Forgery League: The Big Here

Sunday 3 February 2008

Ruins

As cities go, Detroit is pretty much the ultimate American example of what can go wrong. From its height during the heyday of the auto industry, the Motor City fell hard, strangled by freeways, unbalanced by “white flight”, and battered by the decline of US automakers. Attempts at jump-starting the ailing downtown were mostly miserable failures, in particular the fortress-like Renaissance Center.

It took until the 1990s to see any serious signs of recovery, including major investment in renovation and new construction. Today, downtown Detroit is still full of abandoned buildings - shacks and mansions, skyscrapers and factories. (Visit DetroitYES and Forgotten Detroit for a photo tour of some of the most remarkable of these. And perhaps most poignant of all, see the photos from Sweet Juniper of the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository, still full of rotting books and educational materials - “a warehouse full of abandoned hope.”)

Naturally, all this has made the city a magnet for urban explorers in search of “lost” places to discover, and others drawn by the peculiar romance of urban decay. Writing in Metropolis magazine, Camilo José Vergara put forth a fanciful but entirely serious notion:

“I propose that as a tonic for our imagination, as a call for renewal, as a place within our national memory, a dozen city blocks of pre-Depression skyscrapers be stabilized and left standing as ruins: an American Acropolis. We could transform the nearly 100 troubled buildings into a grand national historic park of play and wonder, an urban Monument Valley.”

Not surprisingly, preservationists and downtown boosters were aghast. “If you allow nature to win back man-made objects you are being anti-urban,” one argued. “It’s an insult to America, to what America stands for,” another told the New York Times.

Personally, I love the idea (though I can understand why Detroiters, ever-sensitive about their city’s reputation, would be especially touchy about it). Ruins serve as a sort of memento mori on a grand scale, reminding us of our mortality. They’re not tidy or comfortable. They nudge us toward thinking about time and life, on a scale that’s bigger than our own lives.

And when ruins become overrun by the wild again, they can also be reminders of the endless abundance of nature, that power of rebirth I wrote about a while back. And, as Vergara argues, “Such buildings need to be preserved as symbols of the aspirations they represented when built.”

Thinking along the same lines, artist John McKinnon headed a project here in Toronto to preserve the concrete pillars from the eastern leg of the Gardiner Expressway. The kilometer-long elevated spur, a vestige of a plan to extend the expressway all the way through Scarborough, was torn down in 2001, but the pillars remain as a peculiar tribute to the spirit of “Big Daddy” Gardiner’s Toronto (I’m sure he would have been livid). Stripped of the dangling bits of rusted rebar, tidied up and refinished (how very Toronto), the pillars are slowly being overgrown with ivy.

Another “deliberate ruin” here in town is the Cloud Garden Parkette near Bay and Adelaide (pictured above). Architects Baird and Sampson, together with artist Margaret Priest, took inspiration from Giovanni Piranesi, whose etchings of Roman ruins had captured the imagination of 18th-century Europe. They set out to design and construct a Modernist ruin, with beams and rough bits of wall peeking through here and there. It’s a bit contrived, but the park itself is delightful, somehow creating all kinds of intimate, contemplative spaces all packed onto a relatively tiny lot - dense without feeling crowded. All that and a greenhouse with a little rainforest conservatory too. But I digress.

The parkette was built as a concession by the developers of the Bay-Adelaide Centre. However, before the office tower was completed, the 1980s office-building boom in Toronto staggered to a halt, and for years a vast concrete stump loomed over the Cloud Garden - a real ruin next to a fake one. (The story is told in more detail in Robert Fulford’s book Accidental City.)

Now, at last, a tower is being built on the site. It fills in a significant gap, but I’ll miss the Bay-Adelaide Stump. Okay, as a memento, it was more a reminder of financial folly than of impending doom, but it was like our own tiny, tidy version of Vergara’s historic ruins park.

Even ruins aren’t forever.

Sunday 30 September 2007

Nuit Blanche 2007

Once again, Nuit Blanche was a smash. I’ve never seen another event bring the city to life in the same way - nothing like the sensory overload of Pride or Caribana, though those are great in their own ways. The streets all over downtown were packed with people of all ages, wandering from one site to the next, bumping into friends and excitedly trading recommendations. And there was such a sense of curiosity and discovery in the air - what’s that weird light in the distance? What’s waiting around the next corner?

Wonderful things:

Swintak’s ThunderEgg Alley: A Dumpster Diver’s Paradise, wherein a dingy alleyway near Spadina and College was turned into a tiny hotel using found furnishings, complete with spa, boutique and a front desk clerk who asked if we’d like to book the room (a rather cozy-looking dumpster) for a ten-minute stay. The earliest slot available wasn’t until 5:45am, sadly - it would have been great to hold a room party.

Brian Cort’s It’s A Cloud: in the north atrium of the Eaton Centre, people lay on their backs in a meadow of artificial grass and shrubbery, watching the sky projected on a screen high above while oddly-shaped clouds drifted by. The clouds, in fact, were painted by visitors to the exhibit using black paint, then scanned and cunningly rendered by a Java app.

I still maintain that the best “interactive art” is usually the simplest. In front of the Italian Consulate, there was a giant sheet of phosphorescent paper on one wall, and a dude with a great big strobe light. Strike a pose and flash! - your shadow remained frozen on the wall. A circle had formed around the screen, and people stepped in and out: oddballs with flags who’d apparently drifted in from another performance, couples kissing (to general murmurs of “Awwww…”), dancers showing off their uncanny flexibility, half a dozen people hastily lining up to form a single multi-armed silhouette.

