JasonParis
Moderator
Very interesting article by Urban Toronto's own Amy Lavender.
Would also make a great gift for anyone still looking for that perfect gift for the urban geek in your life!
The new Torontonians
BY Amy Lavender December 12, 2007 15:12
We experience the city in the perpetual present. In Toronto we treat current controversies — architectural hubris, the costs of uncontained sprawl, the challenges of multiculturalism — as if they have never happened before. But a rediscovered novel grants us a rare opportunity to judge contemporary Toronto against its past, and reminds us that many of our most pressing issues have challenged the city for decades.
Phyllis Brett Young’s The Torontonians, an international bestseller when first published in 1960 and recently reissued to intrigue a new generation of readers, exposes the conceits and preoccupations of a city believing itself to be perched at the very edge of modernity. Reportedly the first novel to feature Viljo Revell’s City Hall on its cover, The Torontonians depicts four populations dwelling (then as now) in uneasy coexistence: the staid Toryish urban establishment of the Annex and Forest Hill; the ambitiously modern movers and shakers of the city core; the voracious materialists of its sprawling suburbs; and, making room among themselves in the interstices of the city, the “New Canadians†beginning their own transformations of Toronto.
A study in contrasts and Canada’s first suburban satire, The Torontonians suggests that in 1960 Toronto was a far more complex and contested city than contemporary narratives recall. Commonly represented as a flat and featureless Anglo-Saxon landscape where you couldn’t watch a film or get a drink on Sunday, in reality Toronto seethed with race, class and gender divisions roiling just beneath the surface of a city whose cultural terrain was shifting as inexorably as the price of a cocktail at the Park Plaza. The novel’s principal tension is the cultural divide between the city core and its rapidly growing suburbs; its subtext is the question of whether they reflect two different, perhaps opposed, ways of life.
Although the city portrayed in The Torontonians is predominantly Anglo-Saxon, by 1960 a third of Toronto’s population consisted of foreign-born immigrants. Hungarians rented rooms in the once-gracious Annex homes where Karen (the novel’s protagonist) and her social set had grown up, and in the novel these newcomers are the perennial beneficiaries of charitable bridge tournaments held in the manicured salons of Rowanwood, a wealthy, insular suburb standing in approximately for Leaside. Rowanwood’s population consists mainly of wealthy businessmen and their wives who have migrated north (presumably in flight from the very immigrants they support through charity) in search of the Good Life where everybody, as one housewife puts it, “should live in ranch-style bungalows and be just like themselves.â€
But if The Torontonians satirizes 1960-era Rowanwood for its homogeneity, it is worth noting that cultural commentators worry that many of Toronto’s contemporary suburbs — such as Markham with its large Chinese population, Brampton with its concentration of South Asians and the preponderance of Italian neighbourhoods in Woodbridge — are at risk of developing into ethnic enclaves as insular and homogenous as Rowanwood. But just as these contemporary suburbs are far more open than the census records might suggest, even Rowanwood is more diverse than it appears. A Rowanwood housewife takes as a lover a Polish count fallen upon hard times. The neighbourhood’s most powerful businessman conceals the secret of his slum upbringing. A single mother is quietly subsidized by a neighbour. It turns out that much of Rowanwood is busy concealing facets of difference in order to compete for the dubious rewards of middle-class consumption.
Perhaps this is why the novel’s protagonist finds herself drawn to the city spread out below Rowanwood, musing that “it was only below the Hill that you came into direct contact with the core of vitality that was the true essence of the city†and adding, “here you were acutely and excitingly aware of the steady heart-beat of a really great metropolis, fresh blood continuously pumped into it from the four corners of the globe.†Chafing at the banality of a materialist existence that has reduced her to a consumer of Cuisinarts, carpets and backyard cookouts, and desperate and bored while her husband commutes downtown to work in the city’s corporate canyons, Karen seeks to diagnose precisely what is wrong with suburbia, describing it as “an impossible compromise†between city and countryside. She concludes that suburbia is an “evolutionary cul-de-sac,†and adds:
A city with a future, like an individual with a future, could never remain static for long, could not afford to expand indefinitely along the lines of least resistance. The suburbs, as they now existed, were the city’s lines of least resistance. The towering buildings to the south were the real yardstick of its stature.
