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City Life

Flash Fiction: Janice Takes An Uber to a Coffee Date

Big Ben viewed from Charing Cross, London
Big Ben viewed from Charing Cross, London

We met Janice before when she fell asleep on a subway while on her way to work in Toronto. Join her here for another narcoleptic adventure…

The Uber pulled to the curb in front of the house where Janice rented a basement apartment. She had a date. Sort of a date. She’d met a guy online and they had arranged to meet at a Starbucks for coffee. She could use a coffee. As for the guy. Well. She could use a guy, too.

Janice had an unruly brain and it inserted thoughts into her consciousness whether she wanted them there or not. One such thought, more like an Instagram video than a thought, was a scene of two dogs sniffing each other’s behinds. In a way, that’s what she and this guy were about to do. They would cover it with layers of social niceties—double latte misto blah-di-blah, neutral talk that avoided religion and politics, coded signals of class and income—but peel away the layers and all that remained was butt sniffing. She cursed her brain for throwing this unwanted image into her more conventional hopes for the meet-up.

The guy’s name was Oswald. She’d never known anyone named Oswald. In fact, when she first noted his name, she had swiped past his profile thinking: anyone named Oswald must be a loser. She caught herself mid-thought and wondered if she wasn’t being a bit unfair. It’s not as if Oswald had given himself the name. It was probably a struggle growing up with a name like Oswald. Kids beating you up all the time. High school girls snickering at you as you walked down the hall. He probably had astronomical therapy bills. Janice swiped back to the profile and chastised herself for being superficial.

As the Uber headed down to the Danforth, the side to side sway rocked Janice into a gentle reverie. Her eyes became unfocused and the houses passed in a blur. Waiting at the light to turn right onto the Danforth, people on the crosswalk passed in a riot of colour. Red t-shirts. Yellow t-shirts. All of the colours blending together in a way that reminded her of an expressionist painting.

When the car arrived at the Starbucks, Janice couldn’t remember the intervening time between her wait at the crosswalk and her arrival. And yet she couldn’t remember falling asleep either. She must have drifted into an indeterminate state that suspended all awareness of time passing. She thanked the driver and stepped out of the car. However, she had assumed she was stepping onto the curb whereas she found herself stepping into traffic, almost mowed down by a van going in the wrong direction. 

She experienced a momentary feeling of disorientation, then pulled herself back into the moment and crossed the road. Inside the Starbucks, she stepped straight away to the counter and ordered a tall bold with coconut milk and raw sugar and paid for it with her app. While she waited for the person to fill her order, she surveyed the room and found her Oswald sitting in the corner, lost in his iPhone. She was pleased to note that he was better looking in real life than his dating app photo suggested.

Taking up her coffee, Janice stepped to Oswald’s table and introduced herself. Oswald looked up from his iPhone and said hello and stood and invited her to sit and Janice was utterly smitten if for no other reason than that he spoke with a soft English accent. She told herself not to be so superficial but she couldn’t help herself. Thanks to his accent, Janice could forgive any number of other sins, including his goatee and beret and affected radical student look.

Oswald hoped the location wasn’t too inconvenient.

Janice said it was perfect. She lived on the Danforth which was central to just about everything.

Oswald gave a quizzical look. The Danforth?

You know, Greektown.

Oswald shrugged. I’m just a Yorkshire lad. I don’t know where anything is.

Janice gazed out the window behind Oswald and noted a black cab passing on the left side of the road. Oh god, she said, I’m not in Toronto, am I?

Oswald smiled. You’re on Berkeley Street. I’m afraid if you turn right out that door, and turn right again at the corner, you’ll find yourself at the back end of Buckingham Palace.

Janice pushed back her chair and stood. I really need to be going.

Oswald stood as well, taken aback but doing his best to suppress hurt feelings. You can hop on the tube if you like. Around the corner. Green Park.

Oh god, not another subway. Who knows where I’ll end up. As she left the coffee shop, she turned to Oswald and said: It’s not you; it’s me. She knew how that sounded, but it was the truth.

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Architecture

Mid-Life Crisis

Black and white photo of an apartment building from the 1950s that incorporates mod cinder blocks.
Apartment building on Douglas Street across from Beacon Hill Park, Victoria, B.C.

