![\"John](\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/feature-lorinc.gif\")
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Not for the first time, and certainly not the last, I came across a family of tourists in the subway the other day, trying to figure out how to get to Casa Loma \u2014 Toronto\u2019s second best known landmark and arguably the one whose location is most likely to confound a visitor with a guidebook.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t ask, but there\u2019s a good chance these people were in town for the Pan Am\/Parapan Games, which are set to begin Friday.<\/p>\n
It should be a red letter day for the Centre of the Known Universe: after almost two decades of trying, we will finally get a chance to strut our stuff on the world stage, or at least the hemispheric stage.<\/p>\n
At such sought-after sports extravaganzas, it often seems that organizers and civic officials are at least as interested in the impression they convey to the international media as they are with welcoming the athletes. Consequently, the city\u2019s well-documented self-involvement will re-surface: how do others see us, and what is the story we have to tell?<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re in the destination marketing business, and are pondering the question of what all those hordes of Pan Am tourists should do when they\u2019re not taking in the events, you may find yourself thinking, with relief, about the new Ripley\u2019s Aquarium, the upbeat reviews for Kinky Boots, or the cool cultural sophistication of the Aga Khan Museum. After a long dry spell, we\u2019ve replenished our attraction \u201cinventory,\u201d as they say in the tourist business.<\/p>\n
There are, of course, the restaurants and the museums, the waterfront parks and the cultural attractions, as well as the groovy neighbourhoods that warrant a shout out in the tourist guides \u2014 Kensington, Queen West, Leslieville perhaps.<\/p>\n
But Toronto still does a lousy job when it comes to telling visitors about its stories, and its past. Besides Casa Loma (dubbed by the landmark’s new managers as \u201cCanada\u2019s majestic castle\u201d), the Distillery District, and St. Lawrence Market, it\u2019s as if the city \u2014 which bulldozed so much of its 19th<\/sup> century built form after World War II \u2014 has no history, or at least none worth sharing with guests.<\/p>\n Tourism, of course, isn\u2019t always driven by historical curiosity, but there\u2019s no doubt that heritage buildings and districts \u2014 apart from all their other urban merits \u2014 serve as powerful magnets for visitors. As a 2009 Ontario government study points out, one survey showed that over half of Americans who took a pleasure trip in 2004 or 2005 visited a historic site, museum, or gallery. No one goes to Paris to visit the suburbs, and so on. (The City of Toronto\u2019s salesmanship on this point leaves much to be desired. As this page<\/a> on the City\u2019s walking tour listing puts it, \u201cThink that historic sites are boring? Think again. Toronto is filled with National Historic Sites that are still hip and happening!\u201d)<\/p>\n The new-ish Fort York Visitor Centre<\/a> begins to address the city\u2019s self-inflicted amnesia, but many other cities have gone much further in finding imaginative ways to share the stories of historic areas, including the ones that aren\u2019t necessarily filled with old mansions or designated structures.<\/p>\n For example, Detour, a San Francisco firm, has developed a line of audio walking tours (you download them onto your device) of some of the city\u2019s most atmospheric neighbourhoods, including more outr\u00e9 places like The Tenderloin<\/a>, which contain tons of social history.<\/p>\n In other cases, physical markers connote historical events that have left no detectable residue. Across Europe, for example, artist Gunter Demnig has been installing \u201cstumble stones\u201d<\/a> on the sidewalks where Holocaust victims last lived before being deported; the small bricks are engraved with the name of the victim. A similar project<\/a> has been underway in New York for the past decade, as volunteers use chalk to mark the homes of victims on each anniversary of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire.<\/p>\n Elsewhere in New York, Place Matters<\/a> (a joint venture between City Lore and the Municipal Art Society) has built up an eclectic selection of highly informative online walking tours \u2014 for example, this one<\/a> on vernacular architecture in lower Manhattan \u2014 that include historical information and archival images presented in a slideshow format well suited to portable devices.<\/p>\n New York is also home to the Tenement Museum, which has become one of the city\u2019s most visited tourist attractions. Its very existence offers a powerful critique of what sorts of buildings are historically valuable, not just for tourism but also as a means of creating a heightened awareness of long-vanished communities that had little money and\u00a0plenty of hardship.<\/p>\n The Lower Eastside (LES) has been the subject of other place-making efforts meant to generate a new sort of\u00a0consciousness about\u00a0the way life was lived in a part of the city that became synonymous with crowding, poverty, and poor working conditions.<\/p>\n Preservation and public history expert Chris Neville<\/a>, an adjunct professor at Columbia University, was part of an LES sign mapping project<\/a> that installed large placards on private buildings in the LES. Each had an archival photo taken at or close to the location of the sign, as well as multi-lingual quotes from residents who\u2019d lived in the area. The approach, Neville says, directly addresses the question of whose history is being told, but it also cultivates\u00a0historical sensibility\u00a0\u2014 an awareness, in the viewer, that they’re standing in a place where others have walked and worked, lived and died.<\/p>\n That sense of place, he adds, can exist, or be fostered, in\u00a0areas where original or earlier buildings no longer exist. \u201cJust as there is a story to how things got built up,\u201d he says, \u201cthere\u2019s a story about how things got erased.\u201d<\/p>\n In Toronto, of course, we\u2019ve erased many things, and we tend not to talk about them after they\u2019re gone. Having spent the past two years working on an anthology about The Ward, the \u201carrival city\u201d that predates Nathan Phillips Square, I have found myself wondering what the City should do to create a better awareness of an area whose story played an outsized role in the evolution of contemporary multi-cultural Toronto. The same question could be posed about Parkdale, the Junction and other historically important\u00a0communities\u00a0experiencing dramatic transformations.<\/p>\n Almost nothing remains of The Ward\u2019s original built form; the area fell victim to expropriation and land assembly after World War II, so only a handful of old or historic buildings remain. So here\u2019s my question: how should we mark its role \u2014 indeed, the Ward\u2019s very existence \u2014 at the heart of the city that now surrounds it?<\/p>\n The Ward, after all, is Toronto’s\u00a0Lower East Side. But no one — tourists and residents alike — knows where it is.<\/p>\n