King’s College Circle, in the heart of the U of T campus, was a scene straight out of War of the Worlds or Quatermass - an apparent UFO crash site, surrounded by emergency personnel and people in hazmat suits. I understand there was more to the piece (Marman and Borins’ Event Horizon, pictured above) but we didn’t get to see that.

The park beneath Will Alsop’s famous “tabletop” at OCAD makes a natural and comfy hub for the central exhibit zone, and a nice spot to sit for a while and catch a few artsy short films (we saw one that was an adaptation of a piece by the wonderful troupe Corpus - organizers of the Dusk Dances festival every summer).

We didn’t check out The Ghost Station, a sound installation at the abandoned subway platform Lower Bay, because the lineup literally extended around the block, and by then I was starting to fade. Which meant that, sadly, we missed out on all the fun in the far west: the giant inflated locust at Lamport Stadium, the freaky looking animations at Massey Harris Park, the video projection-graffiti bike (based on that Graffiti Research Lab project), and Misha Glouberman’s Terrible Noises For Beautiful People: Music for a participatory noise choir.

It was barely 1am by the time I crashed. I’m determined to stay up later next year, and maybe bring a bike to get from one site to another. And more than that - to participate. To create an exhibit, or help out with one, or even just grab a guitar and busk somewhere. Dear city and sponsors: let there be a next year.

A friend recently gave me a copy of Municipal Mind: Manifestoes for the Creative City, an inspiring collection of short essays and manifestoes from Toronto’s Poet Laureate, Pier Giorgio di Cicco. Nuit Blanche is just the sort of thing he prescribes: a celebration that brings out the “elements one no longer dares to ask for – conviviality, joy, delight in wonder, the shared forum of imagining and play, of unreserved laughter and serenity ... the playful and ecstatic registers that justify city life, without which the city becomes a place of business, or indentured servitude.”

It takes a poet to say what planners and politicians almost never dare. It’s easy, especially given the City of Toronto’s precarious financial situation, to get lost in talk of dollars and cents. Art, creativity, love: these things are what make us - and our cities - human.

Photos at the Flickr pool.

Saturday 17 March 2007

Transit City gets on the rails

As reported by pretty much everybody, the city has finally launched a plan for the future of light rail transit in Toronto. About time, too. They’ve even set up a web site (TransitCity.ca) with various maps and documents. More coverage from the Globe and Mail, Star, and Spacing Wire.

About time too, says Steve Munro, one of the activists who fought to keep the streetcar network here back in the early ‘70s. Lots more analysis of the proposal on his blog.

It’s not a done deal by any stretch of the imagination, and there are some important questions still to answer. But it’s a crucial step, because it puts a city-endorsed plan on the table for discussion. And a network of fast, reliable surface transit, though less sexy than a subway extension to Vaughan, serves many more people per dollar spent. (If only federal funding was based on such practical criteria!)

There’s a growing sense that things are finally happening at the TTC. I don’t know how much of it can be credited to new commission chair Adam Giambrone, but there’s something symbolic about his presence, a youthful energy that’s refreshing after years of Howard Moscoe’s bluster.

The TTC has a reputation for shutting out the public, even those who should be their strongest allies. They forced the creator of an amusing anagrammed subway map to stop using the look-and-feel of their own official maps (though I note he’s put it back up in its original form now). They treated the TTC Rider Efficiency Guide with glaring suspicion. They completely ignored the popular subway station buttons sold by Spacing Magazine. (What on earth is that stupid little shop in Union station for then?)

But these days it seems they’re opening up. Giambrone and a handful of real live high-up TTC staff came to TransitCamp, a day-long ad-hoc ideas conference held by local webheads and transit activists… and by all accounts they actually listened. And if the Transit City buttons seem suspiciously familiar, it’s because Giambrone’s people commissioned Spacing dude Matt Blackett to design them.

Exciting times - but as always the proof will be in the funding. Fingers crossed. And let’s let the Feds know we want One Cent Now.

Yeah. So about that web site. It’s in Joomla, an open-source content management system - you can tell, too, by the bits of default template still hanging around. In my experience, you can coax the thing into looking tidy, but it involves a lot of banging away at templates and CSS, and the thing always seems to run slow and clunky. I used to run the Flickershow site on Joomla, but finally I couldn’t stand it any more and switched to Expression Engine, which I like much, much better. (I’m thinking of migrating this site to it, too, but with dozens and dozens of entries and comments, it’ll be a while!)

Tuesday 25 April 2006

RIP

Dan Gibson, nature sound recordist. He actually died over a month ago, but I hadn’t heard until now. When I was a kid, we had the very first Solitudes LP, back before his son talked him into adding music (a smart commercial move, I’ll grant you, but no thanks - I’d rather have just the sounds).

Jane Jacobs, author and champion of neighbourhoods and cities as vital entities. Her book The Death and Life Of Great American Cities spurred me to study urban planning (I discovered it, in turn, through Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn). (via Spacing Wire)

Friday 26 August 2005

Farewell to the infiltrator

RIP Ninjalicious, urban explorer and publisher of Infiltration.

Tom has a tribute. Another at Torontoist.