Through Darkest Toronto
by NIH travel editor, Deon Scant
(Mr. Scant managed in this article to brand the Toronto Maple Leafs a losing organization just as they began a season which took them to the semifinals of the Stanley Cup. Nevertheless, he stands by his analysis, especially as they didn't exactly cover themselves in glory in the semifinal. However, an error in the original article has been corrected.)
Seasoned travellers know that the best way to see any large city is on the subway. The subway has two advantages. First, it keeps your judgment from being clouded by views of the city's carefully maintained showpieces, which are usually its least representative parts. St. Paul's Cathedral, for example, isn't even representative of its neighbourhood, let alone of London as a whole. The second advantage of the subway is that it focusses your attention instead on that aspect of urban life which the tourist may easily overlook: the everyday life of the people.
The best way to get a true picture of London, for example, is to descend into the noisome pit of the Underground. There in ancient stations once magnificent but now awash in cigarette butts and the filth of generations the tourist obtains his or her clearest appreciation of how far Britain has fallen from grandeur.
In Paris the subway overwhelms the tourist with the French mania for order. Automatic gates close to prevent latecomers from rushing onto a train. A push of a button will illuminate on a map the shortest route you can take. During the rush hour passengers will crush together in a half-empty car so that it may be loaded more efficiently.
As for New York, the subway there has its own police force.
So let us board the Toronto subway where many new arrivals to the city would board it, at suburban Yorkdale station (one of the stops for the airport shuttle). What we first of all learn about Toronto is that it is not designed for the ordinary person's convenience. The newly arrived traveller who wants to take the subway must take his or her luggage up an escalator, then up a short flight of stairs, over a bridge, down another flight of stairs, and then around a corner just to reach the entrance to the subway.
Yorkdale station is a long structure of concrete and glass, perched in the middle of an expressway. On the outside the concrete is covered with polished aluminum, which makes the station look like the observation cars that Canadian National used to run on the Canadian.
The design was dictated in part by a neon artwork which was originally incorporated into the roof of the station. An attractive piece it was, too, if not all that artistic. Nevertheless, it has now been removed, a victim of the Toronto Transit Commission's failure to understand that installations of neon, like signals, don't maintain themselves.
The trains are frequent, though, and soon you are being whisked downtown, above ground, down the middle of the expressway. The expressway is in a cutting, and the vegetation on the banks of the cutting is allowed to run wild. Its delightful scruffiness belies the official neatness that you will find at more conventional tourist spots.
At Eglinton West, the third station south of Yorkdale, the train plunges underground, and one's attention shifts to one's fellow passengers, who have started to board in large numbers (north of Eglinton West the trains are often nearly empty). The Torontonian travelling alone on the subway and lucky enough to find a seat occupies his or her time in one of two ways. The first is to read. A surprisingly large percentage read Bibles and other Christian religious publications, but a wide range of books, magazines, and newspapers is carried by travellers.
If he or she has nothing to read, the lone subway traveller with a place to sit will do the next best thing – feign catatonia. The typical rush hour scene on the Toronto subway is one of suspended animation, the readers sitting stock still as they concentrate on the page, the rest just sitting stock still or standing stonefaced between the seats. If you are standing and for some reason – an unexpected lurch by the train, for example – you are thrown into another passenger, he or she will pretend not to notice.
Passengers travelling together will talk, but in voices so low that even they often have trouble hearing. Of course, in no city that I am aware of does anyone get on the subway with a justifiable expectation of a festival breaking out, but the silence and immobility of Toronto subway passengers are striking. They also illustrate the culture of prim docility which characterizes Toronto. One of the reasons there are no festivals on the Toronto subway is that there are no real festivals anywhere in Toronto. Celebrations in Toronto are carried out at approved venues with police supervision.
