Empty Parking Lot in Downtown Toronto

Maybe you remember the scene from the 1999 film, American Beauty, the scene where the boy next door, Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), videos a plastic bag as a breeze buffets it no place in particular. Ricky Fitts is utterly transported by the beauty of the moment and in the background we hear Thomas Newman’s haunting “Any Other Name.”

Ricky intuits that the beauty of the moment is somehow related to the fact that it is fleeting. I have been reading the novellas and short stories of Thomas Mann where he poses questions about the relationship between beauty and decay. In a cruder form, Milan Kundera wonders if, in the absence of shit, beauty is nothing more than kitsch. The film, American Beauty, holds to a similar line; the passing moments we stitch together to make a life would come to nothing without the certainty of death.

A few years ago I found myself standing in an empty parking lot on the southeast corner of Dundas and Church Streets in Toronto staring at a scene chock full of ephemera and wondered if I hadn’t stumbled onto the set of an American Beauty sequel. A breeze kicked up the dirt and, with it, a plastic bag. The bag never got very far before the breeze changed and blew it in the opposite direction.

On the wall behind, a mural, itself a piece of ephemera. Etched on the wall, the outline of a building that had once stood where there was now a parking lot. Even the wall turned out to be a piece of ephemera. Shortly after I made this shot, a demolition company enclosed the lot with temporary fencing and tore everything to the ground. After that, a construction company took over, excavating and putting in footings to support a condominium tower.

Now, everything is gone and I can scarcely remember what stood there before.