Once again Spacing is pleased to be a part of Toronto Public Library’s Keep Toronto Reading program. This April the library hopes the whole city will join in reading Austin Clarke’s 2009 Toronto Book Award winner, More, a novel that has inner-city Toronto as its very backbone. Throughout the month, Spacing Toronto will present a series of posts exploring the book and its relationship to our city.
(Queen St., Eastern Ave. and Kingston Rd., formerly the Greenwood Raceway)
From Austin Clarke’s More:
“When I fry-up these six trout fishes, you going to see something girl! As a matter of fact, the two o’ wunnuh going taste something! I frying them in olive oil, with a lil white sugar sprinkle-over them, some lime juice, and Jesus Christ…”
“You went to the Kensington Market?” she asked him
“A hundred! One hundred dollars I win today at the races,” he said, touching the fish; and replacing them in a line when they squiggled for their short freedom on the slippery table. (pg. 45)
At the races, he was a different man. He walked in dressed like a racing steward, or a horse owner, with a folded copy of the Toronto Star in the side pocked of his sports jacket, and in the other pocket a copy of the Racing Form, where the horoscopes of horses were printed, along with the program for the day.
[…]
In those days Bertram went to the track the whole day, every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. He “passed-round just to see how things were” on the other days of the week, sneaking off from work to “place one bet on one race.”
He had a temporary job, a seven-to-six job, six days a week, delivering advertising brochures. “That man spends all his time, losing every penny…” she said this every Friday night and every Saturday night, and repeated it every Sunday night, to herself. His betting and losing sucked the energy she needed to concentrate on her Bible reading, on her textbook on Nursing, and on choosing her dress to wear to church… (pp. 84-86)
Before coming to Canada, Bertram was a mechanic’s apprentice who spent his off-time at Bridgetown’s Garrison Savannah (not to be confused with Toronto’s own Garrison Commons track, which operated in the 1820s). Idora’s mother urges her to go to leave Barbados to get a job, to better herself, but also to “shake off the dust of that crook Bertram, especially. Escape from Bertram.” (67). But Bertram follows Idora, and brings with him his mad love of horse racing, an obsession that leaves him unemployed and penniless. It was “twenty years ago” from the novel’s present that Idora went to the bank and found that “that man” had finally drained her saving’s account. I couldn’t help but wonder if this coincided with the 1987 legalization of Sunday racing.
Toronto has had racetracks for longer than it has been a city, but by the time Bertram arrived here only Greenwood, located between Coxwell and Woodbine in the east end, was still in operation.
Greenwood Raceway, originally called Woodbine Race Course, opened for thoroughbred racing in the 1870s (although betting on horses was not legalized until 1886), and had its last race in 1993. Today, Torontonians looking to bet on-site must visit the revamped Woodbine Entertainment Complex in Rexdale (Etobicoke).
I do not have any mapping skills, but I do have MS Paint, and the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame. Here are (very approximately) the locations of Toronto’s historical racetracks, with Greenwood in red:
Photo by Lone Primate.
Map data taken from the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame.
Fun facts about horse racing in Canada available through the Ontario Racing Commission and Heritage Toronto.
Spacing is reading More as part of TPL’s Keep Toronto Reading.