Scarborough: Toronto’s eastern skyline

The promised future that never arrived is preserved in Scarborough, where all the life is contained indoors

A visitor coming into Toronto from the east on the 401 can be forgiven for thinking they’ve found downtown when they approach the Scarborough City Centre. The cluster of skyscrapers surrounding the Scarborough Town Centre mall would be the envy of many midsize Midwestern American cities. They shimmer on the horizon from kilometers away, some even lit up at night in phosphorescent colours.

Should that visitor arrive and be told that this is, in fact, the Scarborough City Centre we might also forgive him or her if the name causes confusion. Like North York City Centre and Mississauga City Centre, the Scarborough City Centre followed the “if we call it a city centre the city centre will follow” model of city building.

The Scarborough Town Centre mall and the adjacent Civic Centre municipal building both opened in 1973, separated by Albert Campbell Square, the Nathan Phillips Square of the then-city of Scarborough, similarly named after a former mayor and complete with a winter ice rink. In 1985, the Scarborough RT (Rapid Transit) continued the Bloor-Danforth Subway line here with new not-really-a-subway, Ontario-built technology that was supposed to be the future of public transit (though few cities bought it). When the RT pulls into the station on its monorail-like track, it makes a strange electric hum that, along with its late 1970s space shuttle styling, sounds and looks like a low-budget science fiction effects from that era. This place often feels like a bit of the future we were promised but didn’t completely get.

The Civic Centre was designed by Moriyama & Teshima, the local architects that designed both the Reference and the North York Central Libraries. Though the Civic Centre came first, all three of those buildings have central atriums with zig-zagging staircases. When Terry Fox triumphantly ran into Toronto on his Marathon of Hope, he stopped by and gave a speech in here by the pond full of goldfish (fat ones are still swimming in there today) as onlookers crowded every level up to the ceiling. Seven years earlier, in 1973, Queen Elizabeth was in the square to officially open the building. Inside there is a shrine to this event in a locked glass cabinet that includes the actual pen the Queen and her consort used to sign the opening documents. The faded pictures and dusty union jack are now memorials to Scarborough’s former WASPy demographic makeup.

The whole building is filled with these kinds of unintentional memorials to a city that no longer exists. A wall of plaques — commemorating various awards like “Poppy Appreciation” and lists of presidents of this board or that — have entries that only go up to 1998, the year Scarborough was amalgamated into the megacity of Toronto. The following tiles are blank, as if a silent apocalypse hit the city and everything stopped.

When the Civic Centre opened, it was the symbol of Scarborough’s bright future. Inside there is still the architectural model of the “site development concept,” which had a complicated keypad that would light up various sections if the right numbers were pressed (more space-aged 1970s technology). It doesn’t work anymore, as its electric power is unplugged just as the building’s political power was in 1998. Though the building is still busy and used for municipal offices (and in the past month, H1N1 vaccinations), it once aspired to loftier civic ideas. A 1970 proposal letter from Raymond Moriyama summed this spirit up: “We are very conscious of the contribution the new Civic Centre will make to Scarborough and our interest in the Centre goes beyond the normal provision of Administrative Offices . . . As a municipality, Scarborough has come of age. In just two decades it has been transformed from a rural agricultural area into one of the fastest growing municipalities on the continent . . . It will be Scarborough’s contribution toward making Metropolitan Toronto a World city.”

Even 40 years ago we were plagued by thoughts about our World Class-ness. Scarborough was the bright future and it was big. So big that if we could fold it over the rest of Toronto it would almost cover the rest of the city to the Mississauga border. Made up of a few dozen smaller communities — some originally farm country post offices or tiny crossroads — Scarborough was merely a township until it was incorporated as a borough in 1967. Though that farm heritage is just about gone (there are still a couple fields left in the far northeast corner of the city past the Zoo), it isn’t so far in the distant past that it doesn’t live in Scarborough’s collective memory.

In the summer of 2004 I was in an upper-floor room of a retirement residence on Sheppard in Agincourt, just north and west of here. I was there to see Bill Walton, a farmer born in 1919 on whose land the mall and civic centre were eventually built. There was a little metal Ford toy tractor by the window that looked out and over the sprawl to where his farmhouse once was, easy to find because of the condo skyscrapers. “We raised grain and hay and we had pigs and quite a big orchard. The orchard was quite a thing at one time. It kind of petered out,” he told me. Farms in Scarborough all petered out, but this is no depression-era story. Most, like Bill himself, sold their properties, and the Walton farm eventually became what the industry calls a “Super Regional Shopping Centre.”

Inside the mall it’s like a casino: except for skylights letting in hints of the outdoors, it’s an enclosed and self-contained universe. If you want to see Scarborough — not just the buildings or the highways, but the people — walk laps here, because it’s Scarborough’s main street. This mall was home to the very first Second Cup kiosk in 1975, and today it is where the Scarborough Walk of Fame is housed. As loud and busy as it is inside, leave the mall and walk through the parking lot, across McCowan into the open country where the only sound is the hum of the highway. Though surrounded by buildings, a walk here is not unlike walking through rural country: big skies and wide vistas.

“Consilium Place,” the first cluster of highrises constructed in the area, were built in the mid-1980s and wear that era’s style boldly: J.R. Ewing could have had an office. Further on are the newer condo buildings along Lee Centre drive. These are the ones that hug the edge of the 401 and, while impressive from a distance — two of these towers appear to arc towards each other, as if about to hug and kiss — the busiest parts of the sidewalk are where the constant car traffic enters each building (gated communities in a city that isn’t supposed to have any). Past the condos and south on Bellamy, many light industrial and commercial buildings have been converted into evangelical churches suggesting this is, in fact, God’s country.

Save for some of the condo designs, the Civic Centre and some of the (few) intact bits of modish style left around the mall, Scarborough City Centre isn’t particularly pretty. It is the centre of Scarborough, but the life (and lots of it) is contained inside concrete canisters. Perhaps in a few years that life might be so great it bursts out into the open, filling the streets.

Follow @shawnmicallef and @EYEWEEKLY on Twitter.