City Limits

Three books provide different insights into how Toronto has been made. One outlines a neighbourhood’s origins; another walks us through various streetscapes; the third charts the history of a long-running conflict between cars and bicycles. With differing perspectives and speeds, they all probe an essential question: How do we cultivate nurturing communities? Because with devastating homelessness, an affordability crisis, social isolation, loneliness, and the attendant mental distress, plus the erosion of generative conversation and, as many warn us, the demise of democracy, we desperately need wisdom on how to tend to the connectedness essential for individual health and collective thriving. Without human-to-human attachments, we are left to make our way through life alone, and that is proving to be a condition fraught with despair and disaster.

Richard White begins his history of the Beach with a warm, declarative description: “The Beaches is one of Toronto’s best known and most admired neighbourhoods.” (He later notes the eternal “Beach” versus “Beaches” debate. He favours the latter name, but as a once-upon-a-time resident of ten years, I opt for the former.) The east end pocket has “character” and a “healthy urban fabric.” Although White does not explain what constitutes a healthy urban fabric — or character, for that matter — he does show how the Beach developed into the distinctive neighbourhood it is.

The Beach — two kilometres of shoreline along Lake Ontario — became ripe for part-time residents when the Grand Trunk Railway decided to build its route well inland in the mid-nineteenth century. Bordered by Kingston Road to the north, Victoria Park and Woodbine Avenues to the east and west, and the lake to the south, the Beach started as a “seasonal recreation area” complete with rival amusement parks, which meant that the entire district was characterized by leisure and pleasure. There were private lakefront cottages, but it was only when the electric streetcar reached the Beach in the 1890s that it became a proper residential neighbourhood: a “streetcar suburb.” A new fire hall and public school soon followed, as did modern water, electricity, and telephone infrastructure.

The Beach is characterized by small lots, most no more than fifty feet wide, and semi-detached homes built along narrow hillside streets. At first, it grew with almost no input from professional architects or designers, resulting in a “diversity of housing.” Attracting lower-to-middle-class families, the Beach was “entirely a product of free enterprise,” created “by the market, not by regulation.” In other words, it was, “for better or worse, . . . nobody’s vision.” That is the most discernible theme and lesson of White’s history.

White makes the case that the Beach was a product of “both the commercial and the guardian syndromes,” to use a Jane Jacobs phrase, arguing that the two can and ought to live in harmony. Is this a model of how other neighbourhoods can be created? Spurred by an initial force — be it amusement parks, transportation hubs, or fertile resources — human demand generates commerce, which spawns settlement that eventually necessitates regulation. Commerce, settlement, regulation: they reinforce one another. Neighbourhoods are created by needs and desires that shape — and are shaped by — rules and guidelines.

The Beaches raises a vital question: How do neighbourhoods grow into communities? Given the current erosion of connectedness, the challenge of nurturing healthy and friendly communities is a mystery we need to solve. White’s reliance on the reified notion of the market as the primary driver, devoid of human intention and responsibility, doesn’t offer helpful insights into how we can foster them today. I wish that White had shared more of his wisdom on how the original social stratification of the Beach did indeed cultivate a cohesive community.

Shawn Micallef offers an alternative perspective on the shape of neighbourhoods with an updated edition of Stroll, which originally appeared fifteen years ago. His “psychogeographic walking tours” take us through what he calls the Middle, Westish, Northish, Eastish, and Eastest areas of Toronto, showing us the known and sometimes obscure buildings and features that define Canada’s largest city.

Walking, Micallef argues, allows us to be thoughtful in an otherwise hectic world. He fashions himself a flâneur — one who wanders and watches — and wishes to share the result of his process of “joyful discovery.” For each neighbourhood, he provides information on the built environment, offering a combination of political, aesthetic, and historical storytelling. Part travel guide, part urban chronicle, part construction gossip, his book is perfect for the tourist or the weekend rambler.

