A halfway mayor on the wrong side of Gardiner debate

The Gardiner Expressway is an impressive structure in that it manages to be so clankingly awful in so many different ways. I can only congratulate the thing, faintly.

I’m as miserable on top of the Gardiner as I’m frightened underneath it. It assaults me visually from above and beneath and on either side. I salute you, bleak midway. You’re as ugly as the Westway, the starkest flyover road in London, and London is a city that knows how to do The Full Ugly.

Esthetically the Gardiner East looks like a human centipede on hideous multiple legs, suffering from an untreated belly rash, raw, reddish and flaking.

It looks like my fingernails after I start peeling the polish off, an unsightly project that always ends half-finished. Wouldn’t it be better to just remove the polish quickly and entirely with acetone on a cottonball, I think.

Instead I do a John Tory, scraping the polish by hand and repainting lumpily.

The view from Lake Shore heading west towards the Gardiner is one of dereliction, an acreage best chosen for failing mattress shops and dumped bodies. It’s ragged and weedy, a festival of winter salt damage, and then you hit the Gardiner itself, rising up to fatuity and featurelessness.

It is a place that is not a place. No one wants to be near it. Every time there’s a desk move in the newsroom, which flat-on faces the Gardiner, I hope not to end up facing the window and the concrete trundle. The city is hopeful but it’s belted in by this stained grey strap.

The Gardiner has to be torn down, even though every glass condo tower that has sprung up — and is springing up — nearby makes demo- lition more difficult. I’m surprised Mayor Tory doesn’t hate the thing because it will become a terrible symbol of his failure.

Toronto needs reasonable density, not sprawl, as the city’s wonderful chief planner, Jennifer Keesmaat, keeps saying. Density is a compliment. People want to live here, so let’s find the most attractive and interesting way of helping them do that.

Tory’s suggested teardown/buildup half-measures — the man goes partway on everything — are a false economy. Build a boulevard instead. Doing things on the cheap will come back and bite, like my own little Gardiner.

I live on a major bus route, and the buses speed dangerously down the hill, the road surface becoming ever more raddled. People complained for years. The city did a half-repair on the cheap in May, patchworking the route on a coin toss. Some intersections were repaved but not others. Further down, the south lane was repaved but not the north.

The bus route is now worse than ever, the transition from new to old asphalt making the hill even bumpier. But one street over, a road along a ravine with some of the most expensive homes in Toronto but almost no traffic, has been entirely repaved.

It’s not malice or laziness. I suspect they simply repaved the wrong road. As always, a painful discussion with the city ensues. A city engineer came to the house a few years ago, telling me he doubted we had a problem.

“What does your husband think?” he asked me. “I’d like to talk to him about it.”

This remark left me aghast, again as always.

Solution: the half-repair needs to be ripped up in the course of a complete repaving, so that people can ride by bus from subway station to streetcar line, and live on a street in comfort. We need buses, not cars.

Solution: the Gardiner needs to be torn down completely, rejuvenating a huge section of land and bringing people beauty and space. Developers agree; they’re hungry to build. I don’t mind spending a few more minutes in traffic. The era of the car is over, we do not design downtowns to cater to the trucking industry, and we need better ways to enter a beautiful city bordering on one of the world’s largest lakes.

But here’s the problem. I’ve given up, gone limp and numb, the way I do on Air Canada, the way I do when I ride the bus. I will no longer communicate with the city about this because it always ends badly and I can’t take the aggravation.

And this is how half-measures happen. Tory was a half-measure himself. Toronto had a choice between a brave Olivia Chow and an idiotic Ford brother. It went with Tory and look at us now. A hybrid mayor wants a hybrid expressway.

What slaughters me every time I climb the Gardiner East is that ludicrous “museum.” It’s a row of stumps from the remnants of the last time the city demolished a bit of Gardiner, kept white and polished to remind us of sic transit gloria.

Why salute the memory of something we didn’t have the courage to smash in the first place? Why elect John Half-Tory? Why buy a Ford Semi?

In Toronto, the subway is a network of shutdowns, the bus route is rubble, the Gardiner is a trip through a cemetery, and we honour only the car.

And think how much worse it would all be if the Pan Am Games weren’t set to begin. Thanks, Pan Am! This is Toronto in show-off mode, prepped and polished for the world to inspect. Sweaty and unshaven, we wear the Gardiner East like a 1950s bathrobe and carpet slippers.

Come on in, people. Excuse the mess.