Rioting Police, Mayors Who Won’t March and other stories

Let me tell you a little story.

The night before the G-20 started last June, I happened to be in Toronto. I was at a resto on Parliament Street, and had to cross the northern edge of the G-20 security zone to get to the west side B&B I was staying at.  As it happened, (as happens on a fairly regular basis, I admit) I’d gotten fairly loaded at the resto, and of course, during dinner, the G-20 and the relative value of Stephen Harper’s billion dollar photo op had come up, as had the vast number of cops who’d been trucked in to protect the world’s stuffed shirts from people like us .

Now, if you’ve lived your life in a small town like I have, you may or may not like police, but unless you’re a complete torpedo, you’ve learned the rules of engagement with them. They’re pretty simple, actually: never get into it with anyone who has a gun. When I was younger I’d had that rule drilled into me the hard way a couple of times. I’d gotten lippy with police officers, as kids do, and they’d beaten the crap out of me.

So even though I was decently oiled up on the eve of the G-20 and had been joking about what I’d say to the pigs if I ran into them, when the car I was riding in turned right onto Carleton street and encountered a police van and a bunch of police officers blocking the road for no good reason, I wasn’t about to expose myself for a refresher course. I shut my trap and hunkered down in the back seat.

The cops I was looking at were a scary bunch: large young men with guns, too much testosterone and from what I could see, a gang panache that told you that they owned the street, could do whatever they wanted, and watch your ass, citizen. This was the stew of sanctioned aggression that got paralegal Sean Salvati arrested, stripped down, paraded past a female sergeant who had a good look at how big his weewee was or wasn’t, and tossed into jail, all of it just for lipping off at some police officers in for the G-20 jamboree.

Salvati wants redress for the humiliations he was put through. He’s suing the Toronto Police Services Board, the Federal Minister of Justice and the four Toronto police officers who drubbed him, and it seems, given the video evidence on the front page of the June 24^th Toronto Star, that he might get somewhere with his case.  People around here think he’s a goof for thinking his occupation made him special enough to get lippy, and privately I do, too. But I also hope Salvati gets what he wants in the courts, because it might prevent another riot in the future, and it might even put the thumb on the bigger goofs, who any fool can track right up to and into the chair of the prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper.

What Canada had on its collective hands, from the weeks leading up to the G-20 through to the police riot after the G-20 leaders were gone, you understand, was a riot of authority. Not just the people who live in Toronto were subjected to it either. Stephen Harper, deliberately or not, let us all know what a police state would be like, so watch yerself.

That’s why everyone needs to pay attention to this late aftermath of the G-20. The court cases against the police rioters should proliferate and proceed, the statutes that permitted the police riot need to be changed, and the police need to know that they fucked up in a very dangerous way. And we—meaning everyone, including the Conservatives, need to take a hard look at the men who made this all happen. Stephen Harper’s bumboys blew a billion dollars and change to make their Fuehrer look good, without a single good thing coming out of it unless the statutes that permitted the police riot to happen get changed.

Then there’s Toronto mayor Rob Ford, who I hear ain’t going to march in the gay pride parade on July 3^rd. There’s a fairly obvious health argument to be made for why he won’t march—that any walking event that goes further than 200 meters is probably going to bring on a fatal heart attack for this sausage on legs—but I don’t think that’s why Mr. Ford is passing on the parade, and neither does anyone else. He’s passing on it because he wants to spend time at the cottage with his family (I imagine almost as many hotdogs will be consumed there as at the gay pride parade, but that’s another kind of issue.)

Okay, we don’t really believe that, either. He’s not going to march in the pride parade because he’s uncomfortable around guys in thongs, and because he knows damned well he’s going to get an extra special visual dousing of the hardware packed inside those thongs from the celebrants, who, truth be told, don’t like him any better than he likes them.

As it happens, I’m not attending the parade either, although nobody in Toronto’s gay community has noticed. It won’t be because I’ll be marching in the North Bay Pride parade. Parades, whatever else they might be, are collections of bullies and jackasses saying hooray for their side. Doesn’t matter if it’s the military or the gay community. In the old days, if you didn’t show up for the Armistice Day parades, you were unpatriotic. Today, you don’t do gay pride week, and you’re homophobic. But I’m neither of those, and I’m not going, just like I didn’t go to the November 11^th parades once I was released from Boy Scouts.

