Dylan Reid based his latest NOW article, No place to meet, on the 64 comments made to his recent Spacing wire post, in which he asked: “if you had to meet someone in Toronto, but hadn’t arranged a place and could’t contact them in advance, where would you go?” What he discovered was that Toronto lacks a convenient, friendly, and universal meeting place. Though many options were given, it seems that none are suitable for both Torontonians and out of towners, and some spots are just downright aesthetically unpleasing.
I wanna be NYC, by Mike Smith, also appears in this week’s NOW. Smith suggests that in comparison to New York City, Toronto is just a baby. From its density, to its community boards, to its dearth of “dead zonesâ€, New York provides a picture of how much room Toronto has to grow.
Our last day here, I’m standing in front of the 5 Pointz building (not affiliated with the 5 Points neighbourhood) in Long Island City (not on Long Island), a warehouse-complex-turned- artists’-studio covered in graffiti murals.
It’s nothing short of erotic. I find I’m crying. It’s not just the beauty; it’s not even the proud display, outshining the tenuous hate-the-sin, love-the-sinner relationship Toronto has with street art. It’s the fact that it’s both New York’s blessing and blind eye that means this can exist. It’s like the first time I made love, losing youth and taking final ownership of my body. I see the admission written on every inch: we are citizens, this is our home, this is our second skin, this is where we are, this is what we are. I feel a sense of mourning as well. Love for a city may be a doomed love. Anything that seeks to turn earth into concrete may truly not be long for this world. But this is what we are right now, right here.
New York has never claimed to be anything but a metropolis — huge, filthy, stinking and loud. I think, with sadness and hope, of home, still deciding whether or not it’s going to come out and be, really be, a city.
Of course, we really have no choice. But then let us make the choice, and not have it made for us. Let’s own the accident.
photo by Mike Smith, NOW
7 comments
I’m in complete agreement regarding Toronto’s need to relax about many things, and accept we’re a big metropolis, tall buildings and etc. Comparisons with a place like NYC make me nervous though because it implies we’re not allowed to become a big city on our own terms. For every wonderful thing in NY there’s a heart breaking thing, some part of the city that is a broken human community. So far, Toronto’s advance towards world city has been softer, and I think we can continue on in this direction, taking good ideas from other cities, and avoiding some of their mistakes.
I couldn’t believe this tedious, “grass-is-greener” article was published in the first place, let alone linked to. Yeah, we get it, we’re not like New York. Let’s move the discussion forward (as Shawn has above) and begin asking why we’re not like New York, what makes us unique, and how we can build on that to not end up some second rate carbon copy.
I protest: Long Island City is indeed on Long Island, just not IN Long Island.
Many people who grew up in Queens and Brooklyn see life through the subway map, which doesn’t include Long Island, so many of them don’t even realize they are connected to the same landmass.
Otherwise I actually enjoyed the article quite a bit.
What you’re paying for when you pay New York’s high cost of living is high quality public life. Excellent parks, squares, plazas, pedestrian amenities, markets, gathering places, benches, subway, and soon, toilets!
New York is consistently rated the city most Americans would like to live near, and thank the gods most of them can’t.
New York can have a profound psychological effect on a visitor because the city is wrapped up so heavily in myth. No city, other than maybe Paris or London, can lay claim to having fertilized so much raw talent and beauty. The city is immortalized in countless great novels, fine paintings and hip hop songs. In fact, when I take pictures in New York I can’t help but admire them more than pictures I take in other cities because, perhaps, I imagine myself as a latter day Andreas Feininger or Wegee even though I’m using a digital camera and don’t know the first thing about light metering. In many ways, it is impossible not to get swept away by the city’s fable and that, I’m afraid, is what happened to the writer of this article. While there are some really exciting sentences in his writing, the piece is really jejune and hardly objective. We will never compete with the New York myth, even if we build the most glittering skyscrapers and keep our parks neat and trim – nor should we.
