Psychogeography
March 5th, 2010
The following is a reprint of my recent Psychogeography column in Eye Weekly. Photo by Smaku.
Toronto is a city of neighbourhoods, we’re told. When they work well, they feel like a small town and, when they work really well, we might feel like Al Waxman in the opening credits of the King of Kensington, walking down the street like we own it. That’s all fine, but it gives us a false sense of the size of the city. Sometimes it’s good to be reminded of just how big Toronto is.
Try standing over an expressway. Anytime is good, but late afternoon when the rush is at its peak is best. The bottom of Dufferin over the Gardiner, right before the Canadian National Exhibition arch, is good, as is the top of Avenue Road where the 12 lanes of the 401 have been called the busiest road in North America. Every second, dozens of individual people pass by, each going to an individual home, some filled with more individuals, each with their own network of friends and coworkers. It’s a web that doesn’t stop growing, and watching the traffic and thinking this way gets overwhelming fast. Where do all these cars park? How many pairs of pants does everybody own? The numbers add up meaninglessly high.
Another rush-hour place to feel this more intimately is the Union Station basement at 4:45pm on any weekday. Try standing still in the middle of the thousands of GO Train passengers. It’s like a flash-flood mudslide and, if you don’t watch out, you’ll be swept up and taken away to Pickering or Newmarket. The mental aggregate of all this is confounding — we can see all these people, but it’s hard to know where they fit into “the city we know.” It’s too much.
December 29th, 2009
The brutalist Chelmsford Apartment towers loom over an old village house.
This is the first in a series I plan to do over the next little while on the hidden villages and hamlets that have been engulfed by urban sprawl in the Greater Toronto Area. This is going back to the beginning for me, as one of my first posts on Spacing Toronto was on the lost village of Ebenezer, now part of Brampton’s sprawl.
I chose Agincourt to launch this occasional series for two reasons: this is one area in which many, if not most, Spacing readers should have some familiarity with; and it is here that Transit City has its humble “groundbreaking” - namely the grade separation of the CN Uxbridge Subdivision and Sheppard Avenue East.
Unlike lesser known villages around like O’Sullivan’s Corners (Sheppard and Victoria Park), or Hough’s Corners (Eglinton and Birchmount), Agincourt as a geographical place name lives on, in the form of a GO Transit train stop; a mall at Kennedy and Sheppard, local schools, amongst other things. Indeed, today, many Torontonians would describe Agincourt’s boundaries as from the 401 to the south, Steeles to the north, Victoria Park to the west and McCowan or Markham Roads to the east (the City of Toronto’s neighbourhood definition for Agincourt isn’t clear either, splitting “Agincourt” into two neighbourhoods).
125 years ago, Agincourt was a bustling, yet unincorporated, rural village at the corner of what is today the intersection of Midland and Sheppard Avenues, assisted by the construction of the pioneering Toronto and Nipissing Railway in 1871 (which became part of the Midland Railway of Canada empire, the origin of the name Midland Avenue) and the Ontario and Quebec Railway, later the CP mainline to Montreal.
Knox United Church and cemetery, Agincourt. An old church and cemetery will often mark the location of a former village.
The suburban creep of Toronto didn’t catch up to Agincourt until the early 1960s, after the construction of Highway 401 and the wholesale bungalowization of Scarborough Township after the Second World War by Reeve Oliver Crockford. The train has stopped continuously in Agincourt, first hosting passenger trains to Coboconk and Lindsay, later CN, then VIA rail diesel coach commuter trains to Markham and Stouffville. GO Transit took over the service in 1982.
Today, Agincourt village still maintains much of its original building stock, though urbanization has blurred the old boundaries. This has had the effect so that Agincourt is a village lost in plain sight. Several churches from the village era remain in use today, though there have been some adaptations to the area’s changing demographics, including Mandarin and Cantonese language services. The local school, built in 1912, still welcomes students, and the old Victorian and Edwardian housing stock, while standing out from the ranch houses, high rises and townhouse complexes that surround the area, are plentiful on several local streets as well as Midland Avenue and even Sheppard.
December 10th, 2009
High on my long list of Spacing posts I’ve not yet had time to make is one on Richard Serra’s “Shift” sculpture. It sits in a field near King City, north of Toronto. As of today I no longer have to make the post because Derek over at BlogTO wrote an excellent piece on it. When Spacing Review’s editor Jessica Duffin Wolfe and I went out to see Shift on a sub-zero Sunday afternoon last February, the future of this crazy-wonderful piece of art was unclear. However, as the Globe reported a few days ago, it’s future may be secure. Derek at BlogTO writes:
“Shift” is challenging in the way that almost all good modern art is. It doesn’t reveal its meaning or its beauty quickly. But given the chance to dwell upon it for a while, it’s impossible not to acknowledge the seamlessness by which it’s incorporated into the landscape. In speaking of his intentions for the installation, Serra reveals that what he “wanted was a dialectic between one’s perception of the place in its totality and one’s relation to the field as walked. The result is a way of measuring oneself against the indeterminacy of the land.”