Stroll starts at the water — appropriate, given that Toronto borrows its name from the Mohawk word tkaronto, “the place where trees stand in the water.” (According to the geographer Rick Laprairie, the toponym first appeared on area maps in 1752, but it traditionally referred to a weir between Lakes Simcoe and Couchiching, near present-day Orillia.) Micallef celebrates how Toronto’s Harbourfront has been transformed into “a European-style promenade. There’s a place for everybody now: there are separate lanes for cars, streetcars, cyclists, and pedestrians. A ‘complete street,’ as the urban planners say.”

It is here that one sees that the eyes of a flâneur are not necessarily the eyes of a resident. As a long-time inhabitant of Harbourfront (indeed, I live in the “late-modernist beauty” that Micallef singles out, Daniel Li’s Harbour Terrace), I disagree with this visitor’s perspective. The lanes have been partitioned for more than a decade, but the designations remain unclear, especially for cars, and many mistakenly drive on the streetcar tracks. Pedestrians and cyclists also rarely stop at their respective traffic lights. As a result, the Queens Quay streetcar route is the most dangerous in the city and locals have started calling the thoroughfare “the Gauntlet.” If Harbourfront were truly a European promenade, it would have beautiful places to sit, sip cafés au lait, watch and be watched, and wander amid nature or delightful retail — none of which is the case. From my point of view, Harbourfront is a missed opportunity to design a community that is gorgeous and functional. And I suspect residents of other neighbourhoods featured in Stroll may also have perspectives divergent from Micallef’s.

Moving beyond Harbourfront, Micallef walks readers along University Avenue, which, oddly, becomes Avenue Road several kilometres north of the lake, noting interesting tidbits. At the Shangri‑La Hotel, we see Zhang Huan’s surprising and spectacular sculpture Peace Pigeons. At SickKids, the leading children’s hospital in Canada, there is a bust of Mary Pickford, who co-founded United Artists with Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and her husband, Douglas Fairbanks. (The early Hollywood star was born nearby in 1892.) And at Avenue and Davenport Roads, we catch a glimpse of the “beloved row of florists” that Micallef describes as “a tiny Toronto version of a European flower market”— which may soon be redeveloped.

Micallef offers similar tidbits for other areas. In Westish, we see the Palais Royale. Built in 1899, it was converted into a dance hall in 1922 and went on to host performances by Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie. We learn about Bathurst Street, named after the Third Earl Bathurst; it is “the line the Jewish community has roughly followed as it migrated from downtown to the suburbs.” Moving to Northish, we read about the Spadina expressway that was not, which Micallef calls “perhaps one of the greatest symbols of citizen resistance to top-down, midcentury planning.” We are introduced to Arthur Erickson’s Eglinton West subway station, which “still feels like a future we’ve yet to reach.” Eastest includes the Aga Khan Museum, built on the site of the old Bata Shoes head office, and the Shops at Don Mills, an outdoor mall that’s unique in Toronto. And in Eastish, we see the old Victorian brick works, which operated between 1889 and 1984 and facilitated the construction of Old City Hall, Casa Loma, and Convocation Hall. Today it’s home to the non-profit Evergreen organization. We are taken to the Beach and the R. C. Harris Water Treatment Plant, a prominent location in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, and to the Leslie Street Spit, a critical bird habitat created with the refuse of old buildings, sidewalks, and other concrete structures.

Micallef believes walking is the best way to see how Toronto grew into the collection of eclectic roadways, landmarks, and, yes, neighbourhoods that it is. Like White, he believes that “Toronto is not, historically, a master-planned city; it just kind of happened.” Similarly, given his extensive knowledge of the place, the flâneur might have shared more of his wisdom on how streets and homes get shaped into communities — and how rich diversity can morph into connectedness.

Micallef prefers walking to cycling, because cycling is “too fast, and the details blur by.” That brings us to Albert Koehl’s Wheeling through Toronto, which presents a history of the bicycle and its place in Hogtown. This is the story of an old and ongoing battle — between bicycle and car, bike path and road. Political, civil, business, resident, and commuter interests have long had a complex, combative relationship, and automobile infrastructure has impeded our individual and collective ability to enjoy the healthy delights of the bicycle.

