Brigitte Pellerin is a writer and newspaper columnist living in Ottawa. This memoir introduces the new issue of Spacing focused on Yonge Street, available shortly at the Spacing Store and other outlets, and in the mail to subscribers.
No way was I going to take the subway. The train from Montreal spat me out at Union Station on a beautiful summer afternoon in 1998. It was my first visit to Toronto. I was going to walk.
I’d recently been hired to work on a political documentary, researching projects in Montreal and Quebec City — yes, remote work was a thing even in the 20th century. The whole team would meet periodically in Toronto. I was 27 years old, and this was my first gig working in English. I was nervous, of course. Excited, too.
I was staying at what was then the Primrose Hotel, at Carlton and Jarvis, about a half-hour walk from the waterfront. That hotel is now a student residence. Maybe the ghosts of my past anxieties are haunting Toronto Metropolitan University students to this day.
I came out of Union and headed past the impressive Royal York Hotel on the other side of the street and the Dominion Public Building to the station’s immediate right, pausing in front of the Hummingbird Centre, with its massive bird on the façade. Since 2019, this concert venue has been known as Meridian Hall, and I’m sad the green hummingbird is no more.
At least I can count on the Hockey Hall of Fame on the north-west corner of Yonge and Front never to change. Incidentally, seeing signage in my language outside that building on that first trip to Toronto was where I realized there was more French in Toronto than I thought. By which I mean there was some. And more friendliness towards members of the other solitude than my upbringing in Quebec’s francophone public school system intimated.
Still, for a Québécoise who’d taught herself English reading Stephen King novels and going to the lone theatre in Quebec City that showed American movies in their original language, that street corner was a foreboding gateway, impressive and a little scary.
Nobody in my family had tried what I was preparing myself to do: crossing into a parallel world in which I would make a career in English. Working, as a writer, in my second language. I guess I wasn’t happy just to try and make it as an artist, I had to add an extra layer of difficulty from the get-go.
I’d heard Yonge was the equivalent of Montreal’s rue Sainte-Catherine; you can find anything there. I chose to begin my Toronto exploration with it. When you look north from Front St., Yonge appears endless. This felt like a sign. If you take that road, I told myself, there’s no telling where it’ll end. Are you sure you’re ready?
Of course I wasn’t. I went anyway.
I encountered a world that was both similar to and different from my own. Even though you did hear French sometimes (and other languages besides), Toronto in the late 1990s was overwhelmingly English. I’d never lived in that language. But people are people everywhere; if you treat them well, they’ll welcome you.
The offices where I was working were on Bay Street, near the spot in Yorkville where the first Whole Foods would eventually take up residence, and I made a point of walking there from my hotel, occasionally tripping over the now-defunct World’s Biggest Bookstore near the Eaton Centre.
It can be hard to remember a time before all the condo towers, when not every building was tall. Also? Walking up Yonge from that same Union Station today, I am struck by how much tidier the place looks. It’s still loud and a bit garish, but the trash, cigarette butts and food wrappers that used to litter the sidewalk have been swept away.
Many storefronts have changed, of course. And at the risk of alienating half the population of the Big Smoke, I was among the rare people not to bemoan the disappearance of Sam the Record Man. I never understood the appeal of the place. Other than to say you’d been there, what was the point? I could never find anything I wanted to buy.
That first walk up Yonge Street paid off, in case you’re wondering. About half the books I’ve published are in English. I have worked as a print and broadcast journalist in both official languages. I’m equally comfortable in either. It makes sense that I ended up in Ottawa, on the border between the languages.
Toronto no longer intimidates me. It does sometimes frustrate me, especially when I’m trying to get through it and neither the 401 nor the Gardiner will let me. But daunted? Never.
Crossing that gateway wasn’t quick or easy. But I am very glad I did it.