I used to live there and I can tell you, this feeling about being on the top of the world, really has turned New York into a rigid, self-approving and stubborn place. How NY handles garbage is a really good example: while we have been critical of ourselves enough to make the baby steps into full-scale recycling and a green bin program, New Yorkers routinely trash aluminum cans and plastic bottles even though they pay a staggering $257 a ton to truck their garbage to out-of-state landfills.
leonard> I think that’s exactly it. The myth of New York is intoxicating and everybody knows about it — my mom, who hasn’t a punk bone in her body, could hear mention of the “lower east side” and have an idea that “that is where the punks came from.” NY’s myth has trickled into every corner of the the world. It colonized the world through culture the way London colonized it via empire.
This article is also an example of tourist-syndrome — where the place you’re visiting intoxicates you, and suddenly everything pales in comparison, especially your home. I get this feeling in Montreal sometimes when i visit. Same with Chicago, London, Paris (though only a little – what a boring beautiful museum/mausoleum of a town) and even Los Angeles — and when I return home get a little down on Toronto for not having “this or that” thing I saw elsewhere.
But it’s a fleeting condition, because the sum of Toronto’s parts are, I think, incomparable. But you can’t easily describe the sum-of-parts, or market it — but it asserts itself in so many ways when you return from other cities. Like finding out a friend in NY who makes $110G still must live in a tiny box in Manhattan, much smaller than what the most hardup artist friends can afford in Toronto — yet both have about as much access to culture and excitement, but getting it is easier in TO. Or getting jealous of Chicago’s buildings, but then driving for an hour through the south side, where that scale of broken city does not exist anywhere in Toronto, or even 1% it.
I’ve also noticed though that as Toronto’s goodness has, in the last couple years, become a little less subtle, my enthusiasm for other cities is starting to compete with my homesickness for Toronto when I’m visiting. I used to think I’d want to live other places too, now I just want to visit those places.
I’d rather these articles just describe what it’s like in other cities, how they do things. Dragging the comparison back to Toronto is problematic for so many reasons.
^Totally Shawn,
Like I mentioned in the last paragraph, one of the things I really like about Toronto versus New York is that we aren’t obstinate but very self-critical, and that can only be a good thing for a growing city. This magazine and website is a good example: we don’t rag on Toronto because we think it’s an awful place, but because we wish it would perform better in those chosen areas where it sort of lacks compared with what the rest of the city has to offer.
I also have a knack of traveling to a foreign place and finding fragments of Toronto. So, I end up in Camden Town or Williamsburgh because it reminds me of Kensington Market, or Brixton and the 20th Arrondissement because it reminds me of Bloorcourt Village.
Hi. Mike here. Y’know, this is exactly what I expected to hear. And what I told myself as I submitted it. Valuable comments all.
I glossed over the nasty bits. I regret this sorely, but newspapers only have so much real estate, and I made a call to focus on the density issue, especially given what’s going on in Toronto right now – development is really going to hurt us unless we take ownership of it as communities. My experience in NYC only underlined this, and that’s where I focused.
Cavalier? Well, maybe… but calling the piece “unobjective” seems a bit strange. It’s a travelogue – I can’t be objective about my own emotions 🙂 But I think calling it jejune is straight up unfair. Most of the time I was in NYC I was thinking about city planning, and what lessons there are to be learned – both in terms of things to emulate and things to avoid. If you don’t agree with what I wrote, cool. But I don’think that necessitates pejoratives.
Traffic in NYC is horrid, and I saw maybe two bike lanes my entire time there, and very few bike racks. The city as a whole is enamoured with capitalism and itself, and the parochialism that seems to flourish in the boroughs can be a bit off-putting. But what point in printing that? We already know bikes are important here, and we tend to eschew regionalism. And we all know about big scary New York. I was taken with the multiple little friendly New Yorks.
The myth never worked on me. I’ve always been somewhat terrified of the place, having visited before as a youngster, and having become acquainted with its history of corruption, blockbusting and spotty race relations. So my recent trip was more a revelation than a consummation of a relationship with some long-loved myth.
There are a whole hell of a lot of people there, and a lot of them are there because they really and truly like it on its own merits.
I was as much motivated by a love of Toronto as by a crush on New York. But genuine thanks for the reality check; the place does tend to swell everyone’s head at least a bit, regardless of origin.
Oh and Leonard, I know what you mean – there’s a spot where Tompkins Square Park really looks like Allan Gardens.