As at least a dozen gay intellectuals have quietly admitted in the past five years, gay is over. No one gives a damn if anyone is gay. Being homosexual is normal behavior now, so why the need to flaunt it? All the gay pride parade does is disrupt traffic, help pump up the profits of chain restaurants and party merchants, and give corporate demonstrators yet another op to get our names on contest forms so they can deluge us with advertising for six months. Licenses run out, and this one is obsolete.

Don’t get me wrong. I love parades. MayDay, when I was a kid, was great fun. But that’s because everyone had the right to march on behalf of whatever cause they had, even if it was just their sausage business. Maybe Toronto can reinvent its Mayday parade, and everybody will march because it’s spring, and summer’s coming, and because we’re all citizens of a very fortunate country. Those are things I can get behind: much more enthusiastically than the senile nyah, nyah side of gay pride.

Of course, unless it’s out in the 905 suburbs, Rob Ford wouldn’t march in my kind of parade either, which tells you what’s wrong with him: he just ain’t everyone’s mayor. That said, I wonder if David Miller would have marched in the gay pride parade if it had been held up in suburban Markham? He wasn’t exactly everyone’s mayor, either.

In other non-downtown Toronto news, Conrad Black has been sent back to jail for another year in Florida by U.S. Federal Court Judge Amy St. Eve. Since it’s the last place left where he can afford servants, this isn’t a complete tragedy. I note that the bankers who precipitated the 2008 economic meltdown are still running around free, and compared with what these guys did, Black seems like a guy sentenced to death for jaywalking—until he opens his mouth, that is, or Barbara Amiel does the swoon and sleeps through the verdict’s explanation.

1283 words,  June 25^th, 2011

The Life and Death of a Great Toronto Neighbourhood

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It might be time for Toronto’s urban geographers and city planners to add the term un-gentrification to their lexicon, because that’s precisely what’s happening in the Annex, one of their city’s oldest and most famous neighbourhoods. Unlike other neighbourhoods in the city that are being bought out and up by neo-yuppies, who spark the transformation of old carpet stores and empty storefronts into painfully hip clothing boutiques, espresso bars, and of-the-moment restaurants, the Annex is sliding in the other direction. Where the neighbourhood was once a bohemian haven defined by a decidedly middle-class ethic it now is rapidly becoming nothing more than an upscale student ghetto defined by fast-food restaurants, ten dollar martinis, a dwindling clutch of futon stores, and a startling increase in the number of vacant storefronts and the homeless people that populate them.

One of the most important and visible aspects of the gentrification process is the influx of new and interesting restaurants that in turn attract more people to the neighbourhood and more fuel to the fires of gentrification. It stands to reason that the reverse is also true, and that the disappearance of interesting restaurants portends trouble ahead for a given neighbourhood. That’s precisely what has happened over the past five years in the Annex, as the diverse selection of quality restaurants that served something other than sushi and shawarmas have been replaced by places pursuing the aforementioned culinary zeitgeist or downmarket chains aimed at cash-starved students like Pizzaiolo and St. Louis BBQ. Meanwhile, the supply of quality delicatessens, bakeries, and speciality suppliers, necessary adjuncts to a prosperous local food culture, have all disappeared.

Another important factor in and indicator of the process of gentrification is a vibrant nightlife built around interesting and eclectic bars that draw in young people from other neighbourhoods, and here again the Annex exhibits the opposite trend. In better days, the neighbourhood’s evening trade was anchored around Lee’s Palace, a venerable old music hall that hosted some of Canada’s best live music performances. Nearby bars like the Tap and Las Iguanas, which were jointly managed and staffed by former members of the early 90s band Pursuit of Happiness, attracted a healthy mix of musicians, artists, and locals, while the Green Room was popular among underage kids from across the city who were looking for their first drink. Today, in contrast, the nexus of the Annex’s after-hours scene is located in the bowels of the Brunswick House, a place that attracts crowds of professional pukers, UFC aficionados, and other people that normally head to the club district. The only thing they have added to the neighbourhood is an increase in late night fist-fights, noise disturbances, and property damage.