Though Serra’s work has at times been termed monolithic, nothing could be further from the truth here. Not only is the boundary of “Shift” defined by the “maximum distance two people [can] occupy and still keep each other in view,” but the structure also emphasizes the natural curvature of the terrain, rising and falling in direct proportion to the land itself. Its scale is thus determined by a sort of parallax effect, whereby the most distant reaches of the sculpture blur with the land.
“Shift” is also a profoundly human structure. The maximum height of each shifting wall is five feet and hence at eye-level. At no point does it ever disregard the viewer or the land. But this human quality also extends beyond the formal elements of the sculpture.
Read the rest of his post. We were also in a bit of a daze when we finally found the sculpture. We knew what to expect but when you see it in person it overwhelms and we visited it for an hour or so before walking back to the car. What follows are photos of our journey to see a snow-covered Shift (part of the motivation of this mini-post is that our fingers froze to the point of pain while taking pictures, so they need a full public viewing to make it worthwhile). One question some of our readers may be able to answer: where is Roger Davidson now, the wealthy art collector who first commissioned Shift in 1970? Google searches only pick up mention of him in stories about Shift (proving the only way to hide from Google is to have done things before, say, 1993). Beyond checking the links in BlogTO’s post, pick up a copy of Coach House’s 2007 book Concrete Toronto and read a short essay on Shift by Toronto artist and architect Adrian Blackwell.
October 22nd, 2009
In this week’s Eye Weekly my Psychogeography column is dedicated to wandering the bungalow and skyscraper skyline of Willowdale in North York but with the added bonus that a major art …
October 7th, 2009
The Google Street View of Spadina Avenue at Sullivan Street.
The Toronto Star reported earlier this morning that Google Street View is now live in the Toronto and Hamilton areas. This …
September 4th, 2009
Last spring I was back in hometown Windsor doing what one does in Windsor: drive around. I often will visit old routes and haunts, see what’s changed and what hasn’t, but this time I was tweeting-about-town, uploading pictures and making comments. I took the above picture at one end of the Chrysler Minivan plant and remarked that it was over a kilometer long. I was suddenly struck by it’s sheer size though I had driven by this place for years and didn’t think much of it: it was simply the normal scale of things in Windsor.
At shift change the empty street above would look like Union Station at rush hour with workers trying to cross over to the parking lots. Human critical mass. Once my 1985 Pontaic Sunbird had a flat along here and as I struggled to change the tire the gates opened and the flood of people surrounded me. No offers of help, just askance looks at my GM vehicle. Later when I drove an old beat up 1986 Honda Accord I knew if I broke down along here it would be best to abandon it as I had chosen the wrong car to drive. A common Windsor bumper sticker says “Out of work? Keep driving foreign.” In Windsor, the make of your car says a lot about your allegiances, or at least where you or one of your parents might work.
At some point I tweeted that if this plant landed on Toronto it would cover the financial district. I underestimated. Spacing friend Sean Galbraith saw that tweet and made up a series of maps that superimposed the footprint of some of Ontario’s bigger auto plants on Toronto. In Windsor I had nothing to relate the size of the Minivan plant to — and I always drove by it, further obscuring its vast size — so I was shocked that if located in Toronto it would fill nearly the entire space between Yonge and University, from Front to almost Bloor. As the auto industry winds down and plants close, the amount of space these buildings take up will seem even bigger. Here are a few more plants:
August 18th, 2009
This is part of a series of posts by students in OCAD’s Cities for People summer workshop (click the link to read a bit about what the class was about). This post was researched, photographed and written by Mary-Ellen Simko. More information on the psychogeographic map above at the end of the article.
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History of the Area
Both Alderwood and Long Branch, adjacent neighbourhoods in the southwest corner of Etobicoke, were a part of Colonel Samuel Smith’s land and many of the streets in Alderwood are named after the farmers in the area. The Alderwood name became official in 1933 and was derived from the First nations word “Etobicoke,” meaning “the place were the alders grow.” Long Branch was named after a resort in New Jersey and ferry boats brought thousands of Toronto vacationers each summer to use the cottages, hotels, the boardwalk and amusement rides including a Coney Island Carousel. It became a more accessible community in 1916 when Lake Shore Boulevard was paved and turned Long Branch into a year-round community.
Stats for Ward 6
Alderwood and Long Branch are home to 56,620 people that comprise 26,240 households located in an area approximately 18 square kilometres in size. In 2006 56% of the occupied private dwellings (31% were single-detached houses) were owned while 44% were rented spaces. 72% of these south Etobicoke residents drive to their jobs while 79% took non-work related trips by car. Most of the new immigration to the area has been from Eastern Europe (primarily Poland) with the highest percentage arriving between 1991 - 2000. Ward 6 has an average household income of 69,500 which is lower than the city of Toronto however 20% report having an income over 100,000. The population demographic has increased between the ages 45-64 but decreased for the age group 5-9 however 60% of households have children. (more info here - pdf)
Transit and how to get there
Both communities are serviced by the Lakeshore east/west Go transit line that stops at Long Branch Go Station while north/south Browns Line has an off-ramp from the QEW and 427 highways. TTC tracks have existed along this southern edge of the city since 1912 and the all-night 501 Streetcar connects the western Long Branch loop to the eastern edge of Toronto at the Neville Park loop. Bus routes on Browns Line and Kipling join the neighbourhoods with the Kipling Subway station.