The city’s “bicycle craze” started in 1896, when bikes shifted from a form of amusement to a means of everyday transportation. The year before, eighty shops sold 18,000 of them — when the population was 196,000. Businessmen (yes, they were men) rode them to work, fully kitted out in their suits; policemen and clergy used them; doctors made house calls on them; and telegrams and mail arrived on them. Koehl notes an interesting echo of history: Like Amazon today, the original Robert Simpson department store provided same-day delivery at the turn of the twentieth century. Customers could phone in orders, which were dispatched by bicycle. Around the same time, streetcar tracks were installed and the “devil strip”— which continues to be a danger to cyclists — was born.

Bikes also appealed to women, who turned to shorter, more comfortable clothing for riding — which many attacked on the basis of morality. Nonetheless, cycling became a preferred mode of transport — useful and unpretentious. But just as bicycles grew in popularity, so did the automobile. As the car overshadowed the less expensive, healthier bike, expressways designed for the speedier traffic were built, while curb lanes for parking cannibalized city landscaping. “The forgotten bicyclist was left to navigate dangerous roads,” Koehl writes. So dangerous did cycling become that parents campaigned against letting children ride bikes. As mayor, Nathan Phillips proposed a bill in 1958 that would ban kids from cycling on roads altogether. Car doors were a menace for young and old cyclists alike, as were thieves who robbed messengers, often after first placing false orders.

Koehl points out that the original “battle” for Bloor Street occurred in 1929, when the city voted against widening the arterial road to accommodate bicycle traffic. But there have been a few “wins” for cyclists in the years since: in 1972, the city’s first designated bike lane was opened, alongside Eglinton Avenue West; a year later, the city began replacing dangerous sewer grates with a “safer” diagonal design; in 2015, the eighty-five-kilometre Pan Am Path was opened; and in 2016, the Vision Zero road safety plan was adopted.

By the end of 2019, Toronto had just over 150 kilometres of bike lanes, though not a consistent or contiguous system. To convince decision makers to create safer riding conditions, the bicycling community has needed to demonstrate numbers, but to increase the numbers, the riding conditions have needed to be safer. Koehl describes how the pandemic created the conditions for re-evaluating the bicycle’s value. Temporary bikeways were installed and then, in many cases, quickly uninstalled — and this was before Ontario’s controversial new law permitting the province to remove municipal bike lanes without even consulting city officials.

The issues of safety, space, and speed — and commerce — continue to inform battles between cars and bikes. We may think that bicycles are safer, but bicycle traffic has its own challenges that Koehl does not address. Just as there is a range of fast to slow, competent to incompetent motorists, there is a diversity of speeds and skills that plagues cycling. Try taking the bike path from the Canadian National Exhibition grounds near downtown to the west end neighbourhood of Mimico on a sunny Sunday afternoon, and you will experience the challenge of navigating through the novice riders, the families with children, the racers, the sightseers, the exercisers, and increasingly the motorized. The range of speeds and skills — plus the almost complete lack of etiquette or rules — leads to chaos and collisions.

The battles involving cars and bikes are emblematic of that same question: How do we cultivate safe and nurturing communities? Whether it addresses traffic, housing, recreation, or necessary infrastructure, what is the successful combination of vision, planning, demand, desire, and indeed beauty that can build a neighbourhood? And even with the right ingredients, what is the recipe that transforms a neighbourhood into a genuine community?

For White and Micallef, community may be the product of location, demand, and a dose of planning. For Koehl, it may be shared pursuits or common foes. But for communities to be grounded in true connection, care, commerce, and compassion, we need to learn how to mesh diverse and divergent perspectives, concerns, and interests. We need to understand how function can serve a collective purpose; how to nurture strangers into neighbours who care about one another; and how beauty and order, rules and rituals, individual freedom and collective wisdom can intertwine to create a society that we want to be part of. Without community, without feeling connected to and responsible for one another, we dissolve into dislocation and disaster. What is it the Three Musketeers taught us? All for one, and one for all.