The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Toronto's Evolution: Is it Moving Forward Or Backward?

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

How has Toronto changed in 15 years? Shawn Micallef, urban affairs columnist for the Toronto Star and co-founder of Spacing magazine brings readers along on 31 walks around the city to highlight how the landscape, landmarks, and neighbourhoods have changed since the original 2010 publication of the book. Host Jeyan Jeganathan joins him on a brief tour of the Toronto Islands; learns about psychogeography - how location affects the emotions and behaviour of people, what can be learned by walking a city, and how Toronto has changed, for better or worse, over the years.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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A good city is like an onion. you can just keep peeling it and peeling it and never get to the center, never get bored and I think Toronto is that kind of city. Thank you so much for joining us at Toronto Island at Olympic Park right now. I understand this was your first ferry trip of the season down to the island. It was, yeah. The inaugural trip across the harbour is always kind of fun because turn around and look at the skyline. It's like a great reveal of what's changed in the last few months since the last time coming over here. And every time it's different because the city changes by the day, it seems. So when you give it a few months and look at it all at once, it's always a bit of a kind of a shock and overwhelming and just a bit of awe.

This is an update to your original book, Stroll, that you did in 2010. What was the original idea for the book? Yeah, the original book, I sometimes think about my first 10 years of living in Toronto. I moved here from Windsor, sort of always knew Toronto because you come here for, what, the Phantom of the Opera, to go to Ontario Place, to go to the CN Tower you know these tourist things but then when I moved here I realized the city's really big I didn't really know it I didn't know you know where the streets led I didn't know what was one neighborhood over and so we started walking and exploring just for fun and then that sort of morphed into a sort of quasi job writing because I started writing about it. Right. And so I was writing for about six, seven years about Toronto, and with Coach House

Books put together the first book of walks through Toronto, explorations of Toronto. So I sometimes think of that, the first iteration of the book as being my thesis project on getting to know Toronto. Why the update 14 years later? Well, we always talked about updating it because we talked about it kind of idly because the city sort of changed and maybe, you know,

on the 10th anniversary, we'll do something. And then we were approaching the 15th anniversary and decided, okay, let's do it. And I thought it would be a, you know, a couple months project, you know, like this building's gone, add that building in. And I started with my young chapter walking from the lake up. And within the first block, I was kind of, I knew I was a bit in trouble.

Because in that block alone from the lake, I could see like 14 new buildings. Huge landmarks were gone. Like the Toronto Star building is no longer the Toronto Star building. There was Captain John's seafood ship, which was a landmark floating on the lake that's gone and i was like oh this is like the change in the city is way more dramatic than i thought and it's sort of my job to pay attention to the city and even i was taken aback by how much change there was so this two months two month project became an eight month uh kind of odyssey of re-walking every step of the book.

So you have 31 walks that you cover in the book. What would you say is the biggest challenge in terms of the particular routes? The biggest challenge was just the amount of territory I covered. For the first book, I had years to do it. There are years of going out walking, years of, for the first book, I had years to do it, right? There are years of going out walking, years of digging in the archives, years of just kind of experiencing the city and then putting that into the book. I had to recheck all that like within a, you know, a handful of months and it reminded me also of how big Toronto is. You know, we can see downtown behind me, you know, like that's the part

that gets all the postcards and whatever. But the city's big. It's like 44 kilometers wide. You know, that's like Los Angeles size that goes on and on and on. And so to recover it, it was a lot of walking. A lot of steps. Yeah, it was good. It was a lot of, it was good. Yeah, I recommend if you want to get your steps in, write a book about the city. Fair enough. In the buildup to the book in 2010, what were your impressions of the city of Toronto? Back in 2010, it seemed like Toronto was having a bit of a renaissance, maybe.

It had been in a doldrum since the 90s. The 90s were kind of bad for Toronto. There was a devastating recession. We were looking at this building boom behind us, which started around 1998, give or take. But there was nothing built for five years. There were even projects that were just stumps of elevator shafts downtown. So there was that. And then there was amalgamation in 1998, which threw the city in disarray, administratively, but also I think like spiritually, the city didn't know what it was anymore. And places like Scarborough and Etobicoke, places that had identity suddenly didn't technically exist. So it felt like the city was just like

thrown for a loop. And then through the 2000s, this sort of spirit of Toronto came back. The art scene really kind of flourished. There's great music scene. The city started building up again. And there's like a sort of civic spirit and pride that started growing. So I think the book came out of that scene at the time. I'm curious, with your latest rolls of the city, has that changed? Do there have new impressions of the city?