This is a city where until recently the provincial government paid people to lead the baseball crowd in exercises during the seventh-inning stretch. The crowd couldn't be left to its own devices for those few minutes until the government ran out of money for the program. At the liquor store, the punitively taxed bottles are put into bags covered with attractive warnings about drunk driving. People worry about the prizes in the numerous lotteries being too large for the common folk to handle. And on the subway the Toronto Transit Commission believes it is important to post notices in the cars telling passengers to sit up straight (honest – I'm not making any of this up).
In Toronto, you are to behave in the way the people in charge think you should behave, and in general that's how Torontonians behave. Stretching out on the subway is not the way a good Torontonian is expected to behave. Of course, slouching can unfairly take room from other people, but most of the time it doesn't. And when it does, the problem is most easily settled by the people involved, not by the government. Or so I think, but in Toronto few seem to agree with me. They do as they're told and sit quietly without bothering – or indeed even appearing to notice – their fellow passengers.
Eventually, though, one must leave the car and head to the surface through one of the stations. The stations are often described as utilitarian, but nevertheless they are sometimes less functional than they might be. Several have dangerously narrow platforms, and the routes to the surface from some of the downtown stations are unnecessarily complicated. On the other hand, bus and streetcar platforms have been incorporated into the stations to facilitate transfers (the Toronto transit system has a highly enlightened policy on transfers, about which more will be said later).
The most agreeably designed platform is at Downsview station. The platform there is in fact highly functional as well. As this is the newest station in the system, one can hope that the Toronto Transit Commission's long era of resistance to good station design is over.
Torontonians have complained since the opening of the subway in 1954 about the boring decor of the stations, and over the past twenty-five years or so the Toronto Transit Commission has tried to brighten some of them up. Works of art have been commissioned for both new and old stations. Stations have been retiled with more than one colour of tile.
The success of this program has been mixed. The retiling at Osgoode and St. Andrew stations demonstrates much more zeal than colour sense. As for the art, the two hard-edge depictions of PCC streetcars at Eglinton West station are both unambitious and inappropriate, since streetcars have not run on Eglinton for forty years or so. The mural at St. Clair West seems difficult to classify as representative of any meaning of the much abused word art, and several of the other murals which adorn stations throughout the system are quickly forgettable.
On the other hand, the mosaics at Dupont use colour expertly and interestingly, and the fragments of totem poles on the bus platform at Spadina, although they display the Toronto fondness for severity of form over colour and vivacity, are accomplished.
The work of art that best represents the spirit of Toronto, though, is at College station. This station was made over as a tribute to the Toronto Maple Leafs (it is the station for Maple Leaf Gardens), a decision which tells you much about the city. The Maple Leafs were famous long ago. They have not won a championship since 1967, although since that year seven expansion teams have won sixteen championships. The team has had two winning seasons in the last twenty years.
But Torontonians love the Leafs. In Montreal, a single loss by the Canadiens provokes angry calls in the press for the resignation of the entire management of the team. Pat Burns lost his job as coach there in part because he said that he wasn't going to slash his wrists because the team had been eliminated from the playoffs. The general opinion seemed to be that he should at least have tried to slash them.
Our primly docile Torontonian, though, will put up with anything. Important people tell him or her that the Leafs are going to have a breakthrough season, and he or she believes it.
So how did Toronto honour the Leafs at College station? They put up some photographs and autographs, but chiefly they commissioned two murals, one of Toronto and one of Montreal players. The decision to include the Canadiens was probably done out of the Toronto spirit of fairness and good intentions, but it at least meant that a competitive organization was honoured.
They don't call the Canadiens les Glorieux for nothing. The team has won the Stanley Cup in every decade of its existence. It has won a quarter of the Stanley Cups contested, although the cup was first awarded seventeen years before the team was founded. In Montreal, they realize that if you're ahead at the end of the game you get two points, and if you're behind you get none.
Returning to the murals, we find that prominent Canadian artist Charles Pachter produced them in the way he usually produces murals. He projected photographs of hockey players onto metal panels, traced their outlines, filled in the outlines with flat expanses of paint applied with the technique of the house painter, and then added a little crude detail with black paint. Voilà! – there's your art.