We celebrated the end of the pandemic with a trip to visit family in Victoria, B.C. That was last November just days before the omicron variant arrived and forced us to rethink the idea of an “end” to the pandemic. For a brief few days, we got to pretend life had returned to normal. Our worries were restricted to minor issues like flooding, washed out infrastructure, and food and gas shortages. Ah, those were simpler times!

On my second morning there, the rain let up so I walked down to Ogden Point where I caught the sunrise. To get back to the hotel, I went up Douglas Street with apartment buildings to my left and Beacon Hill Park to my right. About half way along the park, I paused to admire an apartment building probably built in the 1950s. In particular, I found myself mesmerized by a simple retro design feature: square white-washed concrete blocks with a star motif in the centre, stacked to form a low wall in front of the building and repeated on each of the balconies. Apart from UFOs and drive-thru burger palaces served by bobby-soxers on roller skates, I can’t imagine anything more emblematic of the 1950s.

I paused to take a shot, then continued along the sidewalk where a sign came into view: Beacon Tower, a 55+ building. I stumbled a little. You see, it isn’t so long ago that I passed that 55+ threshold. I turned back to the building and stared at the retro blocks. Christ, I thought, I qualify to live in an “adult lifestyle” building.

The fact is: I graduated from high school only two or three years ago. Mentally at least (my wife insists I’m far more immature than that and have only graduated from junior high). Because I’m still in reasonably good shape, don’t suffer inordinate aches and pains, and don’t experience shortness of breath when I exert myself, I’ve never come up against anything that challenges my admittedly distorted view of myself. My rational brain tells me I need to grow up which means I need to worry about cholesterol and book an appointment for a colonoscopy. But my rational faculties have always been the smallest part of my brain.

I wonder if the posted 55+ threshold isn’t an artifact from the days when the apartment building first opened its doors. Our perception of what counts as old has changed. In 1888, Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backwards, 2000 to 1887 imagined life in the year 2000 where workers retire at the age of 45 so they have at least a few good years left to enjoy life. No doubt, Bellamy’s threshold was influenced by the deplorable working conditions in Victorian England and their impact on average life expectancy. In the 1950s, we could push that figure along by 10 years. Now, I can’t imagine putting up my feet at 55 and drifting from there into my sunset years. In fact, I can’t imagine putting up my feet at any age.

The gradual deferral of what counts as old age also finds a correlation in changing expectations about when one should start a family. That decision determines how old an infant’s grandparents are. When I was born, my grandmother was 41. When my son was born, his grandmother was 50. As for me, I’ve surpassed them with no prospect of becoming a grandparent. That’s just as well, as I’m only a couple years out of high school and hardly fit for the task.

Categories
Architecture

Honest Eds

People cross Bloor Street during a snow storm in front of Honest Eds department store.
Honest Ed's Department Store, Bathurst/Bloor Intersection, Toronto

I’ve devoted the month of May to images that suggest ephemeral concerns, so it’s natural to suppose that when I present an image of an iconic Toronto landmark, now demolished, you might suppose I’m waxing nostalgic for a place I miss. It’s true. I miss the famous discount department store founded by Ed Mirvish. I miss the vibe it brought to the neighbourhood. I miss how it stood as an acknowledgement of the people who live here. The real people. The immigrants and students. It was absolutely analog. It resisted slick branding and social media campaigns. Sometimes that meant it was tacky as all shit. But, hey, if polished international brands are what you’re after, walk a kilometre east to the mink mile for your Gucci handbags and your Rolex watches.

But I’m not an overly nostalgic person. I’m more concerned with what’s in front of me than with what lies behind. In the case of Honest Eds, what lies in front is what towers overhead. Westbank and The Peterson Group purchased the site in 2014 and while they acknowledge the history of Mirvish Village and will include signs of that history in their new development, it is after all one more of countless residential/commercial developments popping up like mushrooms all over the city.

