STROLL: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto By Shawn Micallef with illustrations by Marlena Zuber. Published by Coach House Books and EYE WEEKLY. 312 pages, plus a colour, fold-out map. $24.95.
Launch party featuring an onstage conversation between Shawn Micallef and EYE WEEKLY senior editor Edward Keenan on May 18, 8pm. Music by Track Meet DJs. FREE. Lula Lounge, 1585 Dundas W. See
www.chbooks.com for details.
In 2004, EYE WEEKLY's Shawn Micallef kicked off his Stroll column with
a manifesto. Over the years his column has changed its name (to
Psychogeography) but not its purpose — he wanders the city keeping his
eyes on the details. This week, EYE WEEKLY and Coach House Books
present the launch of Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of
Toronto, a book collecting Micallef’s observations about the city. By
way of reintroduction, he revisits his initial salvo.
With each step, the walk takes on greater momentum; ever weaker grow the temptations of shops, of bistros, of smiling women, ever more irresistible the magnetism of the next streetcorner, of a distant mass of foliage, of a street name. — Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
When I was growing up in Windsor, Toronto seemed to be a spaceport city made up of the Eaton Centre, Ontario Place and the CN Tower. It had subways that ran like an electric bloodstream underneath the city, promising total freedom and complete mobility. The city I saw on occasional visits was all A Clockwork Orange–style modernism, yet through the gaps I’d catch glimpses of row houses, ravines and streets like Dundas or Davenport that weren’t space age at all. These places seemed like a kind of remixed British colonial landscape, and I didn’t know how they fit with the Toronto I thought I knew. The city was asking to be explored.
When I moved here in 2000, I realized that my internal Toronto map had big blank spots. Not knowing where the streets ended made me nervous, so I started walking. I walked out to the Beach and the Kingsway, negotiated the PATH system, tried to make it across Rosedale without ending up where I started, and forgot about food and water as the city distracted me. In short, I turned into a flâneur, someone who wanders the city with the sole purpose of paying attention to it. I’ve been taking notes ever since.
In the beginning, I wrote down what I saw on my walks and emailed these thoughts in dispatches to friends. Some asked to be taken off my list, but I kept walking, and trying to figure out how this city works, who’s here, how it’s all put together, what’s a street or two over, where the curve in the road leads and, ultimately, what Toronto means. I’ll likely never completely figure out that last point, so I’ll keep walking.
Over and over, we’re told that Toronto is not Paris, New York, London or Tokyo. We’ve been trained to be underwhelmed. There are references all over the city that remind us that this place started out as a provincial city in a distant part of the British Empire, with streets named after places and people in the mother country, reminders of how Brit-focused we were back then. Today, Toronto gets to play all kinds of places in film and TV productions, but it rarely stars as itself. We see cameras taking pictures of NYC cabs on our streets, but not of the Royal, Beck or Co-op companies that Torontonians know.
Since Toronto seems to exist without design or reason, we don’t expect to turn the corner and see beauty or be amazed. Canadians from coast to coast are taught to hate Toronto, even if they can’t always articulate why. But when you ask Torontonians about their city, why are so many people genuinely amazed about being Torontonian? (Only after they’ve run through the perfunctory down-on-Toronto spiel to assuage their guilty feelings about the matter, of course.)
Any Toronto flâneur knows that exploring this city makes the burden of civic self-deprecation disappear. And anybody can be a Toronto flâneur. More people should take the opportunity because this city is more than the sum of its parts, and those parts can be found only on foot. As American essayist Rebecca Solnit wrote in her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, “Cities move at the speed of walking.”
A flâneur is anyone who wanders, and watches, the city. The 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire called the flâneur a “perfect idler” and a “passionate observer.” Baudelaire was a flâneur himself and, when he wasn’t writing poems and spending his trust fund on dandy outfits and opium, he drifted through the streets of Paris. Later, philosopher Walter Benjamin collected a chunk of thoughts on the idea of the flâneur in his epic volume of notes on Paris, The Arcades Project.
The flâneur wanders the city, slightly invisible, just on the outside of everything – he or she observes from an anonymous perspective. That invisibility can disappear, however, if your gender is a little more female or your skin colour a shade or two away from white. What I’ve done for my columns and my book — walk largely unnoticed — may not be possible for everybody. I’ve been lucky — I fit the mould of flâneur more easily than many others. The old notion of the flâneur will be different for whomever engages in this activity, even in a diverse metropolis such as Toronto. But that doesn’t mean that other flâneurs can’t carve out ways to navigate the city comfortably, recording their own insights and noticing the ways their own particular bodies and histories interact with the cityscape.
