A SIGN OF THE TIMES
Edward Keenan peers into Toronto’s future and finds something rotten (and it’s not just Scarborough subway costs),
TORONTO, 2037— If you’ll follow me, folks, the next stop on our walking tour is Nathan Phillips Square. Very exciting. Hard hats on, please! Safety glasses too. I don’t have to tell you about the problem of glass windows falling off the Old City Hall Condos right next door, so watch your step.
If you’ve been reading your newsfeeds — I bet some of you are viewing them in your optic displays right now — you’ll know that one of Toronto’s finest annual traditions is underway inside the Scotiabank-City-Hall council chamber. Mayor Stephanie Ford and city council are debating the one-stop Scarborough subway extension that is now planned to go 100 metres, from Kennedy station all the way to the parking lot in a Hydro field across the street, and whether or not to go ahead with it now that the cost is estimated at $745 trillion.
This year marks 25 years of formal debate and sometimes trench warfare on the issue — though LRT-side historians prefer to point out it’s actually 30 years since Transit City first proposed a line in that corridor. Either way, big milestone year, lots of ritual arguments planned, you can see the transit-fan tailgate parties on the west side of the square.
But what I want to show you is one of the city’s most photographed tourist attractions, the iconic Toronto: RO T sign. You’ve all seen millions of pictures of its rust, its dents, its pigeon’s nests, the friendly family of feral raccoons that live in the half-melted “O” shape over there on the right.
Everyone knows that the crumbling sculpture, an urban ruin protected by the heritage department, forms the name of the city, and that at night the letters “RO T” light up in festive colours. It’s the most beloved symbol of the city government’s philosophy.
But what you might not know is that the meaning of the sign wasn’t intended when it was first built. The sign was put in the square — almost as a fun afterthought — during the Pan-Am Games in 2015. At the time, all of the letters lit up! The colours were bright, the edges were clean lines, it was shiny and new. It’s hard to imagine, I know, since its decaying state now seems such an essential part of its visual identity. But it just spelled the name of the city. In big, bright letters. So simple. And people loved it! It quickly became one of the most famous landmarks in the city. Tourists came here just to pose for pictures with it. Children climbed on it. The city briefly considered making a bunch more of them. One city executive in 2016 said it was “the most successful marketing media branding project” he’d ever been involved with. This was kind of fitting — so much of Toronto’s success had been an unplanned happy accident. After all, the 20th-century writer Robert Fulford called Toronto “The Accidental City” in one of his books.
So even though it was meant to be a temporary sign, the government decided to keep it. But then things got really interesting.
By 2017, the vinyl was peeling off. The sign started getting scuffed up. The colours began to fade. Because it was meant to be temporary, it would need some maintenance. The cost of fixing and improving it back then was estimated at $150,000.
To a lot of people, that seemed like a bargain to preserve the beloved symbol — literally the name of the city, right in front of the seat of city government — that had been such a pride and tourism boon. Such a source of pure delight!
But we all know that is not how politics in this city work. So council refused to approve the expense.
Anyone who has studied Toronto history here will know that letting things crumble to pieces because we’re too cheap to maintain them is among the city’s proudest traditions. There’s the RT in Scarborough, of course, which has been powered by passengers taking turns pushing it on foot since 2030. But it goes back further than that.
Way back in the late 1900s, the city let a gorgeous light sculpture at Yorkdale subway station fall into disrepair and then eventually threw it out because they didn’t want to replace a $28 transformer.
In the early decades of the 21st century, public-housing buildings started falling apart so badly that they had to close apartment towers, even though pretty much everyone said they agreed public housing was really important and worth investing in. You see the vacant and rotting ruins of those buildings all around the city today!
And it’s hard to imagine, now that the Gardiner Expressway is so famous as the last elevated expressway left in North America (and now that constantly maintaining it, rebuilding it and gold-plating it as a “signal that the War on the Car is still over” consumes 92 per cent of Toronto’s annual budget), but, for a long time around the turn of the century, pieces of the Gardiner would fall off and land on cars below, because no one could agree to tear it down but no one could agree to spend money fixing it.
Anyhow, that’s what happened with the Toronto sign. It deteriorated further and further, and still no one would spend money to fix it. After a while, its dilapidated state became familiar, even beloved. By the time the second Mayor Ford was running for his second term, the lights in only three letters still worked, giving the sign it’s nowfamiliar “RO T ” appearance at night. He recognized it as such a fitting, perfect symbol of our approach to governance and infrastructure, he adapted it as his campaign slogan: DOUG: “Let it ROT.” After his re-election, of course, that was adopted as the city’s new motto.
And that’s the story of the sign. As symbols of the city go, it’s an enduring one. Watch out — those raccoons do sometimes bite if you don’t feed them before posing for pictures.
OK, now if you’ll step this way across the square, our next stop is historic Osgoode Hall, a source of much revenue for the government ever since we started listing it on Airbnb to keep taxes low in the 2020s. Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire