{"id":1338,"date":"2006-11-18T16:25:11","date_gmt":"2006-11-18T20:25:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/?p=1338"},"modified":"2013-01-21T13:05:09","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T18:05:09","slug":"the-kids-are-alright","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2006\/11\/18\/the-kids-are-alright\/","title":{"rendered":"The Kids are Alright"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" align=\"top\" src=\"http:\/\/www.toronto.ca\/archives\/images\/f1408_it010wyldafterfire.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p><em>(Image of the Wyld-Darling building on Bay Street, after the 1904 fire &#8212; via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.toronto.ca\/archives\/firecompanies.htm\">Toronto Archives<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>John Barber&#8217;s Globe column today, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theglobeandmail.com\/servlet\/story\/LAC.20061118.BARBER18\/TPStory\/National\/columnists\">A city in decline? Truth be told, Toronto&#8217;s on a roll<\/a>,  is like civic prozac after a few months of hearing why Toronto is so crappy from various candidates. He suggests that &#8220;<em>one reason there are so many urban myths &#8212; as opposed to the rural or small-town variety &#8212; is that urbanites are neurotic and suggestible. The longer the good times roll, the more acutely the average Torontonian senses impending catastrophe<\/em>.&#8221; Toronto was never supposed to be great, so maybe some of us are just uncomfortable when the city is just that.<\/p>\n<p>Of the myths he &#8220;busts,&#8221; three are particularly interesting:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Toronto is ugly. First, get out of the car. Second, open your eyes. Third, walk around. St. James Town would be a good place to start, because it perfectly embodies the urban-decorator idea of ugly. Not until it is gentrified will such judges recognize St. James Town as the monument it is: one of the largest, most radical and ultimately successful examples of high-density modernism, straight out of Le Corbusier, ever attempted outside Hong Kong. But by then the neighbourhood will have lost the soul it gained as an overcrowded immigrant reception centre, and it will be less attractive. So go now.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>During the 1960s, Toronto realized it had a wonderful victorian heritage to celebrate and preserve &#8212; I think we&#8217;re slowly realizing the extent of Toronto Modernism is worth that interest too. Barber writes nice about St. James Town here (I often wonder if people who use St. James Town as their modernist\/highrise scapegoat have ever actually walked through it). I would add Thorncliffe Park as another place to check out. We often keep an archetypal form of what a beautiful city should look like in our heads (either of the Parisian or New York variety, depending on your preference for the tall and phallic or the short and ornate kind of beauty) &#8212; but Toronto is a jumble and mix of all kinds of styles and heights (kind of like the people who live here) and we pull it off on a much grander scale than anywhere else. In the last year, whispers of appreciation of this Toronto style could be heard in corners of the city, and I&#8217;m sure they&#8217;ll only grow louder.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Just what we need &#8212; more condos. But we do! Toronto&#8217;s condo boom is spectacular. If it keeps up, there won&#8217;t be a surface parking lot left in the central city. The streets will be alive with sidewalk traffic at all hours of day and night, and employers will follow the crowd. There&#8217;s enormous vitality looming in those cranes, and plenty more terrain to devour, both on the waterfront and in the suburbs. Bring &#8217;em on!<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I also don&#8217;t understand how the word or idea of &#8220;condo&#8221; has become some kind of bad word. It&#8217;s overheard all the time, just as Barber puts it: &#8220;Guess what? More condos.&#8221; Where are people supposed to live who might not want to rent for the entire lives? Condos are also the reason the rental market right now is not horrible and crazy like it was in 2000 when I first had to look for a place in this city. The real conversation should be about good design and making condo&#8217;s fit in with existing neighbourhoods, conversations groups like <a href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/wp-admin\/www.active18.org\/\">Active 18<\/a> are willing to engage in.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Scarborough is a cultural wasteland. <\/em><em>Au contraire; it is the centre of the universe as we will soon come to know it. Scarborough is the birthplace of a disproportionate share of culturally important Torontonians, it is a multicultural experiment of world-historical scale and a food paradise. Without constant eruptions of new talent and new ideas from melting pots as rich as Scarborough, along with the rest of the suburban ring, Toronto&#8217;s cultural life would be paltry. But it isn&#8217;t.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Scarborough is hard to get too and hard to get around in, so these lazy opinions can trickle in &#8212; just like people who comment on St. James Town, or hold opinions on any neighbourhood based not-entirely-on-fact-or-experience (as we&#8217;ve discussed in the <a href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=1328#comments\">comments on Cariboo Avenue<\/a>) but on urban myth. Spend time out there, and one quickly finds this isn&#8217;t the case. And like Barber says, the multicultural Toronto we celebrate is largely thanks to places outside the core.<br \/>\n<em><br \/>\n<\/em><font size=\"-2\" face=\"Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif\"> <\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(Image of the Wyld-Darling building on Bay Street, after the 1904 fire &#8212; via Toronto Archives) John Barber&#8217;s Globe column today, A city in decline? Truth be told, Toronto&#8217;s on a roll, is like civic prozac after a few months of hearing why Toronto is so crappy from various candidates. He suggests that &#8220;one reason<a href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2006\/11\/18\/the-kids-are-alright\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"sr-only\">&#8220;The Kids are Alright&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[22,21758,20],"tags":[28,3889,3885,1694,469,3886,89,3887,19,3888],"class_list":["post-1338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-community","category-urban-design","tag-behaviour","tag-food-paradise","tag-james-town","tag-john-barber","tag-new-york","tag-parisian","tag-scarborough","tag-the-kids-are-alright","tag-toronto","tag-wyld-darling-building"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Kids are Alright - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2006\/11\/18\/the-kids-are-alright\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Kids are Alright - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"(Image of the Wyld-Darling building on Bay Street, after the 1904 fire &#8212; via Toronto Archives) John Barber&#8217;s Globe column today, A city in decline? Truth be told, Toronto&#8217;s on a roll, is like civic prozac after a few months of hearing why Toronto is so crappy from various candidates. 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