week 4 25 january 2012 geog 4280 | imagining toronto copyright © amy lavender harris 1 week 4 the...

Week 425 January 2012

GEOG 4280 | Imagining TorontoCopyright © Amy Lavender Harris

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Week 4

The City of Neighbourhoods

GEOG 4280 3.0 | Imagining TorontoDepartment of Geography

Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies

York UniversityWinter Term 2011-2012

“If it is true that forests of gestures are manifest in the streets, their movement cannot be captured in a picture, nor can the meaning of their movements be circumscribed in a text. Their rhetorical transplantation carries away and displaces the analytical, coherent proper meanings of urbanism; it constitutes a “wandering of the semantic” produced by masses that make some parts of the city disappear and exaggerate others, distorting it, fragmenting it, and diverting it from its immobile order.”

[Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.]



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“[Walking is] a spatial acting out, a kind of narrative, and the paths and places direct our choreography. This regular moving from one point to another is a kind of mapping, a kind of narrative understanding. Paths link familiar places and bring the possibility for repeated actions. Different paths enact different stories of action. Walking is like a story, a series of events, for which the land acts as a mnemonic. aimless walking represented a radical insubordination to capitalism.”

Mike Pearson & Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology.



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“I seek a poetry that is vital, alive in responding to the city dynamically and dramatically, and one that urges its readers to move off the page to create meaning in the poem—and constructs a meaning that is activated only when the reader has engaged with the city in a like manner. A poetry that rereads the streets, the signage, the geography and cultural atmosphere of Toronto in its very structure. That is, not a poem about the Humber River, but a poem that attempts to become, in its rhythm, language, sound effect, the Humber. Not a poem describing walking through Kensington Market, but a poem that creates the psychological experience of walking in Kensington through verbal dissonance, register shifting, typography and juxtaposition.”

[Stephen Cain, from “Annexing a Space for Poetry in the New Toronto.”]



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Toronto is …

“a score of cities joined together by geographical propinquity.” (Hugh Garner, 1970)

a place where “an antique administration drags on / Like a bunch of small villages rolled into one.” (The Brothers-In-Law,” 1966)

a city where “the streets proceed tiresomely through the neighbourhoods in which each house tries to be more ordinary than the next.” (Stephen Marche, 2005)

A place where “underneath the flourish and ostentation” of the new Toronto is “the old city, street after street of thick red brick houses, with their porch pillars like the off-white stems of toad-stools and their watchful, calculating windows. Malicious, grudging, vindictive, implacable.” (Margaret Atwood, 1988)



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“Toronto is not a city in the modern sense of a unified whole. […] Toronto is, instead, a linked series of towns held loosely together by the gravitational force of its downtown core and the pinned-in-place effect of the surveillance rod we call the CN Tower. […] There is a physical centre, in the sense of a summoning of vectors like a centre of gravity, but there is no normative or mythic one, no single agora or narrative.”

Mark Kingwell, “All Show.” In Toronto: A City Becoming, 2008.



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“Toronto has no social classes— Only the Masseys and the Masses,”

B.K. Sandwell, 1952.



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“Our lives in the Forties and Fifties were insular and “unreal”—unconnected to the WASP reality of Toronto, unconnected to the rural reality of Canada. We knew almost nothing beyond the Village, the downtown department stores where we’d sometimes wander on Saturday afternoons and charge clothes to our fathers’ accounts, and the bits of northern Ontario where we summered and wondered at the people who stayed there after Labor Day.”

Erna Paris, “Ghetto of the Mind” in The Toronto Book.



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“Don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not like the projects you see on TV, with drive-by shootings, Chihuahua-sized rats, and kids falling down elevator shafts. The Jungle is just a worn-down kind of place where the kids run wild and herds of cats live out back by the garages. It’s right on the edge of an industrial wasteland—factories, a steel mill and a strip mall a couple blocks down. Some kids at school call the place Welfare Towers, which is a lie. People here work. Most of them. They’re just not rich.”

[Graham McNamee, Acceleration.]



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Textures of Kensington Market



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Soon she was in the midst of the market area. It was a narrow, labyrinthine network of streets and alleys. Even in the cold air, the smells were so strong she could taste them on her tongue. Chickens and rabbits and pigeons in cages, fish and rotting garbage, cooking cabbage and meat. The little tilting houses were pushed right up to the sidewalk, which was covered with pickle barrels and half-frozen rotting lettuce leaves and a steaming pile of what might have been chicken guts and newspapers written in an odd squiggly script.

[Lauren B. Davis, The Stubborn Season, 2002]



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When Chayelle came to us as stepmother I was six years old. We lived in rooms over the synagogue on Bellevue Avenue; and Yankev with his wife, Henye, and their daughter, Malke, who was a dipper at Willard’s Chocolates and engaged to be married to a druggist, lived around the corner from us on Augusta Avenue. Their youngest son, Pesach, lived with his wife, Lily, in the upstairs flat of his father’s house. Their other four sons were domiciled with their wives and children around and about the city.