August 12th, 2009
I spent five days last week wandering the streets and interiors of London, day and night (never before 11am though). In my essay in the spring/summer issue of Spacing I discussed this method of wandering in and out of public and public/private grey spaces in my second favorite city to walk in (after Toronto). I did the same this time but with the addition of an iPhone leaving a Twitter-trail behind me (and likely giving the folks at Rogers at least $100 in extra roaming text charges). Robert Sharp, a friend (and Spacing contributor), lives in London and we were hoping to meet up at some point. I didn’t know it, but Robert decided to follow me around the city based on my tweets publicly, using the #stalkingshawn tag, eventually finding me at my hotel bar. What follows is a repost of his detailed account of “Stalking Shawn” that he wrote for his own fine blog (do check it out — also his Twitter feed is here). Apart from the chase, he brings up interesting points about how Twitter relates to geography and perhaps even security (and what Toronto looks like via tweet to somebody who has never visited). I joked to him that I’ll only tweet vague things to avoid further stalking but in reality when I’m moving through a city by the time the tweet goes out I’m no longer there — sometimes even the time it takes to write a sentence on foot renders it no longer “present,” but sentences have a hard time changing tense mid way through. And Twitter seems particularly well suited to behaving like a traveller’s public notebook. Now, on to Robert’s post:
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Many landlubbers love the shipping forecast on the radio. The cryptic figures for wind speed and precipitation are soothing and mantra-like, and provide a comforting and consistent start to the day for thousands of listeners who have no idea what they mean.
Online, I find the tweets of my friend Shawn Micallef fulfill a similar function. Amid the constant bombardment of political messages, there is Shawn, always Shawn, with his relentless observations of Toronto psychogeography:
3.55 AM: Streetcar east/gerrard India bazarr/who will write the epic novel of the Lahore Tikka House construction saga
7.55 AM East of Coxwell/streetcarsound/run through alleys + lots to meet/discover it is short turn/TTC most untrustworthy of allies
I know what the individual words mean, but the place he is describing is an utter unknown. I have never visited Toronto, and without that context, the place names are a mystery. I conjure up quite literal interpretations of what each street might look like, or what the acronyms might stand for. And whenever he mentions Spadina, I think of spandex.
How strange, then, to discover that Shawn is in the UK, and tweeting about London. It is also a city of ridiculous and inappropriate names (Hackney Wick, Angel, India Quays, New Cross Gate, Forest Hill, High Holborn), only now Shawn’s nibble-sized thoughts are suddenly contextualised, and I can visualise exactly where he is walking, almost trace his steps.
And that thought, “I can almost trace his stepsâ€, is what occurred to me on Friday evening. Alone and listless in South East London, I decided to do something weird. I decided to use twitter to re-trace Shawn’s steps. I decided to… Stalk Shawn. His regular twitter updates would act as electronic breadcrumbs. Could they lead me, in the dark, through a city of seven-and-a-half million people and 660 square miles, to a specific, bespectacled Canadian flà¢neur? My own twitter updates are here with a map of London: scroll through to relive the chase.
@Spacing Right, I have a plan for my evening. It’s called #stalkingshawn 9:03 PM Jul 31st
@Spacing I’ve blocked him so he’s not following me anymore. #stalkingshawn 9:13 PM Jul 31st
This step was crucial. Since Shawn follows my own tweets, I wouldn’t be able to commentate via the #stalkingshawn tag if he was following me. So I blocked him, then refollowed him myself unilaterally.
August 9th, 2009
In Today’s Toronto Star Insight section I have an essay on Sunnyside. It’s accompanied by some nice photos by the Star’s Keith Beaty that are not online (only the one above is), so …
July 14th, 2009
This is part of a series of posts by students in OCAD’s Cities for People summer workshop (click the link to read a bit about what the class was about). This Main Square post was researched and written by Michael Caton and C. Pete.
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Main Square is located at the TTC hub of Main and Danforth. It is a 3 min walk from Main Subway station and the Danforth GO station, and has several bus and streetcar stops within a short hop. Main Square was built in 1972 as a partnership between CMHC (Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp.), a government entity, and a private company. It was envisioned to be integrated housing similar to the St. Lawrence Market neighbourhood. CMHC manages the renowned Granville Island in British Columbia as well as many other neighbourhood enterprises that encourage integrated and creative communities, supporting artists and diverse incomes.
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Currently, streetcars and buses run up and down Main St. In 1923, streetcars also ran East and West along Danforth.
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The corner of Main and Danforth, viewed from within Main Square. This intersection is a TTC hub, with various bus routes, and the Main St. subway station just a few steps up Main St.
In 1998 CMHC sold out their share in Main Square and the buildings were bought buy Talisker Corporation, a private enterprise. It appears that CMHC may have pulled out due to the quality of the buildings, perhaps due to the incredibly high power needs that may exceed normal conditions. Apparently the sale went with a mandate that a certain percentage of subsidized units must be available. Unfortunately, most of the relevant documents are housed in Ottawa.
