Sheppard and Leslie: more than just Ikealand

For many Torontonians the intersection of Sheppard and Leslie means only one thing: IKEALAND. The hinterland disappears into a goal-oriented intersection: get in there, find exotically named furniture, get out.

Ikealand is also where the “subway to nowhere” goes (strange, defining a place as somewhere by referring to it as nowhere). The Ikea is like the sun: stare at it and you can’t see anything else. However, to paraphrase and distort Gertrude Stein on Oakland, there is a “there,” there, but you have to look away from that Swedish sun to see it.

To understand what’s around this part of town it’s useful to back up a couple subway stops to Bayview and Sheppard. It’s here that North York’s constant transition is evident. Bayview Village, an upscale mall, was once farmland like much of North York. Now it’s the kind of place you might expect to see Dustin Hoffman’s parents from The Graduate shopping, but during WWII they grew potatoes here on the Blue Ridge Farm.

In the late 1950s, the farmland was turned into a meandering housing development that gave the mall its name. Designed by Eugene Faludi – the planner responsible for post-war, low-density development in cities across Canada  — it’s quintessential suburbia, a sort of utopic museum to a Canadian dream.

South of the mall the traditional North York landscape is colliding head on with the newer, vertical Toronto — a Toronto that’s growing fast because of that so-called subway to nowhere. 1950s-style ranch houses — not the usual sight you see when exiting a subway — have white development signs out front with bureaucratic poetry describing the proposed tower that will be built there soon. On streets running south of Sheppard there are a handful of these houses and then, suddenly, the development known as “The NY Towers.”

It’s a startling transition, like two sets from different movies next to each other. The NY Towers hug the 401 — its roar is always audible with constant big-rig downshift sputtering — and look vaguely like the Chrysler Tower in NYC. In fact, one is called The Chrysler, the others are The Waldorf and The Chelsea, correcting any thought that might have suggested the NY stood for North York. The name and design style might be embarrassingly un-Torontonian, but then even in New York there are buildings that are supposed to look like somewhere else (all those European-looking courthouses and museums). Walking through it isn’t unpleasant, and townhouses wrap around bases of the tower with BBQs, hedges and patio doors. Still a version of the Canadian Dream, just packed in a little tighter.

Back on Sheppard, these and other under-construction buildings soon give way to a landscape of old mod walk-up apartments and attached homes, the kind of places so many baby boomers started out in when this was Mel Lastman’s North York. Sheppard starts to slope down here, and there are dramatic views a few kilometres east to Don Mills Road. The Ikea is at the bottom of a valley as vast as the lower Don, but the development hides the topography well when down there.

Bessarion Station — named after a short road nearby — is a lonely outpost, one of the least busy of the TTC’s 69 stations. This will change soon as the Canadian Tire distribution warehouses that were here have been torn down and Concord Adex is building a glass-tower community, like Cityplace by the SkyDome. It’s the kind of place that the Ikea next door seems destined to furnish, the only big box store that seems to evade the brunt of anti-big-box attack  because everybody secretly likes it. Though it’s on the subway, the connection to Leslie station is still awkward: shoppers who come by transit either have to walk about 10 minutes from the subway or take the odd little Ikea shortbus that waits by the station.

The walk is not much in urban terms but the scale of the roads and that underpass instinctively tell us we shouldn’t be here on foot.

But we can, and located an equally short walk from Leslie Station is the entrance to the East Don Parklands. A path leads down under the humid tree canopy to the Don, which, while rushing along, isn’t able to drown out the sounds of Sheppard and Leslie nearby. This whole walk is marked by the sound of a motor symphony, always there in the background. It’s perfectly bucolic down there, with little foot bridges and soaring railway bridges, the smell of trees and the chirping of birds. As wilderness-like as all this is, the Parklands, like Bayview Village, was once farmland and dotted with mills, so the landscape here has long been altered and is untrustworthy — only the bigger picture is true, that this is a river valley. Twists in the river or sugarloaves in the ravine wall may be natural, or not.

A staircase leads up to Villaways, a public-housing project wedged in between Leslie, the Go Train tracks (which dominated everything when passing) and the valley. Just four streets of 1970s townhomes, it’s like A Clockwork Orange meets Sesame Street, but more natural, as backyards open up into communal spaces and some homes sit on the top of the ravine, a setting that would likely be worth seven figures across the valley. The streets — Ocra, Grado, Tomar — all end with the suffix “Villaway.” At 20 Adra Villaway is a tiny community house used by a few agencies including Art Starts, an “art-based community development organization.”

Sarah Bothwell, Art Starts' project manager, chatted with me in front of their “garage front” operation. She runs what they call “the rec” a few times a week and get youth from Villaways to work on projects that include building soap-box racers, treasure hunts in the creek and even field trips to Interaccess, a gallery on Ossington for robot-building workshops. “I think of this as sneaky art,” she says, “I just tell them to just come to the rec. This neighbourhood is fantastic, but we work with youth who have a rap for being bad kids.”

In getting the kids involved in art projects, Bothwell is trying to flip that image. They’ll be working with street artist Dan Bergeron (a.k.a. Fauxreel) soon to produce images that, as Bothwell explains, “Show people how they see their own neighbourhood.” It isn’t as easy as it sounds. Bothwell said that recently they held a community yard sale on Leslie, hoping to attract people from the middle-class suburb just metres away. Only one person came over.

As with much of Toronto, it is remarkable how so many very different environments are so close to each other but could be on different planets. Here, in the shadow of the Ikea, the subway to nowhere goes to a whole bunch of places.

Psychogeography appears every two weeks. Email letters@eyeweekly.com.