Toro(mance)to

I've been thinking a lot about civic placemaking. Stratford is an arts town—we have theatre, dahling, not to mention a festival of lights, independent shopping and dining, and gardens galore. We lack certain things, of course—playgrounds come to mind—but because the typical Stratfordite for both residency and visiting is older, moneyed, and retired, playgrounds are down the list of civic needs. They're simply not sympatico with the story Stratford tells about itself. 

I've been watching Dimension 20, the real-play D&D game that streams on Dropout, and right now I'm into The Unsleeping City, a story arc that's set in a magical New York City. It's masterfully good: funny, tragic, well-plotted, great characters, terrific improv. But the thing I'm most fascinated by is that this story is legible to me, an outsider, at all. It relies so heavily on knowing New York City. There are jokes that dunk on Staten Island, battles with the mythological alligators in the sewers, and the lion statues outside the New York Public Library have a speaking role. You know the ones. 

I've been to New York a half-dozen times throughout the years, and much of my media, from The New Yorker to The Royal Tenenbaums to Brooklyn 99, orbits the region. My favourite educational institution is the Tenement Museum, a living-history museum about immigration in the Lower East Side. I've been to Harlem and Brooklyn for concerts, I know how to pronounce LaGuardia, and I can confidently navigate the subway, unless it's an express. I've I know a lot about New York, but the funny thing is, I don't think I know more than the typical global citizen. 

Okay, let's pause there. Because as much as I heart New York—an average amount?—it's certainly not where I'm from! I'm Canadian, baby! I've lived in three provinces and visited four more. I've eaten poutine and maple syrup, skated on the Rideau Canal, visited Green Gables (and watched a kid throw up in a parking lot after an all-you-can-eat lobster buffet, which was actually much more impressive), climbed Mount Royal, hiked in the Rockies, and, uh, went on my first date in Victoria, B.C. (holla at Big Frank). Like all Canadian schoolchildren, I tried and failed to internalize the difference between Upper Canada and Lower Canada (they're not where you think!), learned about les coureurs de bois, and attended many Remembrance Day observances about the World Wars. 

Canadian national identity is often considered with a sense of slight desperation. We've had moments of cultural ascendancy—the Montreal indie pop scene, the Vancouver Olympic Games—but the sheer gravitational pull of America on global pop culture means drawing focus to Canada is nearly impossible. To keep it all in scale, I'll keep the comparison to Canada's largest city: Toronto. 

Compared to American cities, there is, I think, a lack of romantic narrative about Canadian places. We have avatars of American places: the New York socialite, club kid, rapper, or gangster, or cop. Other American places do this, too; consider the San Francisco hippie, or the Hollywood starlet. Hell, let's throw the Florida Man in there for good measure. But who is the Torontonian? A finance guy? A momo restauranteur? A soundstage actress? 

This extends into and beyond aesthetics. New York was being built up during an era when Art Deco was dominant; Toronto's big build sprint happened while Brutalism was big, so many of our buildings are, ah...blocky? Our skyline is recognizable: the Skydome (never the Rogers Centre, thank you) is a fun engineering marvel, and the CN Tower is still impressive. But there is no great writer who has taken Toronto as her muse, no great Toronto album, and very few movies in which Toronto gets to play herself. On the plus side, there are noteworthy galleries and museums, some very fine educational institutions, a hockey team that can't quite take home the cup, and a film festival that does carry water with the industry. When you live there, Toronto's great gift is that it is a series of neighbourhoods, but it does make it harder to figure out who we are when the vibe changes every few blocks. 

I'm not trying to put Toronto down. I lived there for a long time, and visit often. I'm picking on it mostly because my own small town isn't a known quantity whatsoever, and comparing Stratford to New York City is ridiculous. I also recognize that any competition with New York is challenging, because, like all global cities, it's singularity is what sets it apart. However, and maybe I'm too close to the source to judge, there is a lack of essence in Toronto that makes it difficult to distill. International cities have this—think of the social housing of Vienna, the royal buildings of London, the ancient cathedrals of Paris. There are people-types that go along with that: the socialist mayor, the English snoot, the French snob. So what is Toronto's person-type? 

Civic self-consciousness is important: what do we take pride in, as residents? What draws us as visitors? What stories do we tell about our place in the world, and how we live in it? New York has a romance to it because it has been stuffed full or artists, writers, and storytellers; urbanists, weirdos, meme-makers; historians, architects, and builders. It has been mythologized and narrativized. Maybe it's one of only a handful of places in the world with that level of story stuffed into it. Maybe it's unusual.  

What I want for us, for Canadians, is that same sense of importance. We're a notoriously nice people, but that doesn't have to come with tall-poppy syndrome. We deserve our stories. One of the wildest books I've read lately was Station Eleven, which opens in a theatre in downtown Toronto. The jolt I felt when I realized I had been in that room, I knew the very grocery store where the protagonist shopped, I could picture the swirl of snow over Yonge Street, made the city beautiful. I want to able to step into a story about Toronto, about Canada, and fall in love.