La Palette owner Shamez Amlani will shutter his bistro in Kensingon Market later this month, and the timing couldn’t be more fitting.
For 10 years, the restaurant was a community hub, the launch pad for Pedestrian Sundays and other community projects – the famous Garden Car out front just one of them.
Amlani could be the real King of Kensington, which is why it’s so sad that a prohibitive rent increase has forced him to close his flagship. “We had an exciting idea about how we could change the city,” says Amlani.
“I’ve grown cynical,” he admits. That community remains, he says, but its spirit never infected City Hall. And Rob Ford isn’t even mayor yet.
Still, for all Amlani’s frustrations with bureaucratic inertia, the last decade really was marked by a sense of infinite possibility. There was a philosopher prince in the mayor’s chair, iconic new buildings popped up all over downtown, and a young generation of civic enthusiasts worked at recasting the city in their own image.
Are we at the end of that era? “Cultural renaissance.” “City-building.” “Creative city.” Will those terms sound like antiquated marketing buzzwords when the new regime takes over?
Consider all the fanciful talk a few years back of bike lanes in the sky, entire streets without cars and the unearthing of lost creeks. It may all have been improbable, but the atmosphere allowed such ideas to flourish.
The exuberance was tolerated and even welcomed at City Hall, even though Amlani and others would argue that the city was not especially open to new ideas and simply adopted a happy message that played well. The utopians spoke a romantic language, and core city services, smooth roads and taxation measures were not part of their lexicon. Architects were the new rock stars, and even city planners looked glamorous.
That mood was captured in Coach House Press’s uTOpia books, first launched in 2005. Somewhat aptly, on Tuesday (November 16), the last in the series, Local Motion: The Art Of Civic Engagement In Toronto will be feted at Lula Lounge. “I want people to get the feeling we’re not at the mercy of the people we elect,” says series co-editor Alana Wilcox.
So this is where the real fight starts, where the battle over the legacy of the Miller era begins. The next few years will have to see the last wave of visionaries taking stewardship of the best ideas of the past decade.
For now, we can expect a period of austerity in the visioning process. This time around, it may have to be the idealists who get angry.
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