and her horse went down as a screaming, quivering thousand-pound sack of flesh and bone. Siobhan peered out from between the leaves and got her first clear look at her attackers, and felt the rage bubble up as she drew a bead on the closest. He had the typical look of a six-gun highwayman, rough and ruthless.
There were five men in all, equally scruffy in dress and tactics. They'd been amateur enough to spoil their chance at a clean ambush, which suited Siobhan well enough. She wasn't in the mood to give them an opportunity to learn from their mistake before Judgement Day.
They were advancing now, likely to see if she was still a threat. Siobhan was expressionless as she aimed at the leader. She'd killed her share of criminals in situations less just than this, and when she pulled the trigger it seemed to have no weight at all.
Her revolver thundered. The first man stopped as if he was suddenly yanked backward, fell, and was still. His confederates scrambled for cover, but it was futile. Siobhan hadn't scraped out a living in the lawless frontier on wits and charm alone. Two more shots, good straight ones, and two more men were swallowed by the Reaper's shadow.
The last two men were brave, she had to admit. Most bandits would turn tail and flee if they'd seen their friends cut down with hardly a chance to act. Siobhan caught one of them levelling a rifle at her hiding spot, one that looked powerful enough to blow her apart as sure as a stick of dynamite. She fired fast, without regard for careful aiming. He pinwheeled into the dust, rifle discharging as he fell, and there was blood mixed in with the dirt.
"Shit! Shit!" The last man's reserves of courage had run dry, and he was chasing after them, back into the deep woods. Siobhan held her fire once his back was to her. There wasn't any honor in killing a retreating enemy, and she knew all too well that honor made all the difference. Putting a wounded enemy out of his misery, though, was something else entirely.
Once she was confident that she wasn't walking into a renewed ambush, Siobhan stepped back onto the path and kneeled beside Brendan. The horse was making a few quiet, painful neighs, but she could tell the life was flowing out of him fast. She put her arms around his neck and held the dying animal close, unable to stop her own tears.
"It'll be all right in the end, Brendan, it will," she whispered, her old accent striking through the pain. "Just sleep now. It'll all be better soon. Close your eyes and think of the meadows, now. Find your peace."
The horse's breathing got shallower and shallower, and Siobhan wished she had the medical knowledge to save him, or at least keep him blinking until she could walk him to a doctor. Far too little time had passed when Brendan wheezed and fell silent. She felt a piece of her own soul tear itself away at that moment, perhaps to make sure that he wouldn't be lonely in whatever world waited beyond.
When she rose to her feet again, she left her sense of mercy on the ground. She stalked to where the rifleman had fallen and found that he was still gasping for air, albeit weakly. There was no sense of satisfaction in what she was about to do, no revenge, only justice that had to be done. Siobhan's coin purse may have been light enough to not matter, but she knew well that Charon took payments in kind.
The man was terrified, but that didn't stay her hand. If he'd been too stupid to know that it had been fated to end like this - if not her pulling the trigger, than someone else - he didn't have any business living. Siobhan drew her gun down to point at the center of his chest, and placed a boot on his neck to make sure he didn't try to scramble away.
"Please, good God, don't do this!" he wheezed. Without her boot, and the weeping wound just above his waist, he probably would have been shouting. "Have some goddamn decency! I can tell you... I can help you..."
"The only help you can give me is some fucking peace of mind," Siobhan said with a level look barely restrained. "You won't be killing any more horses, today or ever."
She fired. The bullet tore through the man's torso and buried itself in the dirt beneath. The man convulsed and the air filled with the stench of death. Siobhan was no stranger to it, but that didn't mean it was something easily tolerable. She holstered her revolver and stood still for a long, silent moment, summoning the strength to go on.
After a few moments of introspection, Siobhan gathered what belongings she could salvage and headed down the path, following the tracks of the man who'd fled. Her burning temper was barely cooled by the soft, mountain breezes that had brought her to Montana. True justice would only be served once she eliminated the menace the gang of ruffians presented, totally and completely.
