Finding reasons to love Toronto
Earlier this summer a friend and I were riding our bikes along Toronto’s waterfront trail towards the ferry docks, en route to spend a beachy afternoon at Hanlan’s Point. She remarked, as we passed the near-endless crowds from Strachan Ave. eastwards, that the waterfront was “really something” now, and that if this were San Francisco or some other city it would be more famous and everybody would talk about it all the time.
I’ve been thinking about her comment all summer long, a time that hasn’t been particularly good for Toronto: a season of bad and often heartbreaking news. Despite all that, Toronto was jammed with all sorts of people enjoying themselves on the waterfront, or visiting from elsewhere, that day and every day I’ve been since. Torontonians have been cynical about the waterfront, as it has been a sometimes slow, decades-long process to transform it from a dirty, postindustrial place to one they can be proud of. Visiting it today dispels long held misconceptions about it, but there are still some who haven’t seen how much has been done or who complain about residential towers “blocking the lake.”
That latter complaint I’ve never understood. It’s like saying New York City’s Central Park is blocked by all the buildings that surround it. Apart from a handful of sites, including the ferry docks, it’s possible to walk most of the central waterfront along public promenades. There are also new, selfie-ready places like Sugar Beach, the best tourism investment Toronto ever undertook, judging by Instagram posts. And while a few of the earlier, pioneering, residential buildings are clunky, most new ones are, at worst, inoffensively bland.
Yet just like waterfront cynicism is hard to shake, we’re in the midst of an increasingly nasty mayoral election and undergoing the needless and distracting chaos of having the rules of the municipal election changed by Doug Ford’s provincial government. Paying attention to all of this is to wade into the deepest kind of cynicism and wormholes of bad politicking, making it easy to give up and stop paying attention, to lose the spark of why it’s all worth fighting for.
So I keep reminding myself of that bike ride through a resilient, fun and even beautiful Toronto, on the way to an urban, swimmable beach that has a wonderful sand bar this year. A long weekend is a good time to think about what we actually like about this place.
It’s a funny thing to be from Toronto, a city that has traditionally not had the highest opinion of itself, where the first person to run down Toronto might be a Torontonian. It’s also a city that endures the Canadian pastime of hating on Toronto. That self-loathing has been waning over the last decade though as Toronto love grows in the age of hometownproud Drake, and as the country’s biggest city, with newfound confidence, much of that Canadian disdain rolls off our collective backs. Though when we’re down, as we have been this summer, perhaps it still stings a bit.
What’s great about Toronto’s “greatness” is that there’s a lot of it. In 1777 the English writer Samuel Johnson said, “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” Over two hundred years later, the same can be said for Toronto, a now-massive city that is like an onion that keeps revealing its layers. I’d update Johnson’s aphorism and say, “if a person is tired of Toronto, they need to peel the onion more.”
Apart from the postcard panorama places like the waterfront or the beach, I’ve grown fond of the city’s flea markets. Often found in former industrial buildings or grocery stores far from the city’s core, they’re a multicultural blend of antique stalls, food courts and independent enterprises of all manner under one roof. Favourites include Dr. Flea’s Flea Market in north Etobicoke, the Downsview Park Merchants Market and the Toronto Weston Flea Market.
In this increasingly expensive city these places represent the cheapest of rents and are a first layer of entrepreneurship. Like strip malls, they may not appear on postcards but they are the city’s most ambitious places, each stall or store somebody’s dream staked out in the place they’ve chosen to call home. Seeing all that can make it worth Toronto fighting for.
Just like the skyline, the retail landscape in this city changes quickly too, so it was nice to see that Café Diplomatico on College St. in Little Italy received a Heritage Toronto plaque a few weeks ago during its 50th year in operation. Still independent, it’s a comfort that it still exists, and why the flea markets are so captivating: who will still be here in 50 years?