Toronto is a boom town. That boom started with the first Québec referendum when Montreal businesses, most notably financial institutions, fled the province for Toronto. It got a boost during the 2008 financial crisis when the world discovered that Canada’s more tightly regulated financial institutions, now all located in Toronto, had little exposure to dodgy credit instruments and so had weathered the storm relatively unscathed. More than ever, Toronto became an attractive place to park capital. Among other things, that influx of capital translated into new condo starts so that, by 2012, there were 148 cranes operating in the city. That pace has only accelerated. In 2021, there were 208 cranes operating in Toronto, almost as many as the combined total (276) of the other 14 North American cities in the survey.

Apart from the chaos of perpetual construction and infrastructure that can’t keep pace, the big downside of living in a skyscraper nursery is that all the buildings start to look the same. I find myself walking down a new condo canyon, all the familiar landmarks obliterated, and I can’t tell where I am anymore. I could be on one street. I could be on another street. Who knows? They all look the same to me.

I commend a short article by Aaron Betsky, “The Case for a New International Style.” He notes the trend to generic design in contemporary architecture influenced “by global flows of finance and culture, as well as by similarities in methods of production and standards”. While the influence of safety concerns arising from the pandemic has yet to play out in large projects, Betsky calls on the building industry to resist the temptation to what he calls “relentless value engineering”.

A word that comes to mind is “sterility.” While this word suggests a positive value in the context of health care and epidemiology with clean surfaces and filtered air, as an aesthetic value, it is soul deadening. I fear that much of Toronto’s built space is sterile in this latter sense. What I miss most about the demolition of Honest Eds is the way it disrupted urban space. It was the opposite of sterile.

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Architecture

Deer Park United Church is now the site of a Condo

Night photograph of a backhoe behind the remnants of a demolished church.
Excavation for new condo on the site of the former Deer Park United Church, St. Clair Avenue West, Toronto

Five years ago, I froze my keister while trying to capture the early stages of ground-breaking for a new condo in Toronto’s Forest Hill neighbourhood. The Blue Diamond Condominium project was going up on the site of the former Deer Park United Church at 129 St. Clair Ave. W. Demolition crews had lopped off the back half of the church building, but the new design would incorporate the front half of the church and the bell tower into a shiny glass structure. We call this practice façadism and it seems to be Toronto’s go-to solution whenever the city wants to claim it cares about heritage buildings without impeding the work of property developers.

While the newly constructed condominium tower sits toward the rear of the lot, the former church, or at least the remaining front half of the church, will become The Imperial, a luxury event space which opens this fall. The Imperial’s web site landing page shows a long dining table laid out for a formal dinner, as if waiting for the guests of the last supper, while in the background is a restored stained glass window. I wonder if anyone gave any thought to the name, The Imperial, and the historical ironies that name imports into this space.

The church is gone and, with it, a particular dream of what it means to be church. Deer Park began its life in 1881 as a Presbyterian congregation and constructed the building at 129 St. Clair Ave. W. in 1913. Twelve years later, most of the congregation voted to join of the United Church of Canada. At that time, the UCC had aspirations of becoming a national church, the religious equivalent of Tim Hortons. While it might seem like a wonderful thing, spreading happiness and unicorns all across the nation, such aspirations come with a cost. All through the post-war boom, with Sunday Schools bursting at the seams, churches had no incentive to think about that cost. But beginning in the 70’s, as membership numbers began a long slow decline, the UCC had to face serious issues like its role in the residential school system and its overwhelming whiteness in the midst of an increasingly diverse culture.

It seems problematic to rename this site The Imperial. At the very least, it ought to come with a plaque that offers an honest account of what went before. Although I was raised within the UCC, I feel no regret for its decline; on the contrary, I feel this is a just outcome. So it bothers me that what we choose to preserve of this “heritage site” is a vestige of its colonial and colonizing past. Wouldn’t it be nice to celebrate the dismantling of our colonial past with symbols that carry us into a more equitable future. Instead, we create a space that celebrates the cannibalistic tendencies of late capitalism. I wonder what kind of meals they serve at The Imperial.

Categories
Architecture

Notre-Dame de Paris

Interior shot of the Cathédral de Notre Dame, Paris
Interior shot of the Cathédral de Notre Dame, Paris

Continuing with the month of May’s theme of “what was but is no more” I offer a wide shot inside Notre-Dame de Paris beneath the site of the former spire. On April 15, 2019, the roof caught fire during renovations and, among other damages, this caused the central spire to collapse. Because it is a building of both religious and national importance, the French legislature resolved that, instead of modernizing the building, it should be restored to its former glory as a preeminent example of French Gothic architecture. Hopefully, the workers who perform the next renovation have better luck than the previous workers.