Around the same time I began walking, I started to find other people who were deeply excited about Toronto. (Back then, people tended to keep that kind of feeling in the closet.) One night, in the Suspect Video store buried into the side of Honest Ed’s on Markham Street, I picked up a zine called Infiltration from the magazine rack and paged through it. Published by the late Jeff Chapman, who went by the name Ninjalicious, Infiltration was legendary in urban-exploration circles — Chapman even coined the movement’s name — for taking readers to the behind-the-scenes places where Toronto’s pipes, boilers and exhaust fans do their business. I realized then that other people thought about the city the same way I did; that others saw it as a seemingly infinite and mysterious place waiting to be explored and discovered.
Chapman’s first issue of Infiltration chronicled his adventures in the Royal York Hotel, a place he loved, and where he later spent his honeymoon, shortly before he died of cancer in 2005. Subsequent issues detailed places like Union Station, City Hall, a drain under St. Clair Avenue and St. Mike’s Hospital, where he wandered the halls with his IV pole during his illness. Chapman’s dedication inspired us all to uncover and listen to our own fascination with the layers of Toronto you see when you’re on foot.
At a party sometime during my first year in Toronto, the hostess took me aside and introduced me to Todd Irvine, who, she said, liked to walk, too. After some initial awkwardness, we were soon comparing the worn-out soles of our shoes. We figured a walking date was appropriate, so we met the following Thursday at his house on De Grassi Street. We walked west. We were nervous. And sometimes we would bump into each other because our eyes were on the buildings. We were on something like a date. We crossed the empty West Don Lands – now a completely changed landscape — and eventually ended up at a bar.
We walked again the next week with Marlena Zuber, who has filled my book with psychogeographic illustrations and maps. On subsequent Thursdays, more people joined us. Walks became our weekly thing — our mobile salon. Our practice was simple: we picked a meeting spot and started walking. Sometimes there were two people, sometimes 25, and we drifted through the city, each corner or fork in the road presenting a choice.
Toronto is big — the fifth biggest municipality in North America — and that can be a daunting thing when you start exploring. The best way to start is just to walk. As Glinda the Good Witch of the South says in The Wizard of Oz, “It’s always best to start at the beginning — and all you do is follow the Yellow Brick Road.” Though there is no beginning to Toronto (and no Yellow Brick Road, for that matter) you can follow any of the 32 walks in my book, veering off whenever you want in whatever direction you like, or you can put my book down and start out on your own, in any direction, to find Toronto.
You can start your own society whenever and with whomever you want. While there is a general route described in each chapter of my book, my notes are really just starting points for your own walks through the city. If things go right, you’ll even get lost sometimes. That’s good. You’ll eventually find your way back to someplace that looks familiar, or you’ll find a bus to take you to a subway station.
This kind of walking is also called psychogeography, a term invented by Guy Debord and the Situationists in 1950s Paris. They were concerned with the effects of geography on human emotions and behaviour, so they did absurd things like walk around Paris using a map of London. They got lost, and we try to do the same by breaking out of our usual routes, by following our fancy rather than our logic, by going to places we wouldn’t normally choose to go because they aren’t on our mental map of the city. We named ourselves the Toronto Psychogeography Society, and where the Situationists were trying to strike a blow against capitalism and society, we take a lighter view of psychogeography, best expressed by Christina Ray, the founder of New York’s Glowlab gallery, when she described it as “simply getting excited about a place.”
Walking this way makes Toronto new. The edges of the 416 are different from the centre; the alleys are different from the streets. When you walk through places that don’t fit your mental picture of the city, you create what Bertolt Brecht called a Verfremdungseffekt, a “distancing effect,” taking what’s familiar and making it strange. By removing yourself from your habits and context and letting some unpredictability seep into your routine, you’re better able to see what all the excitement is about.