It would be a long walk, but Siobhan Cameron was not a woman to shy away from a challenge.
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It's easy to understand why so many people have chosen to live in the Los Angeles area. It's got the sort of Mediterranean climate that's rare in North America, warm throughout the year but not too warm, and if it wasn't for the seismically active nature of the land it's built on it'd be perfect. One aspect of its climate is that it doesn't get that much rain - about 30.5 centimeters per year, and most of that in the winter months - for comparison, Toronto gets 83.4 centimeters in an average year. So it wasn't all that surprising that it rained for four out of eight days I was there, though I didn't exactly enjoy that part.
I suppose it's because heavy rains are so rare in Los Angeles that there doesn't seem to be much drainage infrastructure in the streets themselves - at least, not compared to northern cities like Toronto or Chicago. As a result, when there's a lot of water and cars around things can get... splashy.
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When I was interviewed for an article in the Varsity a few weeks ago, one of the questions that came up - but which wasn't included in the final article - dealt with why I thought my being a science fiction writer was relevant to people following the municipal election. I answered then, and still think now, that the inherent forward-looking nature of that genre is something that's deeply necessary in politics. Just because so many politicians look no further than the next election, and sometimes not even then, doesn't mean that's a good way to run a government. Because it isn't.
Given the events of the last couple of years, I believe that a greater consideration of the future is of the utmost necessity. While I still think that transit will be one of the core issues, perhaps the core issue, in Toronto's 2010 election, it's becoming more and more clear that we can't run a city just by staggering from month to month, election to election. Neither can we pretend that foundations laid in the twentieth century remain sound today. We need to consider the future.
As cities go, Toronto is actually doing rather well - if not prospering, the government is able to at least stay afloat, while Cleveland is cutting its transit almost to the bone and Los Angeles is considering shuttering city functions for two days of the week to save money. Still, we're nowhere near solid ground. Very few people are, in this day and age. In particular, Toronto is hamstrung by provincial laws which dole out comparatively miniscule taxation privileges. While city- or county-level governments in, say, the United States freely levy sales taxes and hotel taxes, to pick two examples, the legal structure here leaves Toronto almost entirely dependent on two things in order to keep functioning - property taxes on one hand, and provincial goodwill on the other. Now that $4.5-billion of the province's once-assured Transit City funding has been cut (whoops, I mean "delayed"), it's become even more starkly evident that the city can't count on Queen's Park.
We need to look at ways to break this cycle of dependence. Sarah Thomson's proposal to levy tolls on the Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway to finance transit expansion is the sort of thing we need to examine, to consider. We need to realize that with the new century we face new challenges, and that our old solutions can't solve them all today. We need to prepare for the next recession - there'll always be a next recession, and all we can hope for is that it's not quite as bad as this one - and to build resiliency into the system. With age comes fragility.
I don't know what the answers are. The possibilities are complex enough that it's too much for just one person to be able to see them. It's something that needs to be opened up, to be talked about widely, so that the foundations can be set down. Planning for the future must become a greater priority in City Council. For too long in this city, politicians have just let things slide because things were doing okay, and it seemed like they'd always do okay.
The problem is that at one point or another, the ground gets rough. We deserve better than to lurch from challenge to challenge, never able to look up.
I've not spent much time in Forest Hill - unsurprisingly, as it is one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of Toronto, and I am hardly wealthy in a Torontonian context. I was through there recently due to my trip through the Cedarvale Ravine, and I returned a day later to get photographs from the top of the Bathurst Street bridge - photos which, ultimately, I ended up not using for the post.
While returning to the bus stop, I found it decidedly odd how the sidewalks - both sidewalks - just stop at Ridgewood Road. There doesn't appear to be any allowance for pedestrians along it, unless you want to do a balancing act on the curb. It seems to me to be an interesting, subtle discouragement of people wandering up that road unless they have good reason to.
