By Gregory Clark, September 3, 1927.
We show our visitors the Humber, but not the Don.
We parade them through Sunnyside, but we avoid the shady side.
We present to them the university, though the jail is a quite handsome building.
We drive them through miles of wealthy residential streets where nobody lives at all. And fail to show them the hundreds of miles of homely residential streets where people really live.
We show them the churches and say Toronto is the city of churches. We show them the trees and say Toronto is the city of trees.
But we fail to mention that Toronto is the city of policemen, the city of poles, telegraph poles, telephone poles, hydro poles, the city of parked cars, the city of licenses, drivers’ licenses, dog licenses, car licenses, liquor licenses, gun licenses, fishing licenses, the city of narrow streets.
We strive to show strangers that we have everything that everybody else has. We hide the things that are our own. We want them to think that Toronto is just like every other city. But we know in our hearts that it is strange, even to us.
For a dollar and a half you can get a two hour, twenty-two mile ride in one of the city’s own sightseeing coaches. They run you up Jarvis street, through Rosedale, calling out the names of the prominent and distinguished owners of some of the heaviest houses, across to Casa Loma, along Davenport road, down to High Park, the Humber, Sunnyside, the Lake Shore drive and back downtown. The shorter dollar drive takes in the university, parliament buildings and the “swell” residential regions.
But if you want to see what Toronto really is you must see not one but two of everything. For each cathedral you must see a mission. For each mansion you must see a four-roomed bungalow.
The Chicago man, sitting in the sight-seeing coach, thinks how different Toronto is from Chicago. The air is so pure and sweet. The Chicago man, however, does not know about West Toronto. He should be taken to the packing house district and he would feel quite at home. The story is that the Guelph train was reeling through the night on its way to Toronto. A country lady, amusing herself by counting the eggs in the basket on her lap, found a bad one. Yes, it was a bad one. She tossed it out the train window. But the wind of the train caught the egg and bore it in at another window further down, where the brakesman sat dozing, his lantern between his feet, his chin on his chest. The egg struck him on the chest.
Leaping to his feet and seizing the lantern, the brakesman shouted:
“West Toronto! West Toronto station!”
Gotham on Queen Street
“Take the New Yorker round about so that he never sees Queen street, east and west of Yonge, and he will feel he is indeed on foreign soil. But New Yorkers should be shown Queen street, a few blocks west or east of Yonge and he will think he is in Manhattan. For, despite all the ballyhoo about New York, despite all the rubberneck trips we have been taken on in New York, the fact is that the vast majority of the streets of New York are hardly distinguishable from Queen street in its shabbier stretches. The shops are the same, the things in the shops, the people, the language.
The Buffalo man has only to be taken south-east of the King Edward, instead of northwest, and he would think he was in Buffalo.
There are numerous parts of Rosedale which in the houses, gardens and everything but the pinched and limited space around them are almost as nice as Port Hope. Streets of bungalows north of St. Clair might have been taken holus-bolus1 from Kitchener, Oshawa, Stratford.
Toronto has so many things that nobody else has got that we ought to parade them before our guests. What do we want to do but give our visitors a true, honest opinion of the city?
Scores of cities and towns have rivers not unike the Humber, with parks along the banks and bungalows and boathouses and dance-pavilions. But how many cities have rivers like the Don?
The Don is peculiarly Toronto’s river. There is history written in its slow waters. One look at the Don and you can read the soul of Toronto. You can tell from it what kind of city government Toronto had fifty years ago, twenty-five, and to-day. The Don demonstrates the spirit of progress, which sets beauty and public health far above ugly commercialism. It tells of Toronto’s determination, for the job of cleaning up the Don to its present state of beauty must surely have been a desperate undertaking. Any city can have a Humber, especially if it has a few private citizens, with excellent real estate notions, to promote the beautification of it. But the Don’s development is solely to the credit of the city.
Why we take our guests out to the Humber, with its real estate opportunities so badly exposed, when we might show them the Don, with all its moral lessons. and not the slightest real estate suggestion about it save its upper and unseen reaches; is one of those mysteries.
