35 years since I … part 2
... moved to Toronto!
Last week, you learned about one life-altering decision I made in 1989. Click here to give it a read. Today, however, I want to tell you about my 35 year love affair with Toronto.
Growing up on the farm, Toronto-living seemed a faraway yet alluring aspiration. You see, my family was ‘from away.’ No, not Toronto, but yes, away. Being from away in a rural Ontario community brings with it positives - no blueprint laid out for my life, being the primary one - but also, sadly, negatives. It’s hard to ever quite fit in when your neighbours have the overlapping, deep roots of a wild carrot, introduced by settlers hundreds of years ago and now invasive, while you’re like a transplanted palm, nourished by a different soil. Despite feeling like I was growing in a different, yet adjacent garden, I engaged in local teen activities like gravel running (perhaps a future blog topic), 4-H (definitely one for a future blog), and attending events like maple syrup festivals, fall fairs, stag and does, snowmobile hut parties, and open wedding receptions. Oh yes, I tried very hard to be a little fitter-inner, although will forever feel like weird barbie in my hometown.
I’m quite sure no-one was surprised, therefore, when I spun gravel exiting East Wawanosh township. McMaster University may have granted me my undergrad degree but it was Hamilton that was my gateway drug for the urban addiction I knew I had in me.
Grad school at York University brought me to Toronto in August 1989, and living near the campus made sense. I wanted some access to downtown too so settled on a bachelor apartment near Wilson Station, then the end of the subway line. Although the street name, Cadillac Ave, suggested something loftier, that tiny basement with its pull-out sofa and spiders and millipedes lurking in the dark corners, remains my grimmest living arrangement.
It didn’t darken my views on Toronto , though, and although I did mostly keep my head in the books that year, on my first night on Cadillac, I went downtown to hang out with friends. My mother left multiple voicemails referring to “that wicked city.” She wasn’t wrong - I DID get up to some fun and possibly ill-advised things in my early years here. But nothing as bad as the things I did in Huron County right under her nose.
After eight months with the millipedes and with my degree nearly complete, I next landed on Davenport Avenue three houses west of Casa Loma, sharing a three bedroom flat with other students. Behind our house was a nunnery which fascinated me, and the Casa Loma steps were a favourite place to sit to view the city below but beyond that, the combo of people wasn’t ideal. Indeed that’s the last time I’ve shared accommodation other than seven years with Jack. Four months later, I moved into the smallest bachelor apartment I’ve ever seen at the Crossways at Dundas and Bloor. I soon paint-splashed and ragged the walls keeping up with the faux-finish trend-du-jour. No paint could disguise the cockroaches that advanced through every crack like a nocturnal army. Not info I’ve needed since, but pennies in the cracks between the floor and the baseboard will stem their flow. Beyond its elevator and its main floor mall, though, the Crossways allowed me to explore Roncesvalles, when it was just starting to be cool, and High Park, where you can get some literal cool in the height of August heat. It’s there where I held my first of many summer parties, a great way to mashup my eclectic Toronto and non-Toronto friend mix. I stayed in the west end 18 months.
In 1991, however, I moved back in mid-town to my forever-home (or so I thought). It was the front half of the second floor of a Victorian house behind Casa Loma on Wells Hill. It ticked all the boxes for me - dark wood, fireplace (not working), stained glass, and a cosy fire escape accessible by clambering over a radiator and squeezing out a window. And I did, often with friends. The kitchen was but a nook, the bathroom (ensuite to my bedroom) was ancient, and I had to hike 20 minutes to a laundry mat, but oh man, I loved that place. With inspo and labour from my talented decorator-niece, I soon lived in bold colours. It was there where I began my serious urban walking habit.
If it had been possible to buy that place I would have but after eight years (during which time, I convinced the landlord to upgrade the bathroom and install a stackable Maytag) I gave notice and bought my art deco condo on Farnham, just south of Avenue and St. Clair. The Dorchester is a beautiful but quirky building - no in-suite laundry, no balcony, no AC, and a pack-and-a-half of eccentric neighbours. I fit right in. It’s surrounded by great eating, drinking, and transit, but also an easy walk to Rosedale, Yorkville, Forest Hill Village, and for the real walkers, north to Yonge and Eglinton and south to downtown where I worked for many years. Farnham is surrounded by tree-lined ravines and parks that, when you have no balcony, are essential. If not for meeting Jack, who fixed my Farnham fridge, there’s little doubt I’d still be there. Indeed, I kept Farnham for four years after we moved in together, not quite imagining I could live with someone for long, and certainly not thinking I could ever fall in love with Weston, still in Toronto but a distant never-heard-of corner without restaurants, bars, or a subway station.
Home is Weston, now, and has been for nearly 1/3 of the time I’ve lived in Toronto. I can’t walk to the kinds of things I used to need, although we’re starting to get coffees shops and decent places to grab lunch. But I’m a regular on the Humber River trail, and more than that, for the first time, I’m part of a rich, diverse community. Not rich financially but rich in humanity. People give a damn about their neighbours and even hang out with them from time to time. Midtown never gave me that.
Despite its myriad problems, including crumbling infrastructure, housing crisis, and fiscal imbalance, Toronto is regularly touted as being among the top 10 cities in the world in which to live. For me, it’s the only one. For 35 years, that CN tower has been a lighthouse, guiding me home anytime I leave the city. I don’t see that ever changing.
(Above a photo of the waterfront taken on my 25 Toronto-versary waterfront tour. From left to right below: Cadillac Ave, Crossways, Wells Hill (2), Farnham, some City scenes, and then my Weston home)
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