This calls to mind the Ship of Theseus paradox. First proposed by ancient Greek philosophers, the paradox asks what would happen if you replaced each piece of Theseus’s ship, board by board, until none of the original boards remained. Could you call the resulting ship the Ship of Theseus? Or would it be a new ship? We can pose the same problem in relation to the human body which is “refurbished” every 7 years. Can we say that we are the same person we were 7 years ago when our present body shares none of the physical material that comprised our former body? Memory gives us a sense of continuity, but memory may have no bearing on the problem of identity.

As for the Cathedral that stands on the Île de la Cité, I’m inclined to think it ceased being the Notre-Dame de Paris years ago, back when French society determined that it was a secular society that, among other things, would forbid Moslem women from wearing hijab in the public sphere. Theoretically, the same rules apply to the Cathedral at least to the extent that the Cathedral is a symbol of national secular pride. This makes for a very different building than the building which figures in Victor Hugo’s novel. If all it’s good for is to rouse politicians like Emmanuel Macron into fits of patriotism, why not burn it to the ground?

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City Life

R. C. Harris Water Treatment Plant: Palace of Purification

Silver Birch Beach, Toronto

Located where the ends of Queen Street East and Victoria Park Avenue meet at the east end of The Beaches in Toronto, the R. C. Harris Water Treatment Plant is without doubt one of the most remarkable buildings in the city. I first encountered this Art Deco monument to human effluence when I dove into the pages of Michael Ondaatje’s early novel, In the Skin of a Lion. The facility is named after Roland Caldwell Harris, Commissioner of Works for the City of Toronto from 1912 until his death in 1945. Harris was responsible for another of Toronto’s landmark constructions, the Prince Edward Viaduct, the bridge which spans the Don Valley. It, too, figures in the Ondaatje novel: a construction worker saves a nun from falling from the yet-to-be-completed bridge. Clearly, there is something about R. C. Harris’s massive engineering projects that Ondaatje found compelling.

The first time I saw the building, I was walking east along Balmy Beach at sunset. This is an unfamiliar neighbourhood, so I had no idea what was waiting for me as I rounded a bend in the shoreline. There, lit in orange and gold, I beheld a magnificent structure that I assumed was a cathedral or an abbey. Why had I never heard of this place before? It wasn’t until I stood on the grounds that I remembered reading about it in Ondaatje’s novel. I have to confess that the words I had read did not prepare me for the building’s scale and splendour.

I returned six months later to capture the building in the midst of a blustery snow storm, altogether different conditions, but no less striking. The irony of this place is that even after you understand its purpose, its grandeur still has a humbling effect. You feel that when you talk, you should do so in whispers. It makes you want to prostrate yourself on the ground and greet the rising sun in the east. You wonder if maybe this is holy ground.

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City Life

Renfield St Stephens Parish Church

Reflection of Renfield St Stephens Parish Church in glass of building across the street.

This is a photo of “serviced apartments” which I hope is a euphemism for “hotel rooms”. Maybe some of the people attending Cop26 will stay here. It’s on Bath Street and not that far from the venue. However, I did not post this photo so I could provide accommodation advice to Cop26 delegates. I posted it because, reflected in its windows is Renfield St Stephens Parish Church.

If I felt inclined to write a book about superstition, the story of this church would get a chapter all to itself. During a storm in 1998, lightning struck the tower and it collapsed into the sanctuary, pretty much destroying everything. This happened on … you guessed it … St Stephens Day. I don’t know what St Stephen had against this church, but clearly you shouldn’t mess with him; he has pull with the people who manage the weather.

While I can imagine that the local congregation was bewildered and grief-stricken, nevertheless its response is worth holding up as an exemplar of building back better. The church now has a sanctuary that serves as a multi-purpose flexible space. It also has a kitchen and café, all glass and fronting the street, making it more accessible to the local community.

View of Renfield St. Stephens Parish Church sanctuary
Categories
City Life

A Ride on ScotRail

The back end of Queen Street train station.