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Warfare has always gone beyond the simplicities of soldiers fighting soldiers. Both sides of the battle have always scrambled to come up with some new angle, to find a new way of fighting that would give them the advantage and let them win the day. It wasn't uncommon for medieval armies to attempt breaking sieges by catapulting plagued corpses over city walls, and if the Romans had been able to salt the fields of Carthage without first grinding that city to powder, they may well have taken the opportunity to push their Carthaginian rivals even further back against the wall. Under Operation Popeye, which ran from 1967 to 1972, the United States military seeded clouds over the Ho Chi Minh Trail with silver iodide to induce them to give up their rain and thus extend the normal monsoon season.
This kind of warfare is nothing new, even though it's only been within the last hundred years that armies have gained the ability to even begin to use the weather as a weapon. Fortunately, it didn't have much of a chance to get established - the Environmental Modification Convention, banning the use of weather modification-based warfare, has been ratified by pretty much every major player save France. The United States, Russia, China, and the United Kingdom are all on board. Nevertheless, I think that there's a fair chance environmental warfare may come to be used in the twenty-first century.
If you only pay attention to North American news sources, you may have missed the story of Shen Neng 1, a Chinese coal ship that ran aground in Australia's Great Barrier Reef on Saturday. The Australian government is understandably furious - beyond the potential damage to the reef if the ship breaks up and dumps its fuel oil into the ocean, the area where it ran aground is within a nautical exclusion zone. Australian Prime Minister Rudd has not been sparing the tongue-lashings, and it's probable that a hefty fine will come out of this.
I know that one should never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. A lot of people know this. More than enough to take advantage of it. As the twenty-first century unfolds, I wouldn't be surprised to see a rise in instances of environmental warfare - by which I mean deliberate, destructive actions targeted at the environment, specifically a particular state's environment. Proxy war without bloodshed - just forcing a state to spend resources and effort remediating an environmental disaster. It wouldn't have to be something as blunt as an oil spill in a sensitive reef, either - invasive species can cause billions in damage over a very short time, and devastate carefully balanced ecosystems. Witness the effect of pine beetles in the northern forests of British Columbia and Alberta, the scourge of zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, or the infestations of Asian long-horned beetles across North America.
The fact is, too many world leaders don't appreciate the reality of Spaceship Earth, and that there's no form of environmental warfare that wouldn't come back to bite the agency that began fighting with it. I don't think that the Shen Neng 1 incident was some kind of Chinese black op. But I wouldn't be surprised to see something like it repeated in the future.
Though I had a pizza slice in my hand while walking north up Bathurst past Bloor, when I saw this I had to juggle for my camera and take a few photos. While I'm no stranger to vehicle bunching - it happens far, far too often in this city for anyone's preferences - I'd never seen three streetcars, bumper-to-bumper, trying to get into Bathurst station of all places. Thankfully, this was a temporary aberration - the track work on Spadina over the long weekend meant route diversions, and two of those are actually Spadina streetcars.
They're still bumper-to-bumper, though.
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While the Gardiner brings the people to the heart of downtown and the DVP lets them idle in a sea of brake lights while they dream of going up north and away, they would never live up to their full potential without the Spadina Expressway.
By the middle 1950s, with the end of the Second World War and the growth of the suburban dream, Metropolitan Toronto had a problem. In North York, what had once been rolling agricultural land dotted with village clusters was being divided into new residential subdivisions with such a fury that the world might as well have been ending in 1970. While downtown North York today is dominated by skyscrapers and condo towers to such a degree that the resemblance to downtown Toronto is eerie - so long as you don't journey more than five hundred meters east or west of Yonge Street, at least - it wasn't so back then. Just as was the case in cities across the free world, there were plenty of people clamoring for a patch of land and a home to call their own, but the jobs remained in the old central core.