But rejecting suburbia requires confronting the harsh social and economic realities of life in the city below the Hill. Karen realizes that the “towering buildings†of the downtown core loom above the long-standing slums of the Ward and the city’s first Chinatown, even then being cleared for the construction of the new City Hall and an adjacent collection of commercial towers. She discovers that her best friend’s husband, now one of the city’s most powerful executives and a Rowanwood neighbour, had grown up in one of those slums. Stumbling out into the downtown sunlight after this belated revelation, Karen sees Toronto’s polyglot mix of cultures reflected in the city’s “uneven stratification of brick and granite record[ing] more than a hundred and fifty years of architectural trial and error.†Walking north along Yonge Street, she revels as if for the first time in the “vivid turbulence†of the city’s diversity unfolding all around her.
Reading The Torontonians after nearly half a century, one is of course struck by the city it omits: the CN tower not yet even a figment in the city’s imagination, the genuine cultural diversity that in 1960 has yet to appear, the astonishing sprawl that has turned Leaside from a suburb into midtown.
But one is struck even more by the similarities. Toronto remains divided between north and south — although current census reports indicate that immigrants (now nearly half the city’s population) are more likely to occupy the inner and outer suburbs (but not Leaside, which remains stolidly Anglo-Saxon) while the chattering classes have pushed their way back into the city beneath the Hill, retaking old territory in the Annex, Kensington Market and Parkdale. The Annex in particular has regained much of its ascendancy as a neighbourhood but retains an uneasy (some would say outright hostile) relationship with those living in rental accommodation at its spatial and social margins.
Affluent women are less likely to feel trapped in the “gilded labyrinth†of suburbia, having contracted out childcare and housework in exchange for the dubious reward of lengthy daily commutes along GTA highways. In the downtown core, land developers and ambitious politicians seek to remake the city in their own image. In short, read not simply as a novel but as social commentary, The Torontonians offers a fresh perspective on the conceits and preoccupations of a city that still believes itself to be perched at the very edge of modernity.
Amy Lavender Harris is the author of Imagining Toronto, forthcoming in 2008 from Mansfield Press.
Would also make a great gift for anyone still looking for that perfect gift for the urban geek in your life!
The new Torontonians
BY Amy Lavender December 12, 2007 15:12
We experience the city in the perpetual present. In Toronto we treat current controversies — architectural hubris, the costs of uncontained sprawl, the challenges of multiculturalism — as if they have never happened before. But a rediscovered novel grants us a rare opportunity to judge contemporary Toronto against its past, and reminds us that many of our most pressing issues have challenged the city for decades.
Phyllis Brett Young’s The Torontonians, an international bestseller when first published in 1960 and recently reissued to intrigue a new generation of readers, exposes the conceits and preoccupations of a city believing itself to be perched at the very edge of modernity. Reportedly the first novel to feature Viljo Revell’s City Hall on its cover, The Torontonians depicts four populations dwelling (then as now) in uneasy coexistence: the staid Toryish urban establishment of the Annex and Forest Hill; the ambitiously modern movers and shakers of the city core; the voracious materialists of its sprawling suburbs; and, making room among themselves in the interstices of the city, the “New Canadians†beginning their own transformations of Toronto.
A study in contrasts and Canada’s first suburban satire, The Torontonians suggests that in 1960 Toronto was a far more complex and contested city than contemporary narratives recall. Commonly represented as a flat and featureless Anglo-Saxon landscape where you couldn’t watch a film or get a drink on Sunday, in reality Toronto seethed with race, class and gender divisions roiling just beneath the surface of a city whose cultural terrain was shifting as inexorably as the price of a cocktail at the Park Plaza. The novel’s principal tension is the cultural divide between the city core and its rapidly growing suburbs; its subtext is the question of whether they reflect two different, perhaps opposed, ways of life.
