Toronto is a Bowie town
David Bowie haunts Toronto. In the alleyway between the Bloor Cinema and the Bathurst subway station he’s there on the wall, with short orange hair and the lightning bolt face makeup from his Aladdin Sane album. The mural has been there a while, long before his death last week, but it seems like an appropriate memorial.
There will be others that will appear around the city, as Bowie’s death affected such a wide assortment of people, even those usually immune to mourning celebrity deaths.
I’ve found, to my surprise, I’ve been thinking about Bowie a lot and what it was I liked about him. Some of those feelings are the same reasons I like Toronto. There’s a “Bowieness” to this place, the essence of what makes it interesting.
These aren’t the places where he played in Toronto, though many people have connections to them having seen his shows in venues such as Maple Leaf Gardens, the O’Keefe Centre, the old CNE Stadium or the Guvernment nightclub, but rather a sensibility to this place that is, at times, like Bowie’s own approach to his life and work.
Bowie didn’t have one particular style, in music or fashion; instead he tried all sorts of things. That’s kind of how Toronto went about building itself. Some lament there is no “Toronto style” or uniform look that distinguishes this city from other ones. Instead we’ve tried all sorts of things: Victorian and Edwardian neighbourhoods; mid-century modern midrise apartment buildings; glass box skyscrapers; dainty suburban bungalows; monster homes on postage-stamp lots; big postmodern 1980s condos; and so on.
“Not afraid to try new things” could be written on the sign at the city limits and on Bowie’s tombstone alike. Maybe it didn’t always work, but the shape shifting was and is kind of thrilling and never boring.
It’s almost as if, like Bowie, the city was excited about something and really got into it, then moved on to something else. That might be why he, and this city, were and are able to connect with so many people: there’s something for everybody to like or get into.
There’s also a kind of familiar weirdness to both Bowie and Toronto. Despite being rather popular — Bowie sold millions of albums and Toronto has attracted millions of people — both have been able to retain their strangeness.
Perhaps the most beloved of the strange things in Toronto is the Archer.
Installed in Nathan Phillips Square, the large abstract sculpture’s arrival in 1966 was not without controversy and many people in straight-laced Toronto were scratching their heads wondering what it was. The sculpture was just a bit too avant garde for the mainstream and city council opted not to pay for its installation in the brand new square. Yet, it wasn’t too weird, as private money was raised and it was installed a year after the square opened.
Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find somebody who isn’t at least grudgingly fond of it. It grew on the city the way the strangeness of Ziggy Stardust became part of the pop culture establishment. Less controversial but just as avant guard is Henry Moore’s Large Two Forms on the corner of Dundas and McCaul Sts. by the Art Gallery of Ontario. Odd looking certainly but it’s impossible to imagine that corner without them now.
The AGO itself is a strange amal- gam of additions, the latest by Frank Gehry, but not a “real Frank Gehry,” some would argue, as the addition had to incorporate what was there already, blending and mixing the styles. A very Bowie kind of building.
Sometimes awkward, a little weird and not the usual thing, the Bowie parts of the city complicate this place, keep it from being too uniform and always the same, giving everybody, especially the people who might feel a little weird themselves, a place in the city that feels like it was made for them. Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef.
‘Not afraid to try new things’ could be written on the sign at Toronto’s city limits and on Bowie’s tombstone alike