Forgery League

My faith in this city has been restored. David Miller’s the new mayor. On balance, the changes to council look good: Glen de Baeremaeker is in in Scarborough (diss Scarberia all you like - I’ll take it over Etobicoke any day) and most of the other new faces are promising. And now we’ll have an actual leader at the helm - and not a vile embarrassment of a furniture salesman elected on name recognition and blabbermouthedness alone who knows jack about the city and no longer even gives a crap about his job.

Out in the 905, things aren’t quite so pretty: same old suburban developer-sponsored louts, for the most part. In Hamilton, the new mayor backs the Red Hill Valley Expressway. Construction is underway, so short of a minor miracle (say, new provincial premier Dalton McGuinty pulling a Bill Davis), things don’t look too good on that front.

Beyond that, a federal election is looming, and I think Chretien’s slow-motion retirement might have pissed off people in sufficient numbers that a right-wing landslide is conceivable (if the Conservatives and Alliance do indeed manage to unite).

But for now, I am optimistic and highly relieved.

It’s been really weird watching them tear down the central part of the Royal Ontario Museum to make way for what they’re calling the Lee-Chin Crystal. To me, the Walker Terrace (the mild-mannered 1980s addition that they’re now demolishing, pictured above) was always there, like the CN Tower or Maple Leaf Gardens. It’s pretty weird to see it torn out.

The Crystal is a jagged explosion of metal and glass designed by Daniel Liebeskind, the flashy musician-turned-architect dude who did the Holocaust Museum in Berlin and is now working on the New York World Trade Center site. (His entry in the ROM’s so-called redesign ‘competition’ was scribbled on napkins from the museum’s chi-chi upstairs restaurant.)

I have some pretty strong reservations about the new design, most of which boil down to maintenance. All those weird angles and custom-fitted panels are begging for leaks. And they’ve already had to revise the plans, replacing a lot of the glass with metal. Memo to architects: windows that face up collect dust, snow and bird poop and look like hell in pretty short order. I forsee great gobs of money having to be spent annually just to keep the thing together - money which could be better spent on running a good museum. On the other hand, it does a lot of good things, starting with re-orienting the building to face Bloor Street (a ritzy shopping street) rather than Queen’s Park (a relatively barren car thoroughfare).

I had a bigger shock a few blocks away, where they’re building a new expansion to OCAD, the Ontario College of Art and Design. There, rather than extending horizontally, perches an entire new building a couple floors above the roof of the existing building, propping it up above the park to the south (so as to keep it sunny). People have likened it to a matchbox standing on toothpicks, and it’s completely true. I’d seen renderings of the building-to-be, but to actually see It looming several stories above McCaul St was pretty damn freaky.

The architecture critics tell us that this is all a good thing, that these audacious new buildings will get people excited about our city and its institutions. And I suppose that’s true - people do have a certain fondness for our New City Hall, which was built in the 1950s and still shows up in movies as some sci-fi government or corporate HQ. I have to feel sorry for the people that are going to have to work in these places, though. (I could go on and on about this, but Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn says it better than I could.)

Read in the Star the other day: there’s a hidden river flowing through a good stretch of southern Ontario, way below the surface. Not too long ago, they found out where it comes out, somewhere under High Park (very roughly, our equivalent of Central Park). I love stories like that - the idea that there’s all sorts of stuff we still don’t know about, like buried rivers and tiny 500-year-old cedar trees and squid the size of houses.

I’ve noticed that in any animated film, one sure way to get me crying is to show a bleak landscape suddenly suffused by some elemental Power and come bursting to life: happens in Yellow Submarine, Princess Mononoke, the Firebird piece from Fantasia 2000, even that silly Lemonjelly video. There’s something about that symbolism that really nails me deep down: the idea of rebirth, of the world healing itself, of the power of Nature to regenerate.

I’ve seen pictures of the bleak, rocky landscape where I grew up (near the mining town of Sudbury, where according to Canadian urban legend the Apollo astronauts trained because of its similarity to the moon) turning into pine forest again, and it brought a smile to my face. So did word that parts of the Ukraine and Belarus, uninhabited by humans since the Chernobyl accident, have become refuges for wildlife. And I’m realizing that principle - that life keeps coming back, if only we quit messing with it and let it happen - is essentially how I conceive of God or the divine. It was that force that some in Hiroshima and Nagasaki feared was dead after the atom bombs fell. It says - even if we screw up utterly, there is hope; something new and wonderful will arise in time.