[Shirley Faessler, “Henye.”]



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Goodbaum and Mandelbaum and Birmbaum and Applebaum. The names of Baldwin Street. What names! Names to rejoice in. Names to celebrate. Goldberg and Hershberg and Bloomberg and Rosenberg. And just plain Berg. Altman, Lieberman, Grossman, Goldman […] Gelman, Simon, Levinson, Liebovitz, Brodsky, Sroka, Starkman, Salem, Seiden. And more. Mel Lastman became Mayor of Toronto. Joe Berman founded Cadillac Fairview. Arthur Kruger was Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Toronto. Frank Gehry, architect, renowned worldwide. Baldwin Street boys. Alumni of the ghetto.

[Alvin Rakoff, “Names.”]



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As I turn onto Kensington Avenue, I experience the strangest sense of deja vu, an odd sensation of truly coming home. Victorian houses, tarted up beyond their era in bold primary colours, now sell vintage clothing. ... I go into food shops where they immediately ask if I want to taste something, a morsel of bread at the bakery, smoked chevre from a cheese shop.

[Sarah Dearing, Courage My Love. Stoddart, 2001.]



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May smelled great in Kensington Market. The fossilized dog shit had melted and washed away in the April rains, and the smells were all springy ones, loam and blossoms and spilled tetrapak fruit punch left behind by the pan-ethnic street-hockey league that formed up spontaneously in front of his house. When the winds blew from the east, he smelled the fish stalls on Spadina, salty and redolent of Chinese barbecue spices. When it blew from the north, he smelled baking bread in the kosher bakeries and sometimes a rare whiff of roasting garlic from the pizzas in the steaming ovens at Massimo’s all the way up on College. The western winds smelled of hospital incinerator, acrid and smoky.

[Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. Tor, 2004.]



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The Market this night is deserted, after three, feral catscomb for fishheads; diableriemists rising from sewer gratings, the moon through scaffolding, crescented.

There is the sound of breaking glass, Carol and I see clothesdrift from a window, inspirited – ghosts; a junkie is tossing his girlfriend's dresses, black, edgedin jessamine and picotee.

[Lynn Crosbie, 'Kensington Market (Summer 1987). In Queen Rat, McClelland & Stewart, 1998.]



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The least-scary bar on the street was called The Last Temptation. Once again, the significance was lost to her, but the names in this place were contributing to her state of mind, functioning as subconscious signposts for a new direction. A long-haired, leftover hippie sat at one of the back tables with a guitar, playing for no one. He sang about a woman gone crazy on the street, and since the entire back wall was covered with an image of the one she’d just left, Nova believed his song was being composed on the spot and exclusively for her benefit.




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“Her Kensington Market had been ordered in an efficient separation of products, and she labelled the main roads, for simplified reference, as Fish Street, Clothes and Vegetable Avenues. How much easier life could be if all streets had such utilitarian names; a person would always know precisely what to expect from an address.

[Sarah Dearing, Courage My Love. Stoddart 2001.]



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She bought an assortment of second-hand clothes … a “fill a bag” sale that supplied her with a small but charming wardrobe for twenty-five dollars. … She dressed in her new used clothes, the look stolen from some of the women she’d seen that day. Gap walking shorts and matching taupe tee-shirt were replaced with purple vintage brassiere. … The bra was the best, creating a style of voluptuous and pointed tartiness that had always evaded her. So costumed, she intered her new world. [....]

A sign by the cash register advertised a room for rent, fifty dollars per week, and a quick inspection revealed a single bed, a rough wooden chair, and an incongruous mauve bidet that challenged green ivy wallpaper for dominance over the space. She thought the bidet charming, thought it might make her feel she was living in a Parisian garret, and paid in advance for a month. There was no linen, but it was stifling anyhow, so she lay on the bare and stained mattress, thinking with satisfaction, if only her husband could see his Irish princess now.




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My humble abode is located above Neptune’s Nook Fish Shop, which is owned by friends. … To get into my apartment I enter through the back from a side lane. … Even though most of my simple apartment is above, I have this one special room downstairs, a converted storeroom at the back of the fish shop. It is my little retreat from the hubbub of the Market, well soundproofed and equipped with a Hepa filter to blot out the stink of fish, bleach and sundry Market smells.”

[Vivian Meyer', Bottom Bracket. Sumach, 2006.]



