Urban Art

I originally wrote the following article in April 2001, it was published in mathNEWS at that time. I've always liked this article and although reposting it here represents no new burst of creativity its still a good read (I hope) for anyone who took the trouble of coming to my blog today.

For anyone looking for new creativity look to the end of the article, where I pass judgment on my own writing.

"Toronto is a good city to mind your own business in."

- Writer and U of T English Professor, Northrope Fry

Just off the North end of the Eaton Centre, near Sweet Rosie's Cookies, in the Dundas Subway Station is a mural entitled "Cross Section". Made by William McElcheran.

I still remember when I was just five years old my baby-sitter used to take me to the Eaton Centre to enjoy that positively exciting experience for a five year old, clothes shopping. I remember seeing all the construction then and not paying close attention to the mural dated May of 1984. [That statement is false, by the time the mural went up I was no longer making the daily treks downtown to Eatons, but the construction I can still recall, now more than 20 years after the fact. The mural must have gone up after the construction stopped.]

Now that I am a little older I notice things that at one time were far less exciting than the toy department of a now defunct department store.

Cross Section is like a photograph of people in the Dundas Subway station at rush hour.

The men in their long trench coats clutching their satchels hurriedly off to meet some appointment with eternity.

The gorgeous lady down at the path level with her husband (or boyfriend?) listening to the guitar playing hippy. The male with her is in a rush to get away, he has a look of total disdain.

The boys a short escalator ride up must be in the middle of a fist fight.

There is a man with a long beard mouth open wide, wearing robes. I can almost hear him saying "believe in the lord Jesus, Satan is upon us". Well its been 17 years and no sign of Satan yet, US presidential elections notwithstanding.

There is a father scolding his son, it looks like the child, perhaps five or six years old dropped a parcel on the ground.

A lot of the people are still dressed as if it were the late 1960s and not the early 80's. But just as the dog, a husky, near the North bound platform never changes his fir coat, the actions, the emotions, have not changed, I'll bet, since that subway station first opened more than thirty years ago. [Actually when I wrote this column the Dundas subway station was already well past forty years of age.]

People still have places to go, people to see. The music changes, the way we get from A to B changes. But the thesis that North America is a society more concerned with getting from A to B than with A or B is very much in evidence in Cross Section.

I love watching the people hurriedly rush off to do their daily business. There is, arguably nothing as fun as sitting at a sidewalk cafe, like the Second Cup over by John and Queen, or The Now Cafe on Parliament just North of Carlton watching the people go about their daily business.

To be sure there are those who don't seem to appreciate the rhythm in a city. The movie makers who take up every parking space on a one lane side street. The federal or provincial politician who can't seem to do anything other than cut services while they hike taxes. The suburbanite who complains about the bad traffic or the dirty subway system - ironically their low density housing could never pay for wide streets. It takes Toronto income tax dollars to extend the 404. In the end, though, everyone is part of the city.

All this talk brings me to that immortal question what is a city all about. Is it tax revenue for Ontario or Canada? Is it a place for farmers to sell their produce?

I believe a city is more than that. There is something amazing, specular even, that three million people can live and work within twenty kilometres of each other. Consuming tons of produce and raw materials and generating so much, arts, letters, learning. (As well as manufactured goods.)

Human beings have congregated for all of our recorded history and then some. Cities are institutions that predate nations, states, even politics as we know it today. A poor, but relevant example, Canada celebrated her 125'th birthday in 1992. Toronto celebrated its 150'th birthday in 1984, but even before 1834 there were people living where the Don River meets Lake Ontario.

Toronto, the word comes from a First Nations word for "Meeting Place". And as I type this little column I am in fact sitting on the 27'th floor of a smaller office tower in the same downtown core where over a million people are right now meeting, talking, doing business and improving the quality of life, intentionally or unintentionally, for everyone.

One may not like city life, but it is nearly impossible to escape it. Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, were, are and will be, the heart of Canada. To think otherwise is a mark of the short-sighted.

And thus ends my thesis that humanity is an ever improving species. Ironic, that just 5 months after this article was published the very institution that received my praise the city would be attacked in a manner that would force, I hope, all of us to reevaluate our our manner of living and interacting.

I particularly like this line: meeting, talking, doing business and improving the quality of life, intentionally or unintentionally, for everyone I read it now and the corny poorly constructed lameness of that line astounds me, to say nothing, in this post of the ABCP market of depleted oil stocks and poisoned air. And it was not as if the writing wasn't in the sand in April 2001, I already knew about the Green House Effect, Hubbert Curve, commercial paper was not something I had heard of but I knew that lenders were too willing to part with their money and the dot com bubble was already deep into its burst.

I did predict the disastrous consequences of the Bush administration with a totally unsurprising accuracy. But it seems so ironic, this was an old tirade against Mike Harris and yet it still screams of an optimism of that I have not felt for some time. I wonder, will that optimism ever return?