Bungalow’s last stand

There are a million stories in the naked suburbs — Willowdale’s is just one of them 

The city creates, devours and recreates itself constantly and the velocity of this cycle is quickest in Toronto’s inner suburbs. If you stand at Yonge and Sheppard in Willowdale you can see it happening in one 360-degree glance, as the new and big give way quickly to tiny bungalows. If urban planning were a game of chess, these are the pawns that only a few generations ago were the first line of Toronto’s expansion into Ontario farmland.

Yet urban growth is more like Monopoly, ruled by a market that decides what has value and what can be discarded. Some of those bungalows, now sitting uncomfortably close to streets that have grown fat and eaten up their front lawns, have become offices for dentists and lawyers or offer shiatsu and psychic readings rather than containing nuclear families as intended.

Two blocks east of Yonge is Leona Drive, where a bungalow painted green stands out like a real-life Monopoly house, part of the Leona Drive Project, a temporary large-scale art installation taking over six 1950s bungalows that will soon be demolished to make way for newer, shinier housing. The vacant houses, interpreted and transformed by over a dozen artists, explore the deep territory of this suburban landscape, the one we’re led to believe (at least by popular mythology) has no worthwhile stories and isn’t interesting.

It’s a remarkable project by the collectives Public Access Collective and L.O.T.: Experiments in Urban Research. The green house is by artist An Te Liu, and though made of solid brick, wood and plaster, a simple paint job renders the house plastic-seeming, as if it really is as disposable as we are treating it. Next door, Daniel Borins and Jennifer Marman have impregnated a living room window with a white Honda Civic, evoking a common late-night news story where an errant car drives up over a lawn and crashes into a house, a David Lynch–Blue Velvet view of the tranquil suburbs, where the very instrument that gave rise to this kind of development later destroys it.

Janine Marchessault, one of the project curators and a professor at York University, says the municipal strike over the summer actually made this project possible, as it delayed the destruction of the homes. Cobbling together various small arts grants (to a total of around $50,000) and many in-kind donations, Marchessault and her colleagues’ greatest work of art may have been getting a developer to agree to the project. “The risk for him was if this project caused people to take too much of an interest in these houses,” explains Marchessault. It’s also a massive coordinating effort as the houses aren’t traditional art spaces. While we chatted, one of her workers interrupted and described a “non-lethal” gas leak that needed to be attended to.

Like many of Toronto’s suburbs, Willowdale is not simply an extension of the downtown core but an amalgamation of little villages that had their own development trajectories but were eventually swallowed up by North York and, later, Toronto. The kernel Willowdale was a rural crossroads known as Lansing. You can see the Willowdale name live on around the area on street signs but another ghost of that rural heritage is still visible in the green belt behind the Leona Drive homes. Once the open headwaters of Wilket Creek, the watercourse has been long buried and entombed in concrete tunnels. A slight depression in the land can be followed south, meandering through parks and in between bungalows to the giant 401 sound barrier, where a metal grate blocks access to a culvert under the highway after which this nearly lost vale continues to meander through middle-class neighbourhoods to York Mills and Bayview, beyond which the stream finally sees light.

All along the way there are oversized drains that, coupled with the vast size of the 401 culvert, give a spooky sense that this infrastructure is waiting for the flood, a kind of semiotics of potential disaster.

Many of the bungalows along this route have been replaced by “Monster Homes.” Thirty-year Willowdale resident and artist Robin Collyer, whose work has often explored the suburban form, has installed ostentatious trim on one of the Leona Drive homes as a reference to oversized and overbuilt replacements invading the neighbourhood.

North along Wilket’s course at Sheppard, there is the Leona Drive TTC escape hatch that leads deep below the buried creek to the new subway.

Cross Sheppard and the vale continues all the way up to the Empress Walk mall on Yonge, site of North York’s first municipal buildings.

The streets around a here — a “royal quartet” that includes Empress, Duchess, Princess and Kingsdale — are an early North York suburban development. “Kingsdale” was billed as a place of fresh air and open spaces only 35 minutes from King and Yonge by electric streetcar.

Today, the streets are a mix of new monsters and old craftsman homes that date back to the ’teens and ’20s — a kind of historicity not often associated with North York.

Back on Leona Drive, Steven Logan of the L.O.T. collective has stencilled the original plans of Kingsdale on the back patio of one of the homes. He and his colleagues have also amassed substantial archival research about the neighbourhood, which is displayed in a shed and around the various properties.

The most intimate house in the project is number 9, the only one that includes interior installations. Crossing the threshold into the tiny structure feels transgressive, as if invading somebody’s home. In the dining room, Richard Fung has a video installation of ethnographic interviews with “originals,” residents who were in the area from the beginning. The viewing area is complete with a plastic-covered floral couch, the kind The Brick or Leon’s supplied to so many of these homes. Another room has been covered with thousands of white-painted pennies by Ryan Livingstone, an ode to both the “save a penny for a rainy day” ethos and, he tells me, his grandmother’s polka-dot dress, the one she wore when greeting company. On a related theme, the upstairs bathroom has been painted “Victory Red” by Christine Davis, a shade of lipstick from the era.

Saddest is the kitchen, where Shana MacDonald and Angela Joosse have used artifacts left behind belonging to Ruth Gillespie, who was resident here for 50 years, first with her husband and later as a widow. After she died, the relative who sold the property didn’t bother to clean out all her personal belongings, including diaries and a book of poems to her written by friends and classmates that included the line: “Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become.”

Back out on Leona and wandering the neighbourhood daze, every one of these near-identical bungalows now seem filled to the rafters with stories of so many Ruths who dreamed quiet dreams and lived quiet lives but weren’t boring and did matter. Nothing seems to happen in the suburbs because the stories haven’t been told often enough. The Leona Drive Project tells some of them.

The Leona Drive Project runs until Oct 31. Open daily from 1-4pm and 6-9pm. Opening reception Fri Oct 23 7-10pm. www.leonadrive.ca.