This week’s stroll column in Eye Weekly had me wandering up and down the Yonge Street Strip, and was written before hearing about the closing of Sam the Record Man:
In late high school, circa 1992, four of us from Windsor got into a Dodge Shadow and drove up the 401 to Toronto for our first real road trip. We didn’t know much about Toronto other than the tourist places like the CN Tower or Casa Loma — neighbourhood names like the Annex, Rosedale or even Kensington Market had only a faint ring of familiarity — but we knew the first place we had to go was the Yonge Street strip. We parked, we walked back and forth, and eventually got served drinks at the second-floor bar, staring in awe across the street into the giant rotating neon discs of Sam the Record Man. We were in the promised land.
Yonge Street really deserves a whole book about it.
9 comments
Like the classic “Yonge Street!” shouts of joy in the “Garth and Gord and Fiona and Alice” SCTV movie.
Yonge Street is an awful, dingy ugly strip right in the middle of Toronto. It’s unbelievable that City Hall and that Torontonians have allowed this street to look as crappy as it does for so long. We are surrounded by so much ugliness in this city, that we don’t even see.
It’s not cool, it’s embarrassing that Toronto has such low standards for urban design and architecture. I can’t think of a world-class city whose main street is in such a state of decay.
LB> Dudes like you have been down on Yonge Street for 40 years. The archives are full of older version of your exact statement — yet the people still are drawn to this street, and cities need streets like this.
AND the more I travel the more I figure out that every “world class” city has at least one major Yonge street — it’s just the postcards don’t show it, and if you judge cities on those postcard places of course Toronto, a city you know intimately, will pale.
I will give you $8 if you show me a city (a proper, free, democratic city — not some awful fascist Singapore or Dubai) that doesn’t have a Yonge street. Actually I’ll give you $16 if you can, but I’m certain you can’t.
I love Yonge Street’s tawdry glitter — the book stores, sex parlours (no, Mom, I don’t frequent them), dubious restaurants, discount jewelery. It’s an authentic part of Toronto, and to me resonates far more clearly than the sterile redevelopments and Yonge-Dundas Square. When kids come to Toronto, this is where they go to get their bearings.
Sean — why don’t you write the book about Yonge Street? I can dig up a bunch of literary references for you.
A book is in the plan, yes — exact focus is unclear yet.
Yonge Street is perfect the way it is. It is tawdy, dirty, messy, crowded and decidedly not the boring boutique sterile feel that have overwhelmed the Annex, Danforth or the Beaches. It the only part of the central city that isn’t constantly sprucing itself up for tourists and the wealthy. Keep Yonge St. for real Torontonians.
Yonge Street is ugly and not what the tourist board wants to show off. It is a more true version of city life than some boutique sections of the city. It makes people from whitebread towns nervous. It is the sort of street that Jane Jacobs described as organic, and you won’t often find in the ‘burbs. The secret to Yonge Street, is the secret difference between urban life and non-urban life: classes mix, by choice or necessity. People who live outside of the boundaries of Parliament, Roncessvales and Dupont (fine, there are a few exceptional areas) have probably located there to avoid people of social classes considered lower than their own.
And by the way, two books have been written on Yonge Street: The Yonge Street Story and Opportunity Road: Yonge Street.
Well then Toronto must be one of the most authentic of cities in the world! Most of our streets — not just Yonge — are either decaying, decrepit strips of cheap stores, restaurants, and ugly, neglected buildings or sterile, cold concrete disasters.
Cities all over the world are busy beautifying themselves in a never-ending struggle to remain (for lack of a better word) “world-class.” In the meantime “Beauty” remains an ugly word in Toronto.
Most sophisticated cities  New York, Chicago, Paris, Barcelona, Prague, Budapest, London  devote considerable time and effort to beauty. Respected planner Joe Berridge recently wrote about the work he did in Manchester, a grimy birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and a community not known as a hotbed of urban beauty in the Toronto Society of Architects newsletter. Manchester is busy turning itself into “Barcelona without the Mediterranean.”
Manchester has become a beautiful city,” Berridge writes, “because they devote the senior management resources to that end. The mayor and the chief executive sit on every design panel and personally award every important design commission, directing all significant design decisions. Neither is an architect, but both know instinctively that good architecture and public design are the essence of urban success. If designers can produce a remarkable piece of work, somehow the city bureaucracy will find the money and the approvals. The civic political and executive leadership devotes its energies to managing the city’s future.”
The fact that we celebrate a street as ugly and tacky as Yonge is a testament to the provincial, complacent, mediocre mindset of a city which has no aspiration, ambition or desire to compete on an international level.
A city of beauty would be a joy and an inspiration for everyone. If anyone should be setting the standards much, much higher it should be our writers, journalists, and politicians. But they stubbornly insist on celebrating and defending the tacky, the ordinary, the cheap, the mediocre and the mundane. Like on this blog.
It’s a true shame.