Get used to it: the loud, hot mess of life in Toronto

What is the first thing city-dwellers ask of city life? That it not take place in a city, apparently.

The latest complaint about spiky Toronto comes from people in a condo tower beside the Gardiner Expressway who are unhappy about the overnight noise of the YongeBay-York off-ramp being demolished. Two weekends of overnight work are planned during the spring-summer project, but the mayor admits there may have to be more to get the thing done and dusted, fast.

I do sympathize. People talk a lot of nonsense about food, but it is sleep that builds health and stamina. The sound of nighttime jackhammers is detestable. It’s bad enough during the day in my assiduous real-estate-flipping neighbourhood. But the Star’s photo of an urban couple looking grim on their green-glass balcony a few storeys above eight traffic lanes is, well, ironic. They moved into Blade Runner and now they don’t like it.

With a view of a giant parking garage and a glimpse of lake that is a silent taunt, they’re within baseball-throwing distance of massive glass condo towers that look very much like their own and just above the hideous elevated road that makes it all possible. The air they breathe is fouled by fumes. There are no serene green parklands within reach.

They are living in the intensely urban nucleus of Toronto. In Richmond Hill, condo dwellers recently put up a banner begging higher neighbours to stop spitting and tossing cigarette butts onto their balconies. Such is North American city life, where change is constant, buildings are thrown up without esthetic regard and humans are mobile (and horrible).

City life is a loud, hot mess. The relentless car-honking of New York City is, I suspect, the drivers’ passive-aggressive street protest at the untouchable wealth that lines those same streets. Here, we don’t honk. We expect quiet. But is that reasonable?

Take last year’s complaints about Afrofest in Woodbine Park in the Beaches. Residents didn’t like the African music festival, saying it was too loud and broke its weekend curfew, while organizers called the reaction racist. A Toronto compromise was reached. I understood the complaints about loudness, but I laughed at the curfew set for any music festival held in the park: 11 p.m. on Saturday and 8 p.m. on Sunday. To bed at 8? If your parents set that curfew, you’d run away to the big city.

Remember the condo dwellers at King St. W. and Bathurst St. who complained in 2013 about the smell from a local abattoir that had been in place for more than 80 years? Businesses like that made the area funky and therefore desirable. Once those municipal Dull-Checkers bought their condos, they did not agree.

Dull-Checking is as powerful a force in cities as it is in newspapers. It’s a failure to understand what makes cities attractive. How I long for the Rail Deck Park and the downtown relief line. I came to Toronto for urban thrills, education and a job, a big life, a fast one.

I read the famous opening lines of Jonathan Raban’s book Soft City, where the traveller knows he’s in a city, but not which one. “I come out of the Formica kebab-house alone after lunch, my head prickly with retsina. The air outside is a sunny swirl of exhaust fumes; that faint, smoky-turquoise big city colour . . . A cluster of Italian au pair girls, their voices mellow and labial, like a chorus escaped from an opera, pass me; I hear, in the crowd, an adenoidal Nebraskan contralto . . . I have to hunt in my head for the language spoken here. “But this is where you live; it’s your city,” Raban wrote. I was smitten. City life is an undeclared quarrel that never stops, and to prosper in a city, you have to have a taste for that. Imagine if the night jackhammers were replaced with New York-style honking. Could people in condo towers cope? Could Beachers learn to love late-night dancehalls, clubs and odeons, all that malarkey?

Mayor Tory is wrong about the one-stop Scarborough subway. But now, I wonder if he was actually right to keep the gawdawful Gardiner — I stare at it from my desk in the newsroom and despair at its blank brutality and its pointless back-and-forthing — because it can’t be loudly demolished, lest the Dull-Checkers complain. Condo dwellers should accept that Toronto is where they live; it’s their city and they must learn to like this urban stew.