Yeah, so since 2010 I started writing a weekly column in the Toronto Star about Toronto politics. I love living in Toronto, but it's an incredibly frustrating place, politically sometimes. Sometimes I characterize Toronto as being a teenage city. Look at it, it's big. But it's still so new that it's getting used to being a big city and a lot of parts of Toronto don't accept that it's big. So we have terrible traffic, our transit system's not as big city as it should be. So we have all these growing pains. And so writing about this stuff on a weekly basis, I felt cynicism creeping in, which I didn't have originally, as well as the housing crisis in Toronto's grown, the inequality in Toronto's grown. You know, we have other problems, you know, really big looming problems in the place, in the city. And so those are in the book, but we, my publisher and I, we had to

like remind ourselves that, you know, there's a lot of good in this place. And doing these walks again reminded me that I do actually love this place. There's a term that you use in the book, psychogeography. What does that mean? What does that mean? Psychogeography is a way of exploring cities and space, really. Landscape. That was started in Paris, in France, by the Situationists. And they did all kinds of things. One of the things was psychogeography. It was a way of getting people to think about how they interact with the city. And sort of break people out of the

routines and maybe ruts that they were in. So they would do things like go for a walk in Paris using a map of London. They would try to intentionally get lost. They have this really kind of beautiful, elegant way of exploring cities called the Derive or the drift. They would drift through the city without a destination in mind. Whatever, you know, they came to a fork in the road or an intersection or an alleyway and whatever looked enticing they would follow it. And I realized when I discovered psychogeography that's what I was doing. And I, it was kind of really one of those wonderful moments when you see other people doing what you're doing.

But psychogeography also has like a critical edge to it. It's about exploring and discovering, but it's also about, you know, taking stock of things and like saying, is this good? Is this equitable? Is this that? So it's kind of a wonderful way to explore but also think critically. We're in Center Island going over the bridge to Hamlins, correct? Is that the direction we're heading at? Well, you go over the bridge, you go correct that's not the direction we're heading at so you go over the bridge you go to hamlets to the west wards island to the east all right tell us the history of toronto island the toronto island used to be attached to the city it was like a spit of land that came out but there was a big storm in the middle 1800s and it got severed which is now called the eastern passage to the harbor And so then it became the Toronto Islands.

There was an indigenous presence here, and then it became when the colonial city was being built, this was sort of the escape for the city. And evolved into almost cottage country at Toronto's front door. So it became a populated place. There were little cottages, the entire community's out here. What does it represent for Torontonians?

Again, cottages for a lot of people are out of reach. This is a popular summer spot. Look, it's June and this place is bustling right now. Yeah, I mean, there's this whole idea in Canada and Ontario that the cottage is this archetypal thing. Very few people actually own a cottage. It's out of reach, as you said. And so this is the cottage experience for most Torontonians, the most accessible cottage experience. And it's one of the reasons why it's incredibly important, incredibly precious to Toronto. It's why the ferry

system which is very romantic and old-fashioned is great experience but it's also a problem because it's really hard to get here on a sunny summer weekend day. You have to wait a long time for the ferry, it's crowded, you're kind of penned in. The ferries are from the 1920s. They are ordering new ones, but they're going to be in the same style, kind of slow to get on, slow to get off. And so access to public spaces like the islands has actually become a critical issue in Toronto. As more people don't have backyards, people live in apartments, condos,

they deserve to have this kind of, you know, a cottage experience in a public park. And so making this place more accessible is important. You don't just walk Toronto. You've started walking through Windsor as well. What else can you discover through sort of walking cities? Windsor's your hometown, yet you say that you never actually walked through it. Yeah, I mean, I grew up in the suburbs of Windsor, so I always a car windsor's a car town parents worked it mother worked at general motors um and so i was in a car probably every day of my life until i moved to toronto and you know windsor's

