Some Great Idea

by Edward Keenan

  So Harris built this city. But if you know his name today, it’s probably for two projects in particular – projects whose construction was chronicled in Michael Ondaatje’s 1987 novel In the Skin of a Lion. (Incidentally, that book may be the essential Toronto novel, finding the soul of the city in a native-born Canadian’s quest for identity, which he, in turn, finds in the stories of the immigrant labourers who built Toronto’s infrastructure. But Ondaatje’s portrayal of Harris is wholly imagined, and not based on any research into the man’s personal life. Where Ondaatje portrays him as arrogant and conceited, friends and family told Lorinc in an interview he was self-effacing and idealistic; cordial, warm and elegant.) The first of these projects bearrs his name, the R. C. Harris Water Treatment Plant on Lake Ontario at Victoria Park Avenue. I’m no expert on water-filtration facilities, but I’m confident in saying this one is likely among the most beautiful in the world; the place is a sanitation palace. Surrounded by parkland, it’s an ornate art deco structure outfitted with marble floors and brass fixtures, its limestone walls decorated with bas-relief frescoes illuminated by domed skylights. The whole project was designed in detail by Harris, and built during the Great Depression at a cost of $25 million. The place is still in use, the original pumps still working away, filtering 456 million litres of water per day.

  The other storied Harris project is also still in use. The grand truss arches of the Prince Edward Viaduct span 494 metres of the Don Valley, connecting Bloor Street to Danforth Avenue, joining together the east and west halves of the city. The bridge’s concrete columns topped by rounded sidewalk observation balconies and its black steel-arch girders visually define the vista of the Don River valley, and support the travel of five lanes of car traffic, two bicycle lanes, sidewalks in each direction and east and westbound subways that run under the road. You hear a lot about that subway tunnel: Harris insisted, over apparently strong opposition, on including the lower-level rail corridor to accommodate a subway line, even though Toronto didn’t have a subway system at the time (and wouldn’t for another several decades). The fight over that forward-thinking provision was just part of the struggle to get the bridge built: the viaduct’s construction was subject to four consecutive referenda (it was defeated in one of those years), and city politicians tried various strategies to steer Harris away from the beautiful steel-arch design in favour of cheaper alternatives. He would not hear of it. In the end, the construction of the bridge opened up the east end of the city to more dense, rapid development, and the inclusion of the subway tunnel saved the TTC millions of dollars when the Bloor-Danforth line finally opened in 1966.

  The astonishing thing in considering Harris’s life’s work is the realization that his legacy is the stuff of the city that now allows Torontonians to travel, and keeps them safe and healthy. He recognized that building waterworks and roadways wasn’t a matter of grudging necessity; it was – and is – the material of the city that enables all other great civic endeavours, public and private, large and small. That’s how he talked about it, too. ‘The city is something into which men pour their souls,’ he said in a speech at the time. ‘A drain well dug is as glorious as an opera or a picture.’ He said the men working in the sewers were working for the glory of Toronto. Fittingly, his signature projects are monuments to the city, every bit as beautiful as they are useful.

  Faced with an absolute crisis, he built not just to meet the needs of the city’s struggling population, but to prepare for the glorious needs of the still-greater future on the city’s distant horizon, stretching the water and road networks out into the emerging corners of the city. He taught us to build infrastructure worthy of a great city, for the city we will be tomorrow rather than the one we were yesterday, and to exalt the functions of the city because they enable the great stories of city life to be written.

  Which brings us to the figure whose shadow looms largest today, the one closest to our own time: Jane Jacobs. I know, I know. If you live here, or if you live anywhere in North America and participate in discussions about cities and planning, then you can grow tired of hearing Jacobs’ name mentioned. If someone brings up city planning or a subject remotely related, the Ghost of Saint Jane will soon be haunting you. At Toronto city hall, I’ve heard her name spoken at virtually every meeting I have ever attended, by politicians of every stripe – like George Orwell, she’s claimed by both left and right and everyone in between. The libertarian American journal Reason and the conservative Manhattan Institute have both argued that she was one of their own, while the liberal New Republic hails her as the prototypical lefty thinker. She’s mentioned by those in favour of increasing density and by those opposed to it. In Toronto, and now also in New York, there are prizes and pedestrian urban storytelling festivals named after her. Her pure ubiquity can get on your nerves.

