Obscenity on the streets — spring days in Toronto

The following is a reprint of my recent Psychogeography column in Eye Weekly. Inspired by the unseasonably early warm Easter Weekend, the column was immediately obsolete as Toronto chilled out in the following days. Warm again now, Toronto is blooming. Long time Spacing readers will recognize the Leonard Cohen quote, but being so perfect, it deserved to start another spring.

Out in the wilderness, spring comes slowly and gently: the buds and bulbs take their time appearing and sprouting up. But here in the city, spring hits fast and hard. The first warm day can, in mere hours, radically transform Toronto. Sidewalks will flood with people. Patios will overpopulate. People on major streets wear shirts that expose their bellies. Legs and arms and ankles and wrists, unseen for months, are freed of their wrappers and appear naked across the city. The shock of all that exposed flesh is nearly obscene when seen all at once. The winter makes Victorian levels of clothing seem normal and, for a brief period, we might feel like prudes, eyeing all that skin a little too much.

Each year at this time — that first day when the city buds — I’m reminded of a few lines from Leonard Cohen’s 1966 novel Beautiful Losers: “In Montreal spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth. Girls rip off their sleeves and the flesh is sweet and white, like wood under green bark. From the streets a sexual manifesto rises like an inflating tire, ‘the winter has not killed us again!’”

This winter didn’t try very hard to kill us. It was a friend to both the city’s snow-removal budget and leather-bottomed shoes alike. It’s a shame, because we are a Canadian city and we deserve real blizzards at least three or four or five times a year, with snow that lasts and schools that close and streets that are impassable. This past year there was more (fake) snow in Toronto during the filming of the Scott Pilgrim movie last spring than the real stuff later on.

The upside of this crummy fake-winter is that it was the first year I didn’t stop riding my bike all year long. Except for the few snow days, the city was as easy to get around in as it is during summer and I discovered the reputation of the cold has been greatly exaggerated. Once you start rolling and generating heat, it can be warmer than walking. The downside of a fake-winter is that it risks making these first few spring-summer moments bland, like Florida weather that usually doesn’t change enough for anybody to take notice.

Contrast with winter is what makes the summer great. Will we get that full rush of smells and sounds that the first warm days provide, when windows are open and kids are out and the Sesame Street urbanity unfolds block by block? Will our bodies feel as super-light and naked as they should the first time outside without a jacket if the jackets we wore over winter weren’t as heavy as usual?

Despite the risk, Toronto seemed to embrace its public spaces with passion this past holiday weekend. Montreal used to do Leonard Cohen-style public sexual manifestos better and more naturally than Toronto, but this city has nearly caught up. We may not yet make as much eye contact as Montrealers, but we take to the streets whenever possible.

People were talking about the weather everywhere (I can’t recall any news happening other than the temperature). Not the routine office chats that kill time but rather statements of pure joy. Nobody questioned if this crazy warmth was just the weather or, rather, part of some more sinister pattern. (Not even Earth Hour the previous week was enough of a downer on the sunny weekend.) Which makes me wonder, do we all become climate-change deniers — or, at least, “topic avoiders” — when the Canadian winter is over? Maybe it’s OK to take a weekend off from worrying about the future. Maybe this is what The Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente feels like every day.

Across the city, Torontonians behaved as if the streets were their living room, a kind of en masse expression of our need, love and desire for public spaces. It was rare to see a park bench unoccupied. All the people who didn’t ride through winter were on their bikes and the bike lanes were more crowded than the car lanes at times (and so many crazy-stupid riders riding without helmets). The Don Valley paths felt more like the adjacent DVP does during rush hour. BBQs at Cherry Beach were fired up. Fistfights broke out on the overcrowded and under-serviced Toronto Island ferry. In Trinity-Bellwoods Park, the lawn had hundreds of people on it. Some of the hipsters took off their shirts without irony, their thin pasty skin wrapped around pointy bones and rib cages, their unfortunate tattoos visible.

This past fine weekend overlapped with a civic debate over the future of the privately owned Yonge and Eglinton Square, also known as the “Pickle Barrel Square” due to the well-placed marquee of said restaurant above the expanse of concrete on the northwest corner of that intersection. Rio Can, the owners of the square and the two buildings that frame it, are planning on putting in a retail mall there, extending the buildings to the sidewalk.

My feelings are mixed on this proposal: while I like public spaces and squares, this one isn’t very good in its current state, and the two towers there now are bad examples of modernism. Developing the square might hide them (the same way a super-tall tower on the southeast corner of Yonge and Bloor would divert attention from the ugly CIBC and The Bay buildings). Can this place be improved through design, is the question.

As it is, supporters of the square may be overstating its greatness (it always seems more like a place to pass through than linger) but the attention and desire for public space is the most exciting part. Here is Toronto asking for places where, when the weather is right, sexual manifestos can be played out. Whether or not the square stays a square, this desire is good and should be extended to all parts of Toronto.

Photo by x3nomik.