This is the back end of Glasgow’s Queen Street train station shot from Cathedral Street. I love the way the struts fan out in a peacock display (assuming the peacock is colour blind). I imagine most of the Cop26 delegates and support staff will never see the inside of this or any other train station. They’ll fly into Paisley and take limos to their hotels. Trains are for ordinary folk.

One train ride I took from this station up to Lenzie was particularly memorable. We (by we I mean my wife and I and another couple) had been at a celebration in George Square to mark the homecoming of Olympic athletes who had performed well at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. By the time we were ready to go home, it was late and the trains were packed. Mark and I found seats at one end of a car and our wives found seats at the other end of the car. Seated across from us were two thirty-something women who were modestly drunk and very chatty. They thought it would be a great idea if we came home with them for some drinks. Mark and I looked at one another and laughed, but nicely. Meanwhile, our wives were looking on from the other end of the car, also laughing, maybe not so nicely.

I thanked them for the offer but, I said, we already agreed to go home for drinks with two other women.

“Ooooh,” says one of the women, “you have an accent. Are you American?”

“No, I’m Canadian.”

“Ach! Same difference.”

Mark laughed and, setting aside his native brogue, said in his best imitation of John Wayne: “Them’s fightin’ words, sister.”

You’d think people in the throes of independence marches and referendums would be more sensitive these differences.

Categories
City Life

View from the Kelvingrove

View from the southwest entrance to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, Scotland

The Kelvingrove is near Finnieston which is the district of Glasgow where the Cop26 venue is located. This photo looks out the southwest entrance onto Argyle Street and, beyond it, Regent Moray Street which leads down to the venue, or would if it were a through street. The Kelvin in Kelvingrove refers to the river that flows nearby and which also gave its name to William Thomson who became the first Lord Kelvin for his work as a physicist and mathematician.

Yeah, like you care.

More interesting to me (and probably you) is what’s inside the building, including an amazing sculpture of St. Elvis complete with a neon halo, and Salvador Dali’s Christ of St John on the Cross which was attacked by a rock-wielding nut in the 60’s and slashed in the 80’s by another nut. I guess religion will do that to you. I felt like slashing it, too, but managed to restrain myself.

Categories
City Life

Services at Glasgow Cathedral

Rev. Mark Johnstone prepares for a service in the vestry of Glasgow Cathedral

Rev. Mark Johnstone, minister of Glasgow Cathedral, has been posting notices on social media promoting special services at the Cathedral during Cop26. Of the 30,000 delegates and support staff descending on the city, presumably some of them will want a quiet place to centre themselves. Here’s a photo of Mark chatting with my wife, Tamiko, in the vestry.

In the early days of the pandemic, Mark broadcast a service in which he included the story of how his friend, Dave, from Canada, once made a complete arse of himself during a service at the Cathedral. The story goes something like this:

A few years ago, before Mark had been called to the Cathedral, he and I went to a vespers service there. Because I was travelling with a small suitcase, I had only one jacket with me, the same jacket I wear when I’m hiking in Northern Ontario, waterproof, all purpose, red (so hunters don’t shoot me), and loaded with handy Velcro straps. During the service, the minister at the time, Laurence Whitley, invited everyone to bow their heads in prayer. I was jet-lagged and happy to fold my arms and slouch low in the pew. But when the prayer was done, I found that the Velcro on my jacket sleeves had stuck to the Velcro on opposite pockets, so I was constrained like a patient in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. I was stuck and didn’t know what to do.

The problem is that the Cathedral’s acoustics are extraordinarily “live”. You’ve probably heard the expression: you could hear a pin drop. It applies quite literally to the space where I was seated, what is formally called the choir. Mark saw my situation and started to laugh, quietly of course. I decided there was no choice but to tear away the Velcro straps all at once, like ripping off a band-aid. The noise echoed down the nave. Rev. Whitley lost his train of thought. Mark laughed. And I was free.

In April, 2020, Mark decided the story would make a good sermon illustration. He was trying to get at that feeling of breaking free that we all have craved after our long periods of self-isolation and masking and social distancing. The BBC also broadcast his service so now half the UK knows about his idiot friend named Dave from Canada.

The Choir of Glasgow Cathedral