1982 Flashback: Margaret Atwood on Toronto

Found deep in the electronic archives of the New York Times is this long 1982 travel article on Toronto by Margaret Atwood. It’s got the usual travel-article elements — where to shop, eat, play — and while interesting to see what still exists twenty-five years later (lots, it seems) she weaves in a narrative about her own rediscovery of Toronto. While writing about her newfound love of the city, and indicating the city was beginning to love itself (after the warm glow of the Crombie years no doubt), she takes an imaginary tourist through Toronto. Read the whole thing, but here are some nice passages:

W hen I was growing up in Toronto as a child, in the 1940’s, I loathed it. I associated it with standing in the slush with dampness seeping through my boots, itchy bloomers, gray muggy skies, old ladies who hit your knuckles with the metal edge of the ruler if you didn’t know the words to ”Rule, Britannia.” Later, when I was in high school, I liked Toronto a little better, though not much. There did not seem to be a great deal to do, apart from sock hops, smoking in the washrooms and avoiding the appearance of being too interested in frog dissection. As for university, it produces angst in the best of us, and I was probably wrong to attribute mine specially to Toronto. Nevertheless, I did.

—

In 1961, I shook the clay of Toronto from my feet, forever I thought, and except for a few interludes that were even more emotionally grotesque than fourth grade, I did not return for 10 years. In the interval, strange things happened, and not only to me. By the time I moved back, a decision that had everything to do with money, Toronto had changed. People were actually admitting that they lived there. Not only that, people in other locations, such as Detroit, were calling it the ”Paris of the Northeast.” After a while I stopped turning my head to see if they were talking to someone else and started trying to find out what they saw in the place. ”It’s so clean,” they would say, starry-eyed. ”So safe. The people are so friendly.” I had my doubts: surely a city ought to have more to offer than well-used litter bins, telephone operators who pass the time of day and the possibility of taking an evening walk without getting knifed.

—

Toronto is in fact a good place to wander around in, if you have the time and aren’t after any grandiose effects. Having resisted, through the citizens’ action groups that Toronto excells in forming, various attempts to blast it apart with a freeway and to convert its city-center residential blocks into parking lots and 70-story office buildings, it still has what is known as a ”liveable downtown.” Those red-brick 19th-century row houses, those rambling Rosedale mansions I found so grim and dreary as a child are now considered quaint or even ”trendy,” and many have been restored. (”Bin City” is another new name for Toronto, derived from the bins – New Yorkers call them dumpsters – that sit on lawns during renovations.) .

—

The newest strollers’ paradise in Toronto is Queen Street, once known for its large population of drifters and alcoholics, and recently revived, sort of. It’s no Yorkville, but that’s part of its charm: it still has bargains. Some prefer Queen East, but I’m more familiar with Queen West. Try it from, say, University Avenue west to Spadina (though if you want to hit Dufflet’s, vendor of spectacular and reasonably priced take-home desserts, you’ll have to go a little farther). There’s a cluster of good small restaurants, from the Peter Pan, home of generous helpings, to the Parrot, where they make vegetarian food that actually tastes good, to modest French restaurants like Le Select and La Folie. (Torontonians eat more lunch, I’m convinced, than anyone in the world, and many of them seem to eat it around here.) Farther east, around King and Bay, it’s Businessland, epitomized by Winston’s, which has been called ”the Canadian Establishment’s day-care center,” but Queen is more casual and various.

Photo by Roger Cullman.