North York's far enough removed from Toronto's core that walking's not really an option. Neither, at the time, was the subway - it wasn't until 1974 that it reached into North York proper, and the old Yonge streetcar had always looped right at the border between North York and Toronto. North York, like Etobicoke and Scarborough and Toronto's modern suburbs in York Region and Durham and Peel, owe more to the automobile than mass transit in terms of getting around. Highway 401, that great Windsor-to-Quebec motorway once thought of as the "Toronto Bypass," opened to traffic in Metropolitan Toronto in stages through the 1950s. The people who'd sought new lives in the suburbs were quick to take advantage - and Metro's planners were not slow to realize that there was work to be done to make sure all these people and their automobiles could get around.
The first projects were the Gardiner Expressway and the Don Valley Parkway. Picking up where the Queen Elizabeth Way - one of the first modern highways in Canada - left off, the Gardiner followed the shore of Lake Ontario into downtown Toronto, where today its elevated lanes remain as a psychological barrier between the core and the waterfront. East of the financial district's gleaming towers, it linked up with the Don Valley Parkway. The DVP, laid out next to the Don River in the largest of Toronto's many ravines, wound its way north to Highway 401 and would eventually be extended even further north, as Highway 404, to Newmarket in York Region.
These two expressways were only the beginning. Metro Council, led by Fred Gardiner - he for whom those elevated lanes were eventually named - believed that the automobile was the future, and sought to smooth out the city for it. Highway 400, which ran from the 401 north to Barrie, was to have been extended south to meet the Gardiner, linking along the way with the Crosstown Expressway, meant to connect to the Don Valley Parkway and thus encircle downtown Toronto with expressways. Personally, when I look at the maps, it reminds me more of a noose.
But the keystone to the whole project rested on one route - the Spadina Expressway. From Downsview it would plunge south through neighborhoods and parklands to Bloor Street. Construction began in 1963, and though it proceeded south as the years went on, popular opposition to the project mounted. Pro-urban activist Jane Jacobs, who was no stranger to standing in the paths of expressways, played a significant role in it. The great fear was not only that it would devastate the neighborhoods through which it passed, but that it would encourage the hollowing-out of inner Toronto, with the expressway providing a quick path to the outer suburbs.
It happened in many other cities across North America, but whether it would've happened to Toronto is a question for the alternate historians. On June 3, 1971, the Spadina Expressway was cancelled by the provincial government. None of the other planned expressways were ever more than lines on maps. The completed portion, which went no further south than Eglinton Avenue, is known today as Allen Road. For me, it was always the gateway to Toronto - my father would always turn off the 401 there, take it to the end, then navigate through a twisted skein of Forest Hill roads to the downtown core.
To some degree, the shadow of the Spadina Expressway still falls upon Toronto even today. Depending on who you talk to, it's either the great victory over encroaching car culture and one of Toronto's seminal moments in urban planning, or a great lost hope that has doomed the city to ever-increasing traffic congestion. It's become mythologized, something larger than life, bigger than it ever could have been in reality. So, given that this weekend brought the first breaths of summer to Toronto, I went to chart the expressway - both what had been built, and what never was.
Thanks go to TheCharioteer on the SkyscraperCity forums for providing scans of a planning document from 1961 for the route of the expressway. They were invaluable in figuring out just where the lanes would have gone.
Phase 1 - What's Done is Done
North of Downsview subway station, Dufferin Street forks, and one of the paths becomes William R. Allen Road. I checked up on it where it intersects with Sheppard Avenue, mostly because that point was conveniently accessible from Downsview station, and at that point there's nothing to distinguish it from any other wide suburban throughfare beginning to experience a boom in condo development. It's not until you go further south, to Wilson, that Allen Road really rises above the rest - seriously, since it's elevated by the point - and when it interchanges with the 401 at Yorkdale in a sweeping, swooping series of ramps and dips like bird's flight paths immortalized in concrete, it comes into its own.
