Tag: Building

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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.

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City Life

Kill All The Colours

View from above staring down onto King Street West and Toronto's Financial District. A translucent image of the photographer's foot appears reflected in the window.
Looking down on King Street West, Toronto, during the Pandemic

In his 1947 novel, The Plague, Albert Camus writes of an epidemic, probably bubonic plague, that decimated the inhabitants of the French Algerian town, Oran. One of the curious observations he makes is that the “[p]lague had killed all colors”. Subject to a quarantine for nearly a year, the characters grow anxious and fearful. Inevitably, the suspension of life’s ordinary activities coupled with the relentless threat of death wears on them. It corrodes the affective dimension of their lives, making everything appear dull.

I know from personal experience that severe depression can change a person’s capacity to see colour. All the colours seem muted. Where, in ordinary times, bright colours spark feelings of joy, in times of extreme stress, those same colours can look as if they’ve been greywashed.

In the first months of the pandemic, when most people weren’t sure what was going on and stayed in lockdown, the pandemic threatened to produce a secondary health crisis by ratcheting up anxiety disorders, promoting feelings of depression, and encouraging people to cope through self-medication.

Recognizing my own tendency to view the world through Camus-coloured glasses (life is absurd and pointless so let’s lounge all day in the sun smoking cigarettes and drinking ourselves into a carefully modulated stupor), I chose instead to put the pandemic in a neatly wrapped package. I would manage the shit out of this thing. After all, what a shameful thing it would be to have an epitaph that reads: “Here lies someone who was such a loser he allowed a respiratory pathogen to destroy his liver.”

I did a lot of little things to promote a sense of mental well-being (e.g. making the bed each morning, dressing up even if I wasn’t going out). On the photographic front, I refused to desaturate my photographs. I ignored Camus’s observation and, even if it didn’t feel that way, I pretended the world was bright and shiny.

Only now am I allowing myself the luxury of black and white conversions. I’m far enough away from the early sense of uncertainty that I can now revisit my photographs from that time with a sense of detachment. Featured today is a photograph I made early in May, 2020 from the TD Tower overlooking Toronto’s Financial District. A solitary streetcar rumbles past. There are no pedestrians. No cars. The streets are pretty much empty. The scene really does deserve to have all its colours killed.

Categories
City Life

Stone Angel

Stone angel in Toronto's Mount Pleasant Cemetery stands with right hand raised, fingers broken, with condominium balconies in the background.
Angel in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto

It’s dead on a Friday afternoon in the city. After the May long weekend, all the Gen-Xers head up north to open the cottages they’ve inherited from parents now laid out in Mount Pleasant Cemetery. The Millennial kids don’t go with; they can’t imagine a worse way to spend a weekend than stuck on a gravel cul de sac, no dock in the lake, water too cold for swimming, and the air swarming with black flies. It’s better being stuck bored in town where at least they can make a run to Tokyo Smoke.

After a couple joints, they remember the angel standing guard over granddad’s grave. They call a couple buddies from school, the ones who haven’t turned domestic yet, and invite them over to do some wingsuit base jumping from their 50th floor balcony. A thousand years ago, we could only imagine what it must be like to wheel around the heavens, cherubim and seraphim sailing to glory on a wing. Now look at us.

Most of the friends say they’re busy, but at least one of the friends has the guts to offer the excuse all the others are thinking: you’re a lunatic. And maybe that’s true. But the divide between lunacy and holiness is paper thin. They used to say that someone whose behaviour was a bit off was “touched” as if to suggest that they’d been touched by the holy spirit. Because authorities weren’t confident they could tell which side of the divide a person stood on, they conflated the two sides and called the person a holy fool.

Years ago, when it was still fun to go to the cottage, they’d stand on the dock, toes curled around the rough edges of the pressure treated wood, arms pulled back in preparation for the leap. Always, there was a pause. Time hanging still in the summer air. They could feel the splash of the cold water even before it struck the skin. They could sense the approach of the dark nothing that would enfold them as they sank below the surface.

That leap was a perfect moment, poised in flight, held between sky and water, memory and oblivion. Only a couple friends come over, and then, only to watch. Everyone else is busy adulting. Everyone else has already sunk like a stone and the water grows dark overhead.

Categories
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

Buildings that were but are no more

Night shot of a low building illuminated by a single street light.
Algoma Street South at Night - Thunder Bay

When I began sifting through my photo archive for images related to this month’s theme (what was but is no more), I was astonished at the number of buildings I have photographed that have later met with accelerant and a lit match. See my previous post on Notre Dame de Paris. I swear I had nothing to do with it. Today’s featured photo is a night shot of a building on Algoma Street South in Thunder Bay, ON. I shot this in May, 2016 and a few months later it was gone.

There have been a rash of fires in the vicinity. Two years ago, a building on Bay Street went up in flames. Before that, it was the Hells Angels clubhouse. And in December, the town lost the historic Finnish Labour Temple and, with it, the Hoito restaurant, located just around the corner from my lonely building featured here. There isn’t any evidence to suggest that these fires are connected. But when there are so many fires in close proximity, one does wonder.

As far as I’m aware, none of these fires resulted in injury or loss of life. Even so, each of them has been an occasion for grief, especially in the case of the Finnish Labour Temple, which had been a community hub for more than a century. There is something shocking about fire, something irrevocable. We do our best to clean up the site, but traces remain for years. We smell it in the soot. We see it in charred bits of wood.

Whenever I drive up to Thunder Bay, I see evidence of fire all along my route. In the town of Heyden, just north of the Sault, there’s Pruce’s Motor Inn lying in ruins, ironic given that the local fire station is just next door. And 20 km west of Nipigon was a gas station, abandoned for years, then torched to the ground. Further along, in Dorian, another motel was abandoned then torched, or torched then abandoned. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which came first.

For a lot of sites in Northern Ontario, it’s typical simply to walk way. Let nature deal with the charred remnants. Snow melt and rain turn it into a black slurry. Seedlings hatch there. Moss and lichen creep over the exposed surfaces. In time—natural time, not human time—the burnt out buildings vanish beneath a layer of living matter, joining a larger cycle of decay and rebirth.

The Finnish Labour Temple and Hoito Restaurant in Thunder Bay, Ontario
The Hoito, Thunder Bay, Ontario (2015)
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.

Categories
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

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