a smaller place i always felt like i knew it like the back of my hand because i you know lived there for so long and then when i returned back home uh which I do often, I realized after, I think after the first book came out, that I didn't actually know Windsor. I knew it through a windshield, which is like watching a city on TV. You're kind of separated from it. So I started in the last decade and a half just parking the car in Windsor and just walking. Walking these places I thought I knew, but I only knew them from a car. And Windsor has revealed itself in so many different fantastic ways. A few weeks ago I was in Niagara Falls and I was staying in the tourist zone right by the falls in one of the hotels. And I just went for a walk along the river to the old downtown, the kind of non-touristy

downtown. And, you know, the crowds are all right at the falls. You go half a kilometer away and suddenly you're in the normal city. And walking around the old downtown and the train station, you can look across to New York State and see the train bridge going there. And then zigzagging through the city back to the tourist part you know past the Niagara Falls Public Library which is this beautiful 1970s building that I think is like I just I didn't know it was there and I think it's one of the best libraries in Canada in its design and it was just like oh Niagara Falls there's just and I and

it's a cliche that I'm I about walking, but it actually works. It reveals the places we live in intimacy that you can't get any other way. Do Torontonians really know their city? Some Torontonians surely know their city, but it's such a big place that people say it, people say, you know, it's a city of neighborhoods, which is a good thing. You can, you know, I live in a neighborhood where I can do all my stuff in the neighborhood if I want. You know, go shopping, hang out, go to a restaurant. And so I don't have to leave it if I don't want to. And that's just like, you know, so traffic might be bad in the city.

I don't know because I just walk around and do my thing. But I think the flip side of that is a city of neighborhoods is that people kind of become, you know, they don't really leave their neighborhood as much. Maybe they go to work or they go to school or a few friends live here and there. But the city, again, it's endless. It's like 44 kilometers wide and pretty tall. And then it keeps going, right? There's the GTA, too. What would you say, of all the walks, you've seen the biggest change? kilometers wide and pretty tall and then it keeps going, right? There's the GTA too.

What would you say of all the walks you've seen the biggest change? It was interesting. Some walks have changed more than others. Like the hydro, the Finch hydro corridor didn't change that much. But there's new bridges. Like there's new connections. There were places where I had to walk all the way around, now I can cross because the city's put in all these wonderful connections. But any of the walks that went through the kind of dense urban parts of Toronto, like Yonge Street, right? The way Toronto zones, you know, we look behind me, we see all those buildings, and we talk about how quickly Toronto changes and how fast it's growing.

But it's actually only growing in a few parts, right? It's zoned the Yonge Street corridor, the waterfront, other kind of pockets around. So a walk like Yonge Street goes through those zones for change, and the landscapes are completely different. They, like, the literal, like, what I saw in 2010 is not what you see now. Like, entire blocks gone and new buildings up. So, like, Yonge Street, my chapter on the downtown east side kind of zigzagging around, that's another really intense zone.

So there's entire intersections. I kind of rewrote about certain intersections like Dundas Street and Church Street, which are radically different now. And that kind of change, I mean, that's partially why people are very nervous about the changes in the city, because it feels like the city that you know, the city that you might have fallen in love with

is suddenly not there anymore. So tell us a little bit about some hidden gems on the Toronto Island that you think people should know about. Yeah the islands have a very, you know, they're busy parts, you know, Centre Island, the amusement park, the places closest to the ferry, some very formal kind of gardens, but then it gets kind of wild, like there's some kind of forested areas there's a hedge maze of course one of the things I really like are the modernist pavilions that date to the mid 60s they were by Irving Grossman architect he did a lot of mid-century modern apartment buildings in the city a lot of that Toronto 60s look was him and some of his contemporaries but he built these pavilions these kind of shelters that have uh washrooms and that sort of thing um and they're

gorgeous i mean they could have been at xo 67 right and they're still here um they're still intact the parks department has done an all right job of of keeping them up um so i think those are kind of hidden gems i just kind of love the um that kind of like like that the the the differences of this place right from totally wild um the beaches i think are oddly a hidden gem despite them being like the draw because i think a lot of torontonians still think you can't swim in the lake right because back in the day you couldn't or it was dirtier and that kind of it still has that reputation but we swim at the island every summer and surprisingly one of the cleanest waters yes it's a blue flag beach which is an internationally

