Our love and resilience driving darkness away
On Tuesday night around 10 p.m. as a light rain fell, a few hundred people gathered around a landscaped wall in Olive Square. There, just south of the Yonge St. and Finch Ave. intersection where the deadly van rampage began the day before, a makeshift memorial had been created with bouquets of flowers laid a dozen deep and hundreds of candles that defiantly remained lit in the rain. Posters and sticky notes expressing love, anguish, resilience and then even more love covered the rest of the wall.
Most remarkably, or perhaps unremarkably for Toronto, the notes people left on communal sheets of Bristol board were written in more than a dozen languages. Sometimes the multicultural nature of Toronto seems like a slogan or an ad campaign more than an everyday lived experience but here, in the rain and darkness, the Toronto of our hopes and aspirations was on full display.
The park was quiet but for the traffic which had returned to Yonge and four young men who stood off to the side singing the old gospel hymn, “There’s Not a Friend Like the Lowly Jesus,” their a cappella voices carrying softly over the crowd of mourners and the bright television news tents set up along the sidewalk.
Incomplete sentence fix: The flowers continued to arrive. A block away more people were getting out of parked cars with bouquets of their own, heading for the memorial.
A kilometre and half to the south, at Mel Lastman Square, by the sign that depicts historic scenes in North York history, another memorial with more candles and more notes written in more languages marked another spot where more people were killed on Monday.
As the sign’s pictograms demonstrate, North York grew quickly from its rural beginnings and Yonge St. has seen what might be the quickest invention of a dense urban place in the entire Toronto region. Thirty years ago, when “downtown North York” was still largely a dream in thenmayor Mel Lastman’s mind, there were just a handful of midrise buildings along Yonge St. Otherwise the strip mostly consisted of one- and twostorey mid-century buildings, more of a small town Ontario streetscape than big city. Today it’s home to tens of thousands of people, a city unto its own with an equally impressive and growing skyline that would be the envy of mid-sized cities elsewhere.
Better still is the scene at sidewalk level: entire blocks are lined with restaurants and shops that are busy late into the night. Indeed on Tuesday night, even as people were leaving flowers in the rain, the restaurants and bars in the blocks nearby were open late and busy on a school night no less.
Directly across Yonge St. from the Olive Square memorial is a wonderful jumble of buildings, remnants of the lowrise, mid-century days, which are covered in a wonderful chaos of signs and neon. There’s a 24-hour Korean restaurant and a karaoke bar that has a fibre optic recreation of the downtown Toronto skyline, complete with fireworks going off around the CN Tower. It’s one of the most urban moments in Toronto, a place that offers the thrill of 24-hour public life that all good big city’s offer.
Toronto is a place that lurches forwards and often backwards as it grows rapidly, sometimes willing itself in an urban existence as North York has done. It’s still very much a work in progress though, as it is still growing. A finalized redesign of Yonge St. has been postponed by city council until next year. Olive Square itself is a smart little urban park even if it’s pressed against an Esso petrol station and a few metres from the Yonge and Finch intersection that can be harrowing to cross on foot on the best of days, as it was built for cars not humans.
But it was the humans living in this vertical neighbourhood that demanded Olive Square and worked with city planners to have a communal “backyard” to enjoy, where their apartment kids could play in some green space close to home.
When it opened in 2012, it wasn’t intended to be a place where public grief could be shared, but it has now accommodated that use too.
Walking from Finch Ave. to Sheppard Ave. along Yonge St. — the route the driver took on Monday afternoon — there’s an evolving embrace of the public realm, one that’s hard-fought for in all of Toronto. Still, living in this city, it’s easy to take for granted the crowded sidewalks we do have, or even the busy nightlife on a rainy Tuesday. Not every city is this fortunate. Not every city has the critical mass needed to make an Olive Square happen or to keep those shops and restaurants open and thriving.
The killer had his pick of places that he could have considered striking. If Tuesday night is any indication, Torontonians will not soon be scared out of their public spaces and from the rich public life that a densely populated city offers.
This city is far from perfect and there is trouble every day beyond this horrific attack. With the unfolding story of Bruce MacArthur in the Church St. and Wellesley St. neighbourhood and now this rampage, it feels like we’ve been immersed in many months of death and horror, yet being in a public place with other residents of this city defiantly proclaiming their love for one another drove some of the darkness away.