From the Chicago Tribune, March 19th: “Media giant’s rally sponsorship raises questions” (Thank you, Boing Boing.)

“In a move that has raised eyebrows in some legal and journalistic circles, Clear Channel radio stations in Atlanta, Cleveland, San Antonio, Cincinnati and other cities have sponsored rallies attended by up to 20,000 people.”

Now, let me tell you about Dundas Square. It’s an odd little triangle downtown that used to be full of cheap and/or sleazy shops, in an area that was seriously damaged by the construction of the giant Eaton Centre shopping mall next door. A year or three ago they knocked down the buildings to make way for a new public square.

Fair enough; downtown could use more of that sort of thing. But the concept for the square - essentially our own miniature version of Times Square - has always struck me as ridiculous. Times Square is awe-inspiring in its way: street advertising and trashy glitz taken to its greatest extreme. To mimic it is to miss the point. It’s tacky, uncreative, me-tooish - exactly the sort of thing that Canadians from one end of the country to the other love to mock Toronto for.

The square, then, is surrounded by billboards and giant screens showing full-colour video. And crowning it all is The Media Tower, on the northwest corner (it’s the drum-shaped thing in the photos). Essentially it’s a big box made of girders, several stories high, made for the express purpose of hanging ads on. Guess who owns it. Yay, Clear Channel!

On the other hand, Dundas Square has provided a nice location for antiwar demos. That’s one of the most important functions for a public square, after all. And it makes me feel a bit better.

And hey! There’s this big fat target waiting if agit-pranksters want to hang a banner or something. With lots of exposed girders to chain themselves to.

I dropped by the Toronto Reference Library today. Designed by Raymond Moriyama, it’s one of the loveliest interiors in the city: huge, airy, impressive and yet intimate, with plenty of natural light, water sculptures decorating the ground floor, and generous skylit reading areas. The north end has a stunning view of Rosedale Valley and the uptown towers of Yonge Street. The only real downer (aside from the rather bleak expanses of blank brick on the outside) is the fact that all the upper floors ring a giant atrium, making it necessary to walk all the way around them if you’re headed for the opposite corner.

It’s part of a period in architecture that I particularly love, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on: those buildings that were built by governments in the 1960s and ‘70s. Although they vary widely, there’s a distinctive feel to them, and some common elements, like the use of 45-degree angles and circular forms, lots of brick and warm colours, and vanes to cut down glare and break up blank ceilings.

Those subways that were built in the ‘60s and ‘70s are great examples. I happened on a book about the Montreal Metro recently that was full of this sort of thing: strikingly patterned concrete, angled walls, integrated art and so on. The contemporary stations I’ve seen in Boston and other cities are similar. (Check out Matt McLauchlin’s loving tribute, Montréal By Metro.)

In Toronto, the 1978 Spadina Line is the prime example, with eight unique stations (most of which, unfortunately, are in the median of a minor expressway). Eglinton West is warm and welcoming; Glencairn is quiet and curiously intimate, with lots of small walls to break up its space; Lawrence West has a mezzanine decorated in bright primary colours, while walls of plain concrete lend its platform a quiet dignity; Dupont, probably the most remarked-upon, is mysterious, simultaneously cave-like and futuristic with its round corners and giant circular lights. In their day, all the stations sported original artworks, though some have faded and some have had to be dismantled, notably Yorkdale’s vaulted ceiling of rainbow neon designed by Michael Hayden.

So what is it that I find so appealing about this era? I think it’s a feeling of genuine optimism and civic-mindedness. I’ve only lived in Toronto itself for a couple of years, but it didn’t take long to notice the sense many have of the 1970s as a kind of golden, enlightened age. New expressways were turned back by those living in their path; plans to scrap the city’s streetcar network were abandoned; alienating high-rise housing projects gave way to sensibly planned new neighborhoods. The future seemed bright and human.

I think we could use a little more of that right about now.