If you've ever shopped at Yorkdale, by the way, you indirectly have the Spadina Expressway project to thank. It wasn't until the beginning phases of it were approved, funnelling motorists directly past its inviting signs, that construction on what was for a short time the world's largest shopping mall began.
This view, looking south from Viewmount Avenue at Glencairn station, is typical of Allen Road today, and had the Spadina Expressway been completed its surface sections likely would have resembled this. The subway right-of-way in the median echoes Chicago's Red and Blue Lines, and was really the prime beneficiary of the expressway project - even though the road was cancelled the subway continued on, and the route of the subway still parallels what the route of the road would have been. From what I understand, that's the reason why that particular line is called the University-Spadina Line. Being at the surface, not only was it inexpensive to construct compared to tunneling, but it also allows one to make faces at the motorists stuck in traffic on the other side of the barbed-wire fences.
At Eglinton Avenue, the lanes turn into off-ramps and Allen Road comes to an end, just as the subway enters Eglinton West station and from there the tunnels that continue uninterrupted to Finch, on the other end of the line. Traffic there is no surprise - after all, light cycles only last for so long. It's a brief journey, but it was intended to be much more. If the planners had had their way, there still would have been off-ramps but the lanes of the expressway would have kept on going.
Phase 2 - There But for Grace
Everden Road is a quiet, unremarkable residential street stretching south of Eglinton, and taking into consideration the layout of Allen Road as it was construction, it would have been obliterated had the expressway come through. It would, most likely, have been given over to the median, and this picture would then be looking right down the tracks - though the subway line may still have gone underground at Eglinton West. Still, Metro planners at the time didn't lose sleep over the expropriations and demolitions they had to conduct in the names of progress and traffic flow. A significant chunk of Parkdale, not to mention almost the entire Sunnyside Amusement Park, were demolished in order to build the Gardiner Expressway. For the most part, though, Everden was an outlier - the majority of demolition would have occured around the southern limits of the Expressway.
Demolition, but not destruction.
Everden ends at Ava Road, but the path beyond leads into Cedarvale Park. Occupying one of the city's many ravines carved in the wake of glacial action, it's a rolling, forested, wild expanse of greenspace left almost untouched. Aside from subway emergency exits and some tennis courts at the north end, very little has been built within it. Had the Spadina Expressway gone through, it would quite literally have gone through Cedarvale Park, the ravine transformed into asphalt and concrete. It's an understandable route - the scale of expropriation and demolition of existing properties elsewhere might have been politically unpalatable, and to say that nature was given short shrift back then would be putting it generously. The 1961 planning documents suggest that this area, photographed from the century-old Glencedar Bridge, might have been underground and roofed over - nevertheless, the construction would have changed the ravine, perhaps irreparably. The chirping birds, the wind rustling through trees, the buzz of bicycles passing fast on the path - none of it would be the same.
Cedarvale Park ends at Heath Street, as well as a convenient secondary entrance to St. Clair West station. The highway would have continued - likely to a degree underground, if only to prevent a rather expensive reconstruction that section of St. Clair Avenue - and into Nordheimer Ravine, smaller and more densely forested than Cedarvale. More importantly, Nordheimer marks where the route leaves York and enters Toronto, and the city of Toronto's strident opposition to the Spadina Expressway project was another significant factor in its cancellation. After briefly following the Nordheimer Ravine, the route turns south at Spadina Road, finally meeting its namesake and origin - the whole project, starting in the 1940s, was originally floated as a northward improvement of Spadina Road.
This area is a wealthy one, named after its most eye-catching residence - Casa Loma. Toronto's twentieth-century castle would have survived the coming of the Spadina Expressway, but only just, with artist's impressions I've seen perching it on the edge of an open-roofed, trenched highway. The Baldwin Steps, the pedestrian access from Davenport Road to Casa Loma up the edge of the Iroquois Shoreline, and which I commented on in my Scott Pilgrim phototour two weeks ago, would have have been destroyed.