This is what sells. Toronto, in common with most of North America, believes that sophistication and culture can be bought. In painting, sophistication is commonly held to be anything that is not painted on velvet, which may not be readily identified as the work of Norman Rockwell, and which costs a lot of money.
By exploiting this conception of art Andy Warhol was able, with his mundane representations of mundane subjects, to make himself a major figure in twentieth century art. He referred questions about the significance of his work to his agent. In general, the pop artists filled a huge demand for art by quickly producing shoddy paintings whose acrylic paint started peeling the day after installation, and whimsical sculptures that quickly fell apart. The shoddiness of the art was of course part of the pop artists' point.
They realized that art is simply what rich people buy for decoration. The important thing is that you have to be rich to buy it. Craftsmanship, taste, and creativity don't enter into it. They told rich people their junk was art and that it cost a lot, and the rich people bought it. Therefore, it really was art.
Charles Pachter produces much of his work with a projector. This technique is also widely used in primary school art classes, with much the same results. His work often features an enjoyable whimsicality which one will not find as often in the work of form 4B (although the murals at College station don't), but it does not involve any achievements in technique. But it is considered art by the people who matter, so of course it is tremendously popular in Toronto. I hasten to add that these comments are in no way intended as a reflection on Mr. Pachter. He does people the favour of giving them what they want, and that is supposedly the goal of democracy, which is supposedly the form of government which Canada enjoys.
So in Toronto a hockey team which hasn't achieved anything in over a quarter of a century is honoured with a work of art which demonstrates about as much accomplishment as the team has during the lifetimes of most of its supporters. The station has become a giant free advertisement for the bloated capitalists who year after year rake in great piles of money in return for their care in making sure the Leafs lose more games than they win. The Leafs' initial reaction to the murals was to try to hold up the Toronto Transit Commission for a fee for the use of their trademark. Such are the idols of the Torontonian.
Having now ridden all the hobbyhorses and ground all the axes I planned to ride and grind in this article, as well as some that I hadn't, I will conclude with some miscellaneous comments. The Toronto subway is, as they say in the trade, very fast-working. That is, people are whisked on and off the cars quickly. Outside of rush hour, the doors close less than ten seconds after they open. During rush hour, one is grateful for the prim docility of Torontonians. While not a few of the passengers on the platform fail to see the advantages of standing clear of the doors, the robust and sometimes painful skirmishes that typically develop during rush hour on the opening of the doors of a London Underground train are unknown in Toronto. Boarding and leaving the train are therefore swift.
The number of breakdowns on the subway has been sharply reduced in the last ten years. At one time the regular rush hour traveller could count on one or two long delays a week, usually on the way home.
A single fare will take you anywhere in the city. Not only does this spare the Toronto Transit Commission the cost other transit systems have of buying and maintaining huge numbers of ticket machines, it also permits the enlightened transfer policy mentioned earlier. Transfers are free and often, at the stations with bus and streetcar platforms, unnecessary.
The subway cars and stations are clean (although the windows at Yorkdale could use a good wipe), and the cars are spacious. A tall man or woman can stand up inside them, which he or she could not do on the cars of all the world's subways. The doors are controlled by the guard rather than the passengers, and passengers may not pass between cars.
As you may know, the safety record of the Toronto subway is questionable. The last few years have featured a fatal crash due to inadequate signal maintenance and a fire due to incorrect storage, for over twenty years, of track equipment. On the whole, though, if you stay out of the first and last cars of a train, you stand a good chance of surviving your trip.
And isn't that what being a Torontonian is all about? The idea of life in Toronto is that if you keep your wits about you and your nose to the grindstone, eventually you'll get somewhere else – Woodbridge or Richmond Hill or Florida. And if you keep your wits about you on the Toronto subway, and follow those rules about decorous conduct, you'll definitely get somewhere else. If you start wondering why you're going there, you have only yourself to blame.
Through Darkest Toronto © Actual Analysis, 1998
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