The last time anyone was certain about the character of Toronto was in the 1940s and the ’50s, when the city was shut up tight on Sundays and the rest of the week was just as prim.
In recent years, Toronto has been in flux. We have traded our staid WASP stance for a glorious, riotous international multiculturalism; if we are emphatically not what we used to be, we do not yet know what we will become.
In the search for answers there are many fine books about Toronto’s past, and even one terrific play—written by former mayor John Sewell about another former mayor Allan Lamport—but I have always wondered if there was an ur-text to explain this confounding town, some fundamental document that shows who we really were, once, here.
After all, other important...
Joe Fiorito is a city columnist with the Toronto Star, and the author of the memoir The Closer We Are to Dying (McClelland and Stewart, 1999).
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