  But there’s really no way around her. If you read her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities today, you’re reminded of why it’s the most influential piece on urban planning ever written. She lays out, in plain language and from close observation, the qualities that make cities the world’s engines of economic growth and social cohesion, hubs of innovation and creators of widespread prosperity. The book is read as an urban-planning text and an argument against the folly of central plans drawn up on paper by visionaries, but above all else, The Death and Life of Great American Cities is an argument that diversity is the essential quality of the successful city, and the successful neighbourhood and the successful street or block or park. Diversity of building heights and ages and types and uses (hence the mania for ‘mixed use’ and ‘adaptive reuse’ development); diversity of industries; diversity of ages, lifestyles, cultures and income levels; diversity of opinions in a room making decisions. Jacobs describes the city as an ecosystem – one of organized complexity – that depends for its health on differences coexisting in a confined space. These sometimes act in concert, sometimes in conflict and sometimes in symbiosis, but always rubbing up against each other to create something more vital, interesting, productive and mutually beneficial than any of the single elements could accomplish on their own.

  To make it all work, she argued, cities must operate on human scale. Physically, so that people encounter each other on foot rather than from inside cars, and politically, so that those who live in a place will determine the shape of growth and development through their interactions, not have renewal foisted on them by some master plan. Local democracy, the political expression of diversity, is essential. And you need all these qualities present not just in the city as a whole, but in each neighbourhood, on each street, on every block that’s going to be successful – just as a complete sample of your DNA is present in every cell of your body.

  Originally from Pennsylvania, Jacobs lived in New York City when she wrote the book that would change the world, and she used her own neighbourhood of Greenharwich Village as her primary example of urban vitality. But she moved to Toronto (so her son could escape the Vietnam War draft) in 1968, settling in the Annex, and found a city vividly demonstrating the principles she had ­articulated. The municipal entity that Jacobs lived in when she arrived and for thirty years thereafter – the pre-amalgamation City of Toronto, which people now sometimes call ‘Old Toronto’ or just ‘downtown’ to differentiate it from the suburban former ­municipalities of York, East York, North York, Scarborough and Etobicoke – had long been called a ‘city of neighbourhoods.’ It might have lacked grand boulevards or monuments or squares, but it possessed a dense network of diverse neighbourhoods jammed up against each other pretty much across the entire length and breadth of the city. You could pick an east-west corridor in Toronto – Queen or King, Dundas, Bloor, Eglinton or any of the others – and walk its entire length with very few gaps in the vibrancy of the streetscape. Outside the few blocks of the Financial District and the University Avenue government and hospital corridor, there was no one place for anything – no ‘shopping district’ or ‘street where all the ba
rs are.’ You could find factories and workplaces and shopping destinations and live music venues and tourist attractions all over the city, and in almost every one of those places there was also a large residential population, rich and poor and those in between living and working side by side. (See, for example, the case of Toronto’s wealthiest enclave, Rosedale, which, in the 1960s, shared borders and commercial avenues with hippie central Yorkville and the slums of Cabbagetown.)

  Jacobs was a leader of what is probably the most storied reform movement in Toronto’s memory – and a perfect illustration of how a movement formed in opposition to bad government can come to define itself in the affirmative, and create new proposals from the rubble of those it has defeated. Before moving to Toronto, Jacobs had become famous not just for her book, but for her organized resistance to the New York City expressway-building schemes of bureaucrat Robert Moses. When she arrived here, she quickly found herself in a similar role – trying to stop the construction of the planned Spadina Expressway, and with it an entire network of expressways that would have criss-crossed Toronto.