recognized thing and i know i'm going to sound like a boost toronto booster right now but it is like swimming in the mediterranean i think you can swim out over your head and still see the ripples of sand underneath maybe a smidge colder on the the west side, which is the, it was always the more remote side, was Hanlon's Point Beach, which I think is the best beach because it's west-facing. But it's also been the queer beach of Toronto. Toronto's first gay picnic happened there in 1971, so it's always been a sort of queer space because it's been it's been a bit farther away from all the crowds and now it's been clothing optional for 25 years there's very few of those kinds of beaches in in North America so it's a very kind of unique

space usually those kind of beaches are like far from the city right but you can swim out on the beaches here and you just get beyond the tree line and then there's a CN Tower poking up and so it's like oh the city and like what is like the wilderness what we might travel think we have to travel far far away are all like right next door to each other which is why this place is so special which is why access to this place equitable access easy access affordable access is really important what is good in Toronto by A.R. Smith? When I return to Toronto from somewhere else, sometimes like great North American cities that are famous,

maybe more famous than Toronto for various reasons, and I get back to Toronto and I walk home or I get on the streetcar and I'm like looking at the college streetcar and there's just endless critical mass of people like there's there's people everywhere and and there's human activity and it's and that is exciting to me that I think you know a lot of cities particularly North American cities they have pockets famous pockets where stuff happens. That's where the bars are.

Here's the museums over here. And they get all the attention. They might be world-class museums or whatever. But Toronto just has this kind of continuity, endless continuity of humanity, of just human activity. And I think that is the thing I love about Toronto. What needs work in this city? I mean, Toronto, I love Toronto, but it needs a lot of work. It needs, it needs a functional transit system. It needs, uh,

which I think is kind of coming. Like again, we're in a very awkward time when, you know, we were waiting for subway lines to open. Uh, we've been waiting years and years, but there are big projects in the work and i have to like you have to i have to step back sometimes from the daily frustration um and say like oh there is a new subway downtown relief line the ontario line coming uh eglinton's gonna open the finch lrt is gonna open like these things are gonna once they do open it'll be like oh okay things will click together differently um But yeah, the transit question,

you have to, the TTC, the Go network, it's not good enough to get everyone out of their cars. People will still say it's better to be in my car. And so it has to be better than the car because the car is never going to be the solution when you have this many people living together. It's impossible. It doesn't work in any city.

Only transit works. So there's that one. and the other part of it is the housing uh equity issue like this is there's increasingly toronto was always expensive it was always part of the narrative like growing up in the 80s in windsor we'd hear what toronto housing price of 200 000 for a house oh my gosh uh whatever uh it's always been, but it's kind of been exponentially hard. And like the stories of people leaving the city, of just not finding a place for them here, is kind of dire. At Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow is concerned with the downtown revitalization.

How can she best achieve that? Yeah, when it comes to downtown, I sometimes think about what it was like when I moved here in 2000. The downtown was coming back after the recession. Very busy place, but no one really lived downtown. There were no residential towers, like one or two, a few on the edge. City place, the cluster of condos, which is around the CN Tower and the SkyDome were kind of coming but now there's so many people living within within the bank Towers within the kind of office Towers that there's always people around like you used to go downtown at night there'd be nobody there now there's people there so I think I think downtown needs to reinvent itself as not a place just for office workers.

The whole economy was based on going for lunch because they're there, but then they left and went somewhere else. It needs to be reinvented as a 24-hour neighborhood. I think it's lazy to say we've got to get the office workers back in there. Let's reinvent the place. Maybe the lunch place needs to be open at night. Maybe we need to loosen the zoning and allow for more bars, restaurants. Maybe we need nightclubs back in the city. We have very few places

for performance to happen. Bands have a very hard time playing. DJs have a very hard time playing. It's hard to dance in the city. Maybe we should be able to dance downtown again. The Agenda with Steve Paikin is made possible through generous philanthropic contributions from viewers like you. Thank you for supporting TVO's journalism.