This photo looks south along Spadina Road from the Baldwin Steps, and this perspective would have been utterly, absolutely transformed by the Spadina Expressway. If I read the maps correctly, Davenport Road would have been rebuilt to be carried over the Expressway here. Where the road is now would have been the northbound lanes, while the subway line would have been built in an open trench along the right side of the photo. The potential route of southbound lanes, crashing through the middle of existing construction, aren't visible. They would pass beneath the railway bridge you can see further down. Beyond that, approximately where the center line splits to form a peanut-like shape in the middle of the road, where some of the grand historic residences of the Annex still stand - it would have been entirely obliterated, because this is where the Spadina Expressway was to interchange with the Crosstown Expressway.
There's almost a grim beauty in the audacity of the plans, of the degree to which the planners wanted to smooth the ground for progress. Between the lanes themselves and the network of sweeping on-ramps and off-ramps necessary to guide motorists from the Spadina to the Crosstown, the Crosstown to the Spadina, or onto whatever residential roads survived the construction, it might be that no building photographed here would have still been standing had the projects all come to fruition.
After meeting the Crosstown the Spadina would split and separate out, in preparation for its planned Bloor Street terminus - while the southbound lanes would remain on Spadina, the northbound lanes would split to bury Madison Avenue. The number of heritage properties I passed in just a couple of blocks wasn't surprising - this is the Annex, after all, one of the historic residential centers of Toronto. It's a quiet street in terms of traffic, but considering how many of these houses are probably subdivided residences for students of the nearby University of Toronto, probably not as peaceful once exams are over. I doubt it ever gets even close to what it would've been like had the Spadina's northbound lanes come through here.
It was the residents of the Annex, Jane Jacobs among them, who were instrumental in pushing back against the suburban interests that sought to push the expressway through. Understandably, as in terms of the unbuilt portion, the neighborhood would have been bisected and possibly devastated - though the damage to Forest Hill and Cedarvale Park wouldn't have been small change either.
Here, at Bloor Street West, the Spadina Expressway would come to an end and the commuters would have to make the rest of their way downtown - an admittedly short way, mind you - on city streets. I can only imagine how clogged and congested this intersection would be if that had been the case. It would've transformed the area around it and beyond, that much is certain. It's safe to say that the Expressway would, among other things, mean that there would be no Spadina streetcar today - anyone trying to lock up two lanes in a right-of-way for transit vehicles along such a busy corridor, in the more car-centric Metro Toronto a completed expressway network would have fostered, probably would have been crucified. There are a number of possibilities for what could have happened beyond here - I've seen references to express lanes south, but I've also seen artist's impressions of the Spadina being taken south to meet the Gardiner, crashing through Chinatown and Kensington Market to get to the lakeshore.
I believe it's for the better that the Spadina Expressway was never built. It would have cut through established communities, reduced valuable greenspace to asphalt, and encouraged more and more people to quit Toronto for the suburbs and their siren song. Nor would have it solved any long-term congestion issues - congestion is never solved by just building more expressways. The phenomenon of induced demand is particularly noteworthy in terms of automobile infrastructure - new expressways would encourage more use of the system, ultimately to the extent that Metro's traffic troubles would just be larger and spread out over more of the city. The implementation of an auto-centric policy, such as the one behind the Spadina Expressway, would encourage people to use cars who might not have otherwise done so.
The Spadina Expressway was the keystone, and it's arguable that because of its absence, the Gardiner Expressway and the Don Valley Parkway never did live up to their potential. Today, every once in a while you can still hear people calling for a demolition of the Gardiner in downtown, nd the sheer weight of traffic it sees in rush hour should make it no surprise that the DVP's unofficial nickname is the "Don Valley Parking Lot."
There's always a cost to everything. Myself - I do believe that, in the end, it was one worth paying.