  The expressways had been in the works for more than twenty years by the time Jacobs arrived; the network had begun with the building of the Don Valley Parkway and the Gardiner Expressway. The planned Spadina Expressway was under construction by 1963, and the city planned to build an additional five such autoroutes, razing parts of Rosedale, Scarborough, Eglinton West and either Keele or Clinton Street in the process.

  In 1969, the Spadina Expressway (today’s Allen Expressway) extended south from above the 401 to Eglinton Avenue. Plans called for it to proceed down along Spadina through the Annex and terminate in Chinatown. But a number of Annex residents who would have seen their neighbourhood bulldozed by the new road began organizing to stop it. Jacobs formed a group called the Stop Spadina, Save Our City Co-ordinating Committee with University of Toronto professors David Nowlan and Alan Powell, politician John Sewell (who was elected to Toronto city council to oppose the expressway in 1969), architects Colin Vaughan (father of current city councillor Adam Vaughan) and Jack Diamond, artists Michael Snow and Harold Town, and many others. They sent around mimeographed newsletters, circulated petitions and threw parties, neighbourhood by neighbourhood. Communications visionary Marshall McLuhan even made a short film to agitate against the expressway’s construction.

  The Liberal chair of Metro’s regional government, Albert Campbell, and the NDP mayor of Toronto, William Dennison, remained firmly committed to the road-building plan. Dennison said Jacobs and her crew were simply a small band of downtown loudmouths protesting: ‘Lots of tracks in the mud but really only a very few rabbits making the marks.’ After a legal battle, the Ontario Municipal Board ruled in favour of the city’s plan. Unbowed, the protesters, now representing a mass movement of Torontonians, appealed directly to the one person who could overrule the municipal authorities: Progressive Conservative premier Bill Davis. In June 1971, Davis rose in the legislature to declare the expressway dead. ‘Cities were built for people and not cars,’ he famously said. ‘If we were building a transportation system to serve the automobile, the Spadina Expressway would be a good place to start. But if we are building a transportation system to serve people, the Spadina Expressway is a good place to stop.’ Indeed, the rest of the highway network was eventually cancelled and, in 1972, the movement that stopped Spadina helped sweep a reform council into office that was led by Progressive Conservative David Crombie, nicknamed ‘the Tiny Perfect Mayor.’

  But the battle had not been purely about stopping a road. The arguments against the road network led to the articulation of a set of environmentalist, urbanist, neighbourhood-based principles – essentially the principles Jacobs had laid out in her book – that found application in building the city. Furthermore, the opposition effort had created an army of activists, artists, citizens and politicians who had rallied together around those shared principles and were now in a position to put them to work. Roughly the same group of people, acting on the same principles, stopped, for example, the levelling of Kensington Market and Cabbagetown, which were to be replaced by new housing projects on the (disastrous, we now realize) Regent Park model. Development guidelines were sharply rewritten to ensure mixed uses and mixed heights, and to make preservation of existing buildings part of the process. The transit system and its service levels were radically expanded into the suburban areas of Toronto on the principle that cars must not be thought of automatically as the main method of getting around.

  Crombie’s mayorship led Harper’s magazine to call Toronto ‘the City That Works.’ During a decade in which major American cities were abandoned by a middle class decamping to the suburbs, Toronto maintained its vitality. The era is widely, and fondly, remembered as a renaissance in Toronto’s development.

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  Now that we’ve taken a trip down memory lane, let’s put some of it together and find the themes that tie this Toronto story together. We’ve got this founding myth of Toronto as a meeting place, now enhanced by an embrace of multiculturalism. And we’ve got this holy trinity of civic patron saints who show us how Toronto was built and the principles on which it became the city that works. You can draw a neat, tripartite schematic that encapsulates this:

   from William Lyon Mackenzie: democracy is the foundational principle of the city, a political condition that allows everything else to function;

  from R. C. Harris: building and maintaining the infrastructure of the city is the most important function of the municipal government, because it is the stage on which all the city’s stories are played;

  from Jane Jacobs: if numbers one and two create the environment that allows the city to build and express itself, then diversity in all its forms is the essential condition of Toronto, the quality that drives it to thrive and grow.