As if these trends aren’t discouraging enough, those interested in the long term health of the Annex must now also respond to the death of both its heart and soul. Dooney’s Cafe, the long-time haunt for writers, artists, and other assorted political and cultural rabble-rousers that acted as the neighbourhood’s soul, was sold recently. Ownership of the famous cafe, which successfully fended off the predatory gaze of Starbucks in 1995 in one of the neighbourhood’s seminal moments, passed from the steady hands of Graziano Marchese to those of Marnie Goldlust, a twenty-something with little experience in the business and even less in the neighbourhood and its unique politics. Its devoted core of regulars, which included people like Globe and Mail columnist Rick Salutin, writer David Gilmore, jazz impresario Bill King, and actor Tony Nardi, has already abandoned the place for more hospitable climes, most of which are situated outside the Annex entirely.

The neighbourhood’s heart, meanwhile, is slated for transplant surgery. Honest Ed’s, that infamous insult to good taste that anchors the neighbourhood for tourists and locals alike, is widely expected to meet the business end of a wrecking ball sometime in the near future, as David Mirvish converts it and significant parts of neighbouring Mirvish Village into a lucrative mega-condominium project. While the finished project and the upwardly mobile tenants that will populate its units may help to stop the de-gentrification of the Annex by providing local merchants with an influx of new residents with disposable incomes to burn, it could just as easily accelerate the process by replacing a glittering monument to the neighbourhood’s quirky eclecticism with another cold and sterile condominium block.

Un-gentrification shouldn’t be confused with de-gentrification, a concept best described by writer Adam Sternbergh in a November 2007 piece in New York Magazine on the New York borough of Red Hook. In it, he describes how Red Hook failed to take off as the latest it-neighbourhood despite the fact that it was subject to the attentions of New York’s real-estate developers, artists, professional hipsters, and other members of the vanguard of gentrification. It was, as Sternberg noted, a realtor’s dream, “boasting Manhattan views, a salty maritime history (working piers! Brawling sailors!), and a brochure-ready name, all of which would play perfectly on some theoretical condo prospectus. Seeking waterfront living with a dusting of urban grit? Then drop your anchor in Red Hook!” The fact that Red Hook has yet to exchange its bars and diners for flower boutiques and it-fashion stores left Sternbergh wondering whether gentrification was the raging and unstoppable fire that its proponents depicted it as or instead a flood that raises all ships but eventually, and indeed inexorably, puts them right back, and in so doing leaves behind a badly damaged version of the original landscape. The Annex, however, is a unique case, and as such doesn’t co-operate with Sternbergh’s analysis. Far from being a neighbourhood awaiting the arrival of gentrification, be it with anticipation, nervousness, loathing, or some combination thereof, the Annex is one whose cycle is already complete. It is un-gentrifying, a phenomenon that may merit its own feature article one day.

The recent shootout that left two wounded at the corner of Bloor and Brunswick Streets, the geographical heart of the Annex, should have served as a bloody reminder of the Annex’s decline, or even a catalyst for discussion about it. Instead, it elicited no more than the usual isn’t-that-terrifying and aren’t-guns-terrible titterings that inevitably accompany the rubbernecking spectators and the police tape at shootings. That nobody seems to have noticed the broader trend that produced the shooting is a consequence of its comparatively glacial pace. While previously no-go neighbourhoods like south Ossington or West Queen West appear to gentrify in a matter of months, the Annex’s decline has been much more gradual. But that difference in pace makes it all the more dangerous and all the more difficult to reverse. The people affected by it, from local residents and business owners to the ever-shifting landscape of public officials and politicians, have been lulled by the gentle grade of the decline into believing that the long-vacant storefronts, corporate fast-food outlets, habituated homeless population, and pools of blood and broken glass that should be viewed as warning signs are instead perceived as longstanding characteristics of the neighbourhood and elements of its charm. Unfortunately for those who care about the neighbourhood, it appears that nothing, not even the shooting of innocent bystanders on a popular street corner, is capable of exposing this dangerous deceit.

Toronto, July 28^th – 1218 w.

Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs died last week at 89, and in the Toronto neighbourhood where I live, people talked of little else for several days. There was a sense of loss in the talk, but no profound sadness or grief. Jacobs led a long and unusually happy life, and one filled with the kinds of achievements few get to savour. Among the most immediately savourable was the neighbourhood she saved from freeways and the idiocies of “urban renewal”–the Annex area around Dooney’s Café that she lived in after she moved to Toronto from New York City . It’s a neighbourhood that regularly displays the sorts of urban qualities she valued most: It is dynamic, not too glitzy, with everything on a human and walkable scale. She was both liked and revered around here, and she seemed comfortable with the former, and not very interested in the latter. She was fond of saying that keeping the neighbourhood in which she lived intact was her life’s greatest achievement.

