No landmark for young kids
When cookie-cutter culture moves downtown
BY Dave Bidini
Photograph from Flickr by Marc Boudreau
In my youth, I feared Leon’s furniture store: long cold journeys from our small Etobicoke crescent to a long cold highway that ended at a flat gray building with a blinking yellow sign filled with goods to bleed the teenage mind: wooden bedroom furniture, brown rugs, table lamps and miles of toilets. The store’s atmosphere had all the exuberance and ringing zeal of records by John Stewart or the Laurie Bower Singers, the manufacturing equivalent of easy listening music or the airport novels of James Michener. It painted adulthood as a zombiescape of credit-card weighted fossils, a half-dollar dropped on the tone arm of a life that, at 14 and 15 years old, was filled with songs by bands who wanted to burn stuff and books with protagonists who never stopped moving.
These memories were rekindled in me, recently, when it was announced that a large parcel of space in one of Toronto’s oldest and most beautiful buildings—the old Railway Roundhouse along Bremner Avenue, just south of the Rogers Centre, home of the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team—was to be leased to the same store that, for me, blackened countless adolsecent Sundays. The store’s lease was approved on the basis of its historical pedigree, which is a little like making donuts and poutine staples of the Canada Food Guide simply because they’ve weathered years of change. Gus the Other Barber on Bloor street and Vesta Lunch on Dupont—both longtime culture/consumer signposts—are historically significant in the way they’ve related and opened their doors to their neighbourhoods; a great slab of concrete that sells made-in-China armchairs and slouches on the arm of the highway is not.
Over the last handful of years, Toronto, like Vancouver and now, Calgary, has seen the heart of its city cordoned off by an unblinking fence of condominiums rushed into the skies by developers keen to make hay of the city’s real estate boom. Places like the Roundhouse, current home to a single tenant, the Steam Whistle Brewery—whose support of local art and artists has been non pareil—are disappearing among the cement; using the building to house a furniture showroom only hyper-commercializes one of the last vestiges of a faded era. Instead of baseball or hockey fans—the Leafs’ Air Canada Centre sits a few hundred feet east of the Roundhouse—touring the old railyard or stopping for a beer at the brewery’s restored home, they’ll be tempted to sweep into Leons, mothers and fathers inflicting the same kind of punishment on children bound for an afternoon or evening with their favourite team or players.
Toronto already has a culture war on its hands: developers versus artists, the lust of commerce versus civic liveability. For years, the city’s three most significant civic events—Doors Open, Nuit Blanche and the Toronto International Film Festival; not forgetting countless music and theatre events—have emerged from the dreams of artists and their community. During this past September’s Nuit Blanche, 200,000 people strolled the city after midnight exploring galleries and attending arts events. Still, neighbourhoods become thickened by condominiums and mega-stores, stealing space and driving artists to darker corners of the city.
Choosing to honour the longevity of a furniture depot rather than Toronto’s keening artistic vibrancy—which, in 2008, is even more pronounced considering that, for years, the city struggled to find its creative identity—is an unfeeling and short-sighted move. One of the reasons I chose not to live in the suburbs was to avoid being reminded of the greater world’s lust for prosperity and the bottom line. But alas, the virus of commercialism has once again found me.