  Democracy, infrastructure and – the greatest of these principles – diversity.

  This book takes its title from the first line of British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Conigsby: ‘A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea.’ Disraeli wrote that London was formed around the idea of commerce; Paris manners; Jerusalem faith; Rome conquest; and so on. If Toronto is a great city, or in the process of becoming one, its great idea is inscribed on the coat of arms, whose motto reads: ‘Diversity Our Strength.’

  When the city council of the newly amalgamated City of Toronto officially adopted the motto in 1998, they were referring to the combined power of the seven municipalities that had been joined together. Those amalgamated municipalities were themselves amalgamations, made up of dozens of the unique towns and villages that had combined their strengths in the past.

  At the time I write this, when city council and the debate about the mayor’s capacities appears rent with divisions between the old City of Toronto and the suburban areas of the new city, the idea that this diversity is a source of strength might seem ironic. But the thinking behind the motto – which means so much more, of course, in practice – is a handy reminder that there’s more than one meaning to diversity, and more than one dimension to the term as it applies to Toronto.

  Earlier, I spilled a lot of ink on how the ethnic diversity of the city is vitally important, and clearly it is. But the recent usage of the word as a direct synonym for multiculturalism does disservice to the city’s slogan, since it’s just one of the forms of diversity that has made the city great, as Jane Jacobs taught us. (Jacobs hardly touches on ethnic diversity in her seminal book – though at least a third of the chapters deal directly with diversity.) Richard Florida – celebrated and derided in equal measure as an urban guru, and currently the head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto – has laid out a theory in which the success of modern cities can be measured in part by how ethnically, but also sexually, diverse they are. Proudly multicultural, Toronto is home to the second-largest (and among the most visible) gay population of any city in N
orth America.

  The Harvard-based urban economist Edward Glaeser wrote in a 2012 essay in the City Journal, citing Jacobs, that the long-term economic success of a city depends on a diversity of industries within the city. The Martin Prosperity Institute, in a discussion paper, echoes this when it describes the ‘depth and sophistication’ of Toronto’s employment diversity. Manufacturing and retail trade, professional, scientific and technical services, health care, finance and cultural industries, among others, are all significant contributors to the local marketplace.

  To use a metaphor that the creative-class–touting Florida might approve of, Toronto is not like a masterpiece of classical music conceived by a genius composer, with defined roles in the intricately plotted symphony to be played by various people. Rather, it’s closer to a piece of improv jazz built up and added to by various players to create something less harmonious, maybe more challenging and difficult to appreciate, but more exciting and dynamic. It’s a piece of music still being composed and recomposed all the time.

  But it has barely begun. We’re still inventing Toronto, for the umpteenth time in its history, as a city built by diversity, according to the principles of diversity and as a monument to diversity – and that invention is a collaborative project. Understanding all this makes it easier to interpret the craziness of Toronto’s recent politics.

  THE NEW CITY

  1

  If you’re looking for a villain in the modern story of Toronto, it’s probably Michael Deane Harris, the twenty-second premier of Ontario. His legacy is hotly debated. He led what he called the Common Sense Revolution, in which he slashed welfare and social-service rates, while also slashing income taxes, and somehow, in an economy coming out of a deep recession and soaring into the Clinton-era boom (the last hurrah of North American manufacturing), managed to increase the provincial debt by $20 billion. Cranky conservatives loved him, saying he was finally sticking it to the teachers’ unions and welfare cheats and giving the people back their money. Leftists loved hating him, organizing epic protest rallies at Queen’s Park and around the province.