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Commerce, by which I don't meanthe Canadian Imperial Bank of,but hand-to-hand transactions,smiles on the faces of buyers and sellers,a laugh here, a shouted joke there,live fowl in splattered cages,a counter with a hundred pairs of fish eyes not-so-glassily staring outfrom a stores' dark cavern ...sun's glare streaming down on all of itwith the freshness of spring, with the warm magic breath of living.

[Raymond Souster, "Saturday Afternoon at Kensington Market", from Collected Poems, Volume Six. Oberon, 1986.]



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“O those lovely black corrupt olives. Nowhere else have I seen such generous ones winking at me with the moist eyes of a thousand Fatimas. I lost my heart to them on my first visit and haunt the place ever since. Fondly, I gaze at them and the crowds diverse as the maps of the world. They also hunger for sensations only this fabulous realm can gratify.”

[Irving Layton, 1983. “Varied Hues.”]



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“The pigeons strutted stiffly, collapsed in clucking confusion in their confining wire cages stacked one on the other at the edge of the sidewalk, their acrid excrement spilling and dripping like a thin grey gruel into the drain. The cheese stores, narrow, crowded, brash with blaring radios, emitted the rankness of age and curdle. Outside the vegetable shops, quantities of discarded fruits and greens suppurated in the heat like miniature heaps of compost. […] Kensington Market, with its air of international peasantry, with its hand-painted signs in Portuguese, Hindi, Italian, with its promise of French pastries, Jamaican meat patties, Jewish bagels, with its intestinal streets clogged by cars and vans, with its implosive hothouse atmosphere, was a disappointment.”

[Neil Bissoondath; A Casual Brutality.]



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“On Saturdays Nadine, Carla’s stepmother, would take her to Kensington Market, where laden with bags Carla would wait, her body in an impatient and resigned burning, as Nadine talked to the storekeepers, haggling an extra piece of fish, an extra lime, an extra pepper, mistrustful of the weighing of every item. […] Carla stood waiting, her nose rejecting the smells, her throat gagging on rotten fish and rotten vegetables, her face turning away from the appalling blood stains on butchers’ aprons at European Meats, her whole being wishing to be elsewhere.”

[Dionne Brand, What We All Long For.]



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“The Market is no neat theme park of Shopping Past. It is a living, bruising, sweaty history. [....] To my knowledge, the residents of the Market today are almost all recent immigrants too poor to do otherwise, university students playing poor, and a handful of sophisticated urbanists who, for some reason, want to live among the Market’s racket and odours.”

[John Bentley Mays, from Emerald City.]



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“They don't bother to venture off Kensington Avenue, so they ignore the food, the privilege of abundance, never stop to think that the food nourished the formation of the Market, the way it does all life. Tradition and history and community are irrelevant to these searchers of fun wear. Their parents see a vast selection of cheese, bread, and cheaper produce but less convenience than a supermarket, terrible parking, crawling traffic. They see dirt and E. coli, Poor-Peopleville, and wish for just a little more regard for their needs please. Kensington Market provides them with once-a-year entertainment shopping ...”

[Sarah Dearing, Courage My Love. Stoddard, 2001.]



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“On the business side of things, Cyrus York has recently embarked on an ambitious project to redevelop the city’s Kensington Market, a ramshackle collection of vegetable merchant stands and drug-dens sitting on top of the most eligible real estate in the city. His associates have been applying gentle pressure on the Market’s landlords, compelling them to part with their properties. The threat—barely whispered—is that he is prepared to make formal complaints to the fire marshall about all the regulations currently being flaunted. Thus will come crippling renovation expenses to destroy them all.”

[Sean Dixon, 2010. The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn. Coach House, 11.]



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“Underneath, like all markets, it possessed an ancient rhythmic hum created from trade, community, basic needs met, marriages -- or at least couplings -- made. This same music turns into white noise at a modern mall, some special secret element removed by its enclosure or the attempts at convenience.”

[Sarah Dearing, Courage My Love, Stoddard 2001.]



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It is the strangeness of the past persistent, the past persisting into a future which probably has no place for it.” Turning to Toronto’s Kensington Market in particular, she adds, “But most of the market dealers were of a generation that is gradually passing away. And the customers were mainly fairly recent immigrants and those of us who like to drop in on the past, occasionally, when we have time.

[Adele Wiseman, Old Markets, New World.]



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This is my refuge. It is where I can be invisible, or, if not invisible, at least drunk. ... The smell from the market doesn't bother me. I've been here before, me and the old lady. We know the price of things. Which is why I feel safe in telling stories here.

[Dionne Brand, “At the Lisbon Plate”. In Sans Souci and Other Stories. Women’s Press, 1989.]



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week 4 25 january 2012 geog 4280 | imagining toronto copyright © amy lavender harris 1 week 4 the...

Documents

old city

city of neighbourhoodsgeog

new toronto

different paths

aimless walking

like manner

kind of mapping

cultural atmosphere