Although the city portrayed in The Torontonians is predominantly Anglo-Saxon, by 1960 a third of Toronto’s population consisted of foreign-born immigrants. Hungarians rented rooms in the once-gracious Annex homes where Karen (the novel’s protagonist) and her social set had grown up, and in the novel these newcomers are the perennial beneficiaries of charitable bridge tournaments held in the manicured salons of Rowanwood, a wealthy, insular suburb standing in approximately for Leaside. Rowanwood’s population consists mainly of wealthy businessmen and their wives who have migrated north (presumably in flight from the very immigrants they support through charity) in search of the Good Life where everybody, as one housewife puts it, “should live in ranch-style bungalows and be just like themselves.â€
But if The Torontonians satirizes 1960-era Rowanwood for its homogeneity, it is worth noting that cultural commentators worry that many of Toronto’s contemporary suburbs — such as Markham with its large Chinese population, Brampton with its concentration of South Asians and the preponderance of Italian neighbourhoods in Woodbridge — are at risk of developing into ethnic enclaves as insular and homogenous as Rowanwood. But just as these contemporary suburbs are far more open than the census records might suggest, even Rowanwood is more diverse than it appears. A Rowanwood housewife takes as a lover a Polish count fallen upon hard times. The neighbourhood’s most powerful businessman conceals the secret of his slum upbringing. A single mother is quietly subsidized by a neighbour. It turns out that much of Rowanwood is busy concealing facets of difference in order to compete for the dubious rewards of middle-class consumption.
Perhaps this is why the novel’s protagonist finds herself drawn to the city spread out below Rowanwood, musing that “it was only below the Hill that you came into direct contact with the core of vitality that was the true essence of the city†and adding, “here you were acutely and excitingly aware of the steady heart-beat of a really great metropolis, fresh blood continuously pumped into it from the four corners of the globe.†Chafing at the banality of a materialist existence that has reduced her to a consumer of Cuisinarts, carpets and backyard cookouts, and desperate and bored while her husband commutes downtown to work in the city’s corporate canyons, Karen seeks to diagnose precisely what is wrong with suburbia, describing it as “an impossible compromise†between city and countryside. She concludes that suburbia is an “evolutionary cul-de-sac,†and adds:
A city with a future, like an individual with a future, could never remain static for long, could not afford to expand indefinitely along the lines of least resistance. The suburbs, as they now existed, were the city’s lines of least resistance. The towering buildings to the south were the real yardstick of its stature.
But rejecting suburbia requires confronting the harsh social and economic realities of life in the city below the Hill. Karen realizes that the “towering buildings†of the downtown core loom above the long-standing slums of the Ward and the city’s first Chinatown, even then being cleared for the construction of the new City Hall and an adjacent collection of commercial towers. She discovers that her best friend’s husband, now one of the city’s most powerful executives and a Rowanwood neighbour, had grown up in one of those slums. Stumbling out into the downtown sunlight after this belated revelation, Karen sees Toronto’s polyglot mix of cultures reflected in the city’s “uneven stratification of brick and granite record[ing] more than a hundred and fifty years of architectural trial and error.†Walking north along Yonge Street, she revels as if for the first time in the “vivid turbulence†of the city’s diversity unfolding all around her.
Reading The Torontonians after nearly half a century, one is of course struck by the city it omits: the CN tower not yet even a figment in the city’s imagination, the genuine cultural diversity that in 1960 has yet to appear, the astonishing sprawl that has turned Leaside from a suburb into midtown.
But one is struck even more by the similarities. Toronto remains divided between north and south — although current census reports indicate that immigrants (now nearly half the city’s population) are more likely to occupy the inner and outer suburbs (but not Leaside, which remains stolidly Anglo-Saxon) while the chattering classes have pushed their way back into the city beneath the Hill, retaking old territory in the Annex, Kensington Market and Parkdale. The Annex in particular has regained much of its ascendancy as a neighbourhood but retains an uneasy (some would say outright hostile) relationship with those living in rental accommodation at its spatial and social margins.
Affluent women are less likely to feel trapped in the “gilded labyrinth†of suburbia, having contracted out childcare and housework in exchange for the dubious reward of lengthy daily commutes along GTA highways. In the downtown core, land developers and ambitious politicians seek to remake the city in their own image. In short, read not simply as a novel but as social commentary, The Torontonians offers a fresh perspective on the conceits and preoccupations of a city that still believes itself to be perched at the very edge of modernity.
Amy Lavender Harris is the author of Imagining Toronto, forthcoming in 2008 from Mansfield Press.
