The sidewalks are wider, the buildings (ever) taller on our historic Avenue/Road
Spadina is a strange word, when it’s repeated over and over. Try it. You’ll soon wonder how we use it in conversation without pausing in curiosity. Yet we say Spadina easily and it means “Toronto” just as much as the Ojibway word it’s derived from, Ishapadenah, means “hill” or “rise in the land.” To get a perfect view of the street, climb the Baldwin Steps up the namesake hill at Dovercourt Davenport, stand next to Casa Loma and look south over Toronto and the southern, downhill length of Spadina (a “road” first, then south of Bloor, an “avenue”) to its glittery skyscraper end. It looks as if somebody cleared a wide swath of land through Toronto to make the street — the “spine of Toronto” as the late writer Matt Cohen called it — and, in a way, that’s true.
Spadina’s girth is due to William Baldwin who, in 1818, cleared a royal-scaled driveway from the lake, through what was then a forest, to his “Spadina House”(pronounced Spa-dee-na here, unlike in modern references to the street where it is Spa-die-na). Today the house is a city-owned museum. Baldwin’s family had a clear view down to the lake, but the effort also allowed the city a rare street that matches the proportions of Toronto today.
Toronto was never supposed to be a metropolis and its infrastructure is forever catching up. It’s why we’ve got wooden hydro poles (which some of us think of as nice artifacts of our industrial past) and, less romantically, small sidewalks. Even Yonge Street can’t match the wide sidewalks of Spadina. Strolling on Spadina’s broad concrete walks is like being in a another city, because sidewalks, and their comparative size, affect how a city behaves.
In an entry in his Moscow Diary dated December 17, 1926, philosopher and urban observer Walter Benjamin wrote, “It has been observed that pedestrians [in Moscow] walk in ‘zigzags.’ This is simply on account of the overcrowding of the narrow sidewalks; nowhere else, except here and there in Naples, do you find sidewalks this narrow. This give Moscow a provincial air, or rather the character of an improvised metropolis that has fallen into place overnight.” He could have been writing about Toronto.
On Spadina however, Torontonians can proudly walk like world-class pedestrians. Yet as Spadina passes through one of the most intense development zones in the country, it also seems to, as Benjamin writes, “fall into place overnight.” We hardly notice skycrapers going up anymore until somebody moves in and flicks their switch and a light glows in the sky where it didn’t before. The city was shocked (shocked!) last year when Waterfront Toronto opened the Spadina Wavedeck at the foot of the street. Not only did it bend the rules of what a sidewalk can look like in Toronto but it confused people who were adamant in their belief that waterfront development would never move forward.
Walking north from the lake, the first leg of Spadina to the Gardiner Expressway might not make Mr. Baldwin proud. It may be our worst connection to the water, as pedestrians can only pass on the east side and have to “wait for the gap” to cross a busy Gardiner off-ramp — an unexpected and speedy yield in a part of town where people on foot generally have critical mass over cars. Rough crossings aside, this has become a crystal entrance to the city for those coming off the Gardiner, in an area that less than a decade ago was either parking lot or urban scrubland.
“Cityplace” is clustered on both sides of Spadina. Skyscraper-and-condo haters have derided Cityplace since the first towers started going up. Part of this sentiment is certainly due to Toronto’s fear of heights, which, when applied to places completely appropriate for towers, becomes ideology rather than good city planning or thoughtful opinion. The other reason for the hate seems to be a kind of underlying misanthropy. Phrases like “ugh, more condos” are often heard but rarely interrogated. Are we talking about condos in general, or just the badly designed ones? Replace “condo” with “people” and suddenly we have one group — presumably all living in tidy two- or three-storey houses — sneering at another group of people who want to live downtown and don’t seem to mind spending their money on a glass perch in the sky. “Condo dweller” is the new sloppy epithet for “bourgeoisie” or, worse, for “uncool.”
It’s true that, at ground level, the east side of Spadina, towards SkyDome (or whatever they call it now), is imperfect and feels too much like a Supercentre entrance, but take a walk through the newer development on the west side. With fountains, townhouses, pathways and a Sobeys store, Cityplace has learned from its mistakes and has created a completely urbane neighbourhood where it’s easy to forget there are dozens of floors overhead.
An extension of Fort York Boulevard will soon open, connecting Spadina to the fort — only a few hundred metres west at this point — passing by the new soon-to-be-named Douglas Coupland Park along the way.
The vast scale of the Cityplace development can be seen along the rail corridor across from the dowdy Globe and Mail building (like the Toronto Star building at 1 Yonge and the National Post building in Don Mills, our flagship newspapers have less-than-flagship headquarters). There, a massive concrete wall rises out of the ground containing a honeycomb of hidden parking garages. Like many parts of Toronto, the ground we walk on may be real or human-created. A new pathway here extends underneath Spadina and will eventually become part of an east-west bike-trail network.
At Front, across the tracks, old Spadina begins to appear with familiar turn-of-the-last-century warehouses. The Toyota dealership and surface parking lot here are remnants of when the area was ruled by cars and there was near-contiguous pavement from the CNE to University Avenue. Today much of the space in and around those old warehouses has been filled in with new buildings, some that match the older form (like The Morgan on the northwest corner at Richmond with its massive penthouse that looks like the lair of an art deco villain from an Ayn Rand novel) and those that are completely contemporary (like District Lofts just east on Richmond with soaring catwalks between mid-rise towers).
Old and new Toronto collide and coexist in this ever-changing neighbourhood, not always easily. Walk the Queen Street alley behind The Morgan and see how it resists becoming part of Toronto’s celebrated “Graffiti Alley” with what must be weekly sandblasting. At King, the parking lot on the southeast corner is finally being filled in, though unfortunately by just a one-storey LCBO, proving again that this crown corporation is not a good urban citizen.
The Queen and Spadina intersection is, for many, the heart of Toronto. It was an early Toronto landmark for me as a visiting kid; I worried that lost skydivers would be electrocuted by the thick web of streetcar wires that still hang overhead. Spadina, like Yonge, belongs to all of us, it just has more elbow room.