We all took what we wanted from these walks. We’ve found parts of the city we didn’t know existed, and its public spaces have become personal. Some of us enjoy going into dark ravines with the comfort of a group. (That’s one way of mitigating the limitations for would-be flâneurs who don’t fit the traditional model of one who’s allowed to walk wherever and whenever they want.) Others used it in their own work. Marlena started interpreting our walks in paintings, illustrations and, later, maps. I collected details and they fed my writing on the city in my EYE WEEKLY Stroll and Psychogeography columns, and in Spacing magazine, and elsewhere.
Walking also helped inspire [murmur], a mobile-phone oral-history documentary project I co-founded in 2003. We record short stories and anecdotes people have about specific locations and put a sign in that spot with a phone number that passersby can call to hear that story in the place where it happened. Working on [murmur] gave me an excuse to ask people about their memories and experiences of Toronto and to get underneath the surface of this city a little bit more.
Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, a former poet laureate of Toronto, said in a 2004 speech that the city is falling in love with itself “as a haven against, and a cultural blueprint against, globalization, and as a great experiment in the rehumanization of contemporary life. There is an excitement that carries its own momentum.” Toronto is always changing, always reinventing its parts, working from a Victorian base that serves as a kind of scaffolding for all the new people with their new ways of doing things who have changed and continue to change the city into something bigger and more interesting.
I undertook many of the walks either alone or with one or two partners for company. Either way is fine – you’ll see different details with different people, and when in a group your conversation will start to bounce off the geography and take both your body and your mind to places you didn’t expect. Sometimes I covered similar ground again with the larger Psychogeography Society and saw different things and took other detours.
Though I’ve been walking since I moved here, the walks collected in my book took place between 2004 and late 2009, and though the early walks were revisited and updated, the city is always changing and my words are snapshots in time. The essays are just starting points and initial sketches – it’s up to you to fill in the spaces in between with whatever you find on your own walks.
» Excerpted from Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto by Shawn Micallef, published by EYE WEEKLY and Coach House books.
5 THINGS WE LEARNED ABOUT TORONTO FROM SHAWN MICALLEF'S STROLL
1. “Between [197 and 205 Yonge], there’s a park disguised as a forbidding vacant lot. If you’re feeling particularly romantic, the small raised “stage” area can be viewed as an homage to the Colonial Tavern that once stood here. On the Colonial’s stage, jazz greats from Gillespie to Holiday to Brubek played in surroundings so intimate people could chat with the performers by the stage after the show. Years later, in a basement space dubbed the Meet Market, notorious Toronto punk pioneers the Viletones further eroded Toronto’s morals just as their contemporaries in New York did at CBGB.”
2. “The Toronto-Dominion Centre was long an exception to the generic look of much of the PATH. Architect Mies van der Rohe laid out a mausoleum of a mall down there, a place of order, clean lines and polished travertine marble. Even the store signs were uniform: white letters on a black background using a font Mies designed specifically for the TD Centre. Sadly, the building’s owners, Cadillac Fairview, have since allowed each tenant to install their own vernacular signage, but some retain the elegant font created by van der Rohe, perhaps unwittingly preserving something unique to Toronto.”
3. “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’.… Baldwin’s family got a clear view down to the
lake, but the effort also gave the city a rare street that matches the
proportions of today’s Toronto.”
4. “The big windows of the cardio room [of the Metro Central YMCA] look across Grosvenor Street at the dark tower of the forensic sciences centre. It’s here that inquests into death take place, where tragedy becomes bureaucratic. More recently, the building has become the final stop on the ‘Highway of Heroes’ route that the bodies of Canadians killed in Afghanistan take from CFB Trenton. (It’s possible to catch the motorcade’s final few blocks along Bloor, Wellesley or Bay, where Toronto police block traffic and stand by their cruisers, saluting the hearses that sail quietly by.) The divide between trying hard to stay alive and investigation into death generally goes unnoticed.”
5. “[The Leslie Street Spit] is an unlikely place to find an iconic piece of architecture. Yet this rough landscape is the perfect context for just such a thing: a rusting Quonset hut abandoned halfway out on the peninsula.… At about 3.7 metres in length, this Quonset is smaller than most. You can see the faded words ‘Testing Building,’ above the front door. The hut once housed the Port Authority’s gauge for measuring lake levels and was later used for storage when the Port Authority moved its equipment to the foot of York Street…. [According to the Toronto conservation authority’s Ralph Toninger] The move was made after ‘staff complained they were afraid to go inside because of all the raccoons and things’ living there.”