The odd effect of a two hour sight-seeing tour of Toronto as offered by the spiel-coaches is to create an idea of smallness. The one hour cruise seems to bind the city into a town, a university town with a number of venerable churches fully thirty years old.
The emphasis is on the old. But Toronto is young. We wind around about Jarvis street, Rosedale, the lower edge of the Hill, with never a glimpse, a sensation of the enormous vista of Bloor street which flings itself across the city from the uttermost end of Danforth to the Islington end of Bloor. Yonge street, as far as the spieler indicates, is this funny little crowded street full of small shops, like any old cross street in the big cities. We do not show that Yonge street is a pavement that runs from Lake Ontario to North Bay, and beginning to be suburban Toronto nearly all the way.
Toronto of To-day
These deserted mansions bunched together in Rosedale are not Toronto. They are Toronto in 1900. Toronto, 1927, is the thousands of acres of streets and homes spreading away up Yonge street, the whole townships of happy bungalows to the west, the east. Sightseers in Toronto should be run from Islington to Scarboro along the one street, Bloor-Danforth. They should do Yonge street from the bay to Hog’s Hollow.
The Royal Bank could make a fat interest out of air if it would designate one of its elevators for tourists and run them to the roof to look out over the city.
Should we impress visitors with our sameness, our age, the wealth of individuals, or with our differences from other cities, our youth, the independence of hundreds of thousands of people who live far-flung in the finest suburbs there are in America?
The spielers on the coaches make a great point of calling attention to the T. T. C. car barns and the fine T. T. C. cars and so forth. If the spielers could run visitors through miles and miles of homes, and point out that it is the city’s wonderful transportation facilities that makes all this spread possible and renders unnecessary the piled-up apartments of the cities most of the visitors come from, T. T. C. would mean a great deal more than handsome car barns and pretty red cars.
Brownstone distillers mansions, colleges, churches, amusement parks – everything everybody else has got we show.
We speak of them in their own language. “The spire on that cathedral,” says the spieler, “is the tallest spire on the North American continent.”
And as the visitors all know that they have the tallest spire on the North American continent in their own home town it doesn’t matter.
We are shown a white candy box sort of a house and are informed that this is the home of the president of the Lizzie Maria candy works, whose stores downtown are decorated in much the same style as this house, and you will observe, ladies and gentlemen, that the number of the house is the same as the price of his candy per pound – forty-nine cents!
Maybe the guests would rather see the house Dr. Banting lives in – the savior of ten thousand lives per annum. Or the section of the city that was burned by the Americans in 1812. Or the site of the hanging of the rebels – just across the street from the tallest spire on the North American continent – rebels who dared to assert that Canadians should have representative government just as if they were a British people. Or maybe they would rather see the house the city did not present to George Young.
There is so much to see in a city of over ten churches and five picture shows that a reliable guide book cannot be prepared in news paper space. But the Toronto of the rubberneck wagons, the Toronto of the brief guide folders, the brownstone Toronto, the official Toronto, being no different from any other city in this part of the Caucasian world is far different from the Toronto that produces a strangely large share of world-renowned scientists, that marches the biggest Orange procession in the known world, that disappears in summer to the wilds, men, women and children, that operates the biggest annual world’s fair, that owns its public utilities, that won’t support a single cabaret or dive, that votes the same way forever, that had only five or six delicatessen stores and fills the early September air with the odor of preserving ketchup and gherkins and peaches, that is not American and not English, but something pretty much its very own.
And it never shows itself on the city hall steps, nor anywhere around the tallest spire in America, nor in pretentious residential neighborhoods, but is scattered and spread over thirty two square miles of city and another dozen square miles of suburb, very neighborly – over a fence, somewhat dour, not hospitable in the American fashion, yet not inhospitable in the least.
“A city,” old Col. Denison used to say, “unpopular both with burglars and commercial travelers.”
But intensely popular with some three-quarters of a million Torontonians.
Editor’s Note:
- Holus-bolus is an old-fashioned word that means all at once, all together. ↩︎
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