We first encountered EYE WEEKLY contributor Shawn Micallef in 2004, when our then associate editor (now City editor) Edward Keenan was working on a story about the absence of historical plaques in Toronto. For a city with a then-severe (and still lingering) identity crisis — “world class,” anyone? — our lack of pride and self-confidence seemed tragically mirrored by the failure to trumpet our own significant past on the streets where people could see it; to create what then-EYE WEEKLY editor Bert Archer later called “a city of the imagination” by mythologizing our locations and personalities.

We dialed up Micallef, who was a co-founder of the then-new [murmur] project, which took a more grassroots, less official approach to recording local history — literally recording it, on audio tape, and then making it available in snippets via cellphone to people standing on the street. A pedestrian encountering a [murmur] sign on a hydro pole could phone an number and hear a person tell them a story about the very place they were standing.

“I think there are not enough narratives or stories attached to buildings in Toronto. You walk by a lot of nondescriptness everywhere in the city. You kind of have the feeling that stuff happened here, but there’s nothing to tell you either way,” Micallef told us.

He and his partners Gabe Sawhney and James Roussel wanted an approach to history based in immediacy and storytelling — an anecdotal history that represents what you can’t learn from reading a book about Toronto: “I think a huge part of the [murmur] experience is the physical experience of being there. Of being able to stick your finger in the bullet holes or sit on the bench that someone’s talking about. You get this kind of 360-degree, five-senses view of it. So the narrative is just one small part of it, the information that’s being passed over to you is a small part of it. There’s something about that physical location that’s useful.”

This is a way of talking about the city and focusing on things both great and small that has informed much of the excitement that has waxed and waned in Toronto in recent years, of thinking of our public spaces — both grand official architectural points such as the RC Harris Filtration Plant and Will Alsop’s OCAD building and tiny, unremarked buildings and patches of grass — as places where the story of what Toronto is and means is written in the lives of its citizenry. A way to walk around the city and be aware of the built environment, of looking at a bar or a modernist tower or a railway underpass and wondering what it would say if its walls could talk.

Micallef, of course, became a contributor and columnist for EYE WEEKLY. And meanwhile, [murmur] has become an ever-larger and more exciting part of the city. What started with a handful of locations in Kensington Market has now spread to The Annex, Spadina from Chinatown to Casa Loma, Fort York and Little India, and a project is underway in The Junction.

The concept is such a success — a revelatory way of looking at the city as a story we walk through — that [murmur] has also spread to other cities, to Edinburgh, Dublin, San Jose, Vancouver, Montreal and São Paulo.

On the day this paper is published, July 17, [murmur] celebrates five years of storytelling in Toronto with a party at the Canadian Corps Hall at 101 Niagara (see www.murmurtoronto.ca for details). We congratulate Shawn and Gabe on half a decade of success. But more importantly, we thank them and everyone else who’s been involved in [murmur] for the stories they’ve given us, and the way they’ve helped us develop a way of thinking about ourselves.
Hear, hear!