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Square life

The hardest part of coming back from New York City is not becoming that asshole who always talks about how things are better in New York City.

So let’s talk about Times Square instead. When I first visited, at the age of 16, I considered it the apex of capitalism returning 12 years later, I realize it’s the nadir.

Resembling nothing so much as an amped-up Niagara Falls, it exists at the nexus of T.G.I. Friday’s and Madame Tussauds.

It is a place to leave, a place to escape, a place to pass through on your way from one theatre to another. It is impressive, but it is not pleasant.

It is both more and less of a place than anywhere else I have ever been. Far from having no “there” there, it is a locale with nothing but “THERE,” screamed out in capital letters.

Yonge-Dundas Square, on the other hand, succeeds entirely in spite of itself. It may have been intended as a pathetic and stupid imitation of Times Square, and in some respects remains as such. But in our desperate craving for a civic locus, Torontonians have forced it to transcend the failure it was set up to be.

A concrete expanse ringed by billboards, with six trees plunked along its southern side (just two of which appear to be happy), it is a neo-brutalist moonscape bathed in the glow of national advertisers.

But it is our neo-brutalist moonscape, and it is consistently subsumed and animated by our desire to make it the place we deserve. Like Toronto as a whole, it’s characterized by its capacity to become the constant invention of those who occupy it.

It has been the site of spontaneous revelry (after Canada’s victory in the 2004 World Cup of Hockey) and citizen-planned revelry (after Obama’s victory in the 2008 election). Of official mourning (the vigil at the XVI International AIDS Conference in 2006) and unofficial mourning (the vigil for the victims of the shooting at the Eaton Centre in 2012). Of protests for justice, for democracy, for pot and for Christian fundamentalism.

Once, in 2005, it coincidentally played host to a Uniting Toronto Against Guns rally and a Newmindspace pillow fight at the very same time.

On a hot Tuesday afternoon, its tables and chairs are occupied by people sitting, not doing much of anything. Some are on the verge of sleeping. Visitors and residents cross paths while admiring the fountains.

After 10 years, it has finally acquired a sense of history, even if it bears no trace of it.

In a 2006 essay for Toronto Life, the Globe and Mail’s Doug Saunders wrote that Toronto had “no distinct core, no symbolic heart, only an evolving and colliding set of human trajectories.” He argued that Toronto was defined less by static points plotted on a map than by the movements of populations through time and space. Like Los Angeles, he said.

I’m not sure this is still quite so true.

Amidst the caustic indifference of the video billboards, we are drawn to and congregate in Yonge-Dundas Square, as though it is a natural condition to be drawn to a centre once such a thing exists.

If you give a hamster some cotton-like bedding materials, it knows to fashion them into a nest. If you give citizens a place to be, they know it is the place to go.

Toronto’s modern history is a series of victories against itself. Sometimes that means defeating short-sighted proposals. Other times it means salvaging the problematic.

Toronto is neither what we have nor what we make of it, but the clash between the two.

Somehow, we move forward, in spite of ourselves.


YDS facts

• Opened May 30, 2003 with performances by Snow and Treble Charger.

• Toronto’s Brown & Storey Architects’ design was selected from among 48 submissions.

• Overseen by a 15-member board of management including representatives from Ryerson, the Downtown Yonge BIA and Massey Hall.

• A one-day event permit costs $3,570, plus tax.

jonathang@nowtoronto.com | @goldsbie

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