Perhaps her greater achievements, though, were to make the term “urban renewal” a social obscenity across most of Western civilization, and to halt, by sheer intellectual force, the post-World War II socio-economic juggernaut that nearly transformed cities across this civilization into bizarre and unlivable slavery to the private automobile, a transformation that very nearly made our inner cities, which have been and remain the social and economic engines of Western societies, uninhabitable. Still, the most important books she wrote—The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), The Economy of Cities (1969), Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984) and Systems of Survival (1992) constitute a progressively complex articulation of common sense and the economic, social and architectural civilities on display in the streets of the Annex—all of which remain chronically invisible to our political and economic macrosystems.

I first encountered Jacobs’ work around 1980, while I was working as an urban planner in Greater Vancouver. I was part of a group that Montreal native Harry Lash brought together to create Greater Vancouver’s Livable Region Plan, which was Canada’s most ambitious—and last—master planning exercise, one that somehow managed to be ill-starred, daffy and brilliant all at once. Jacobs hinted that we were on the right track in using local aspirations and citizen insights as our primary policy database, and that the unco-ordinated binary systems of regulation and provision—transportation, housing, and industrial development, each of which tended to ignore the concerns and goals of related subsystems—were our enemy. I argued about Jacobs so vociferously with my colleagues, most of whom were receptive but ill-equipped to apply her thinking to anything substantial, that it destroyed my career. When push came to shove, their professional training—such as it is—won out. To them, her ideas were ultimately unproven and unmatrixable, and they usually ended up dissing her lack of empirically-proven research.

There was no defence against this, because Jacobs was never much for plodding research, and her proofs were too meagre to survive at a bureaucrat’s table even though they made exquisitely obvious sense on the street. She was a philosopher, and her thought moved by a leapfrog of insight and inductive reasoning drawn from street-side observation. When your professional well-being is predicated on securing the growth trends of the immediate past and projecting them dumb-ass into the future, what Jane Jacobs had to say simply didn’t translate. It is often noted that Jacobs disliked urban planners, and nearly everyone who followed her career has witnessed one of her storied skewerings of them at public events. She sensed their functionary hostility, even in the obsequious ones who drooled on her coat-tails.

I saw a fair bit of her around the neighbourhood during the 15 years I’ve been here, and I read and reread all of her books. I heard her speak in public at least a dozen times, and I listened carefully because she always delivered some nuance I didn’t have. But I had just one conversation with her, an interview I did for an architectural magazine in the late 1990s, during which I did far more talking than I should have. She was then at the point where she spoke slowly and a little hesitantly because her street wits had begun to flicker, and it took me a few minutes to realize that the deeper intelligence she possessed remained undiminished. I shut my trap, and she imparted a piece of wisdom to me that is of incalculable value and utility. She told me that the future is inherently unpredictable and surprising, and that attempts to predict and manipulate it result mostly in idiocies and human misery. There are, she said, more than enough idiocies and miseries in the present to put right, and this is what people of good will should devote their energies to. She practiced this with remarkable consistency throughout her long life, and it is a crucial part of her genius.

While I was in her house that day—we conducted the interview at a table and chair in her living room—I was struck by how much it reflected her characteristic attention to detail and specificity, and how little it gave to abstract design. It was a private physical proof that she believed that urban design ought to be dictated by dynamics and by the individual’s earned accumulations of thought and experience: a vase here; a painting there; a child’s toy on the windowsill; some framed photographs, small ones of people, larger ones of cityscapes, each clearly a memento of something upon which her generous attention had alighted, and which was now part of her mind. I could see, in the kitchen, where a thick tendril of ivy trailed inside through the window, and was being accommodated. She saw me looking at it, laughed, and explained that it had wanted in, and since winter hadn’t arrived…

To a fashionista, the house would likely have seemed an incoherent mess of bric-a-brac; chaotic, without flow or sufficient attention to good taste. To me it was an extension of Jacob’s fine mind, and that virtually everything I could see was part of a narrative far more coherent and complex than any Mies van der Rohe corporate slab. It worked because it encouraged that combination of intellectual comfort and labour by which she lived. To me, that was perfect design. And as human beings go, so was she.

1048 w. May 2, 2006