Every once in a while, I encounter someone online - usually in the teeming cesspool that is the typical comment thread on a major metropolitan newspaper's website - railing against the idea of streetcars, attempting to argue that they're outmoded and obsolete, and that everyone would be better off if we just ripped up the rails and ran buses instead. Leaving aside the examples of the current state of transit in most of the cities that did just that, streetcars have a higher passenger capacity for no other reason than that they're bigger than buses - plus, they don't have to lug their powerplants along with them.
Take the example I came across yesterday. Due to track maintenance, streetcars on Spadina Avenue are being replaced by buses this weeekend. It's rare I see a bus crowded to this extent that's not running on Dufferin Street. It's also the first time I've ever actually seen a Spadina bus outside that video.
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Last night I raced a streetcar on foot and won. In its defense, though, it was a race through the Entertainment District on the first day of a long weekend, and the first warm day of the year at that. After it had sat at the Spadina intersection for four or five traffic light cycles because the cars kept inching past it into the crammed lanes beyond, refusing to allow it an opportunity to continue, I decided to take my destiny into my own hands and walk. On reaching Bathurst Street, where the Entertainment District and Fashion District traffic thankfully peters out, I waited a few minutes and boarded the same streetcar I had left behind at Spadina. It might've been easier to just stay on the streetcar - but I didn't have a seat and didn't feel like standing around. At least the way I did it, I got a walk out of it.
Past Bathurst the streetcar really moved, as they are wont to do, and it gave me a chance to reflect. I can't imagine myself as having done that when I was younger, but what I've come to realize is the sheer weight of the habits that are formed in early childhood and just endure. My current project to photograph every streetcar operated by the Toronto Transit Commission shouldn't come as a surprise, I think, from someone who always dashed to the train set for free play in kindergarten. But I never just walked when I was a kid, the way I do now. My question is simple - why? My potential answer - environment.
To put it simply, I have to wonder if the difference between urban and suburban development is prominent in how those exploratory urges are expressed.
I grew up in Barrie which, although outside the Greater Toronto Area, is a sprawling city with quick links to Toronto thanks to Highway 400 passing through it. Today, it's surrounded by vast tracts of residential subdivisions scattered over what was good agricultural land ten years ago, but even in the 1990s it wasn't exactly a model of New Urbanism. Neighborhoods tended to bleed together, the only real difference being in the design of the houses that lined the streets. Whenever I ended up going downtown on my own without taking Barrie Transit, I would take my bike - at least it was faster.
I think that suburbs are designed in such a way that walking from place to place is subconsciously discouraged - not that this was an intentional introduction by the people who built them, but a result of optimizing them for automobile journeys. When I walked along Sheppard Avenue East a few weeks ago, I felt like I'd covered a lot of ground by the time I reached Kennedy - ultimately, it ended up being only 3.5 kilometers. I'd recently done a wandering walk from my apartment to Yonge and Dundas, weaving and wandering through dense downtown neighborhoods, hardly feeling tired at all.
It's the scale, I think, that discourages. In dense areas like downtown Toronto, the cityscape around you is always changing, and things are tight-packed and clustered together. Sometimes the suburbs, by contrast, feel like they've been built for giants - buildings are far back from the road and widely separated from each other, there aren't nearly as many people on the sidewalks, and the cityscape seems unchanging - just the same houses or apartment blocks between the major intersections, and the same shopping plazas with gas stations and convenience stores at those intersections. In a dense community, exploration is rewarded almost immediately, which can distract from the length of the journey - but in more sparsely-built suburbs, the journey is harder to ignore.
At least, that's a possibility. I'd be interested in hearing how off-base you think I am.
Immediately against the railway that marks out the boundary between West Queen West and Parkdale, along Gladstone Avenue where the Dufferin buses turn, there's a house with one wall given over to a mural of an inexplicably smiling fish. It's been there since 2007 at least, and it's awesome. It's a piece of color, of design of the sort that Toronto needs more of. It's character all on its own.
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