Architects, planners, conservationists, historians, writers and lovers of heritage will pour into the Isabel Bader Theatre for the 42nd annual Heritage Toronto Awards Monday (October 17).
Prizes will be handed out for heritage in its many forms, but the night’s highlight is the 20th Kilbourn Lecture, delivered this year by history prof Steven High, a founding member of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University. His lecture: The Deindustrialization Of Our Senses: A Multi-Sensory Approach To Intangible Heritage, “will explore the changing dynamic between industry and surrounding communities in Toronto.”
What does this mean and what does it have to do with heritage?
This year’s nominees for the William Greer Architectural Conservation and Craftsmanship Award include the restorers of the art deco North Toronto Consumer’s Gas Showroom the bell tower of the Church of the Redeemer on Bloor West the Don Jail (now the administration offices of Bridgepoint Health) the FIVE Condos that soar out of what used to be the Rawlinson Cartage warehouses (behind a restored and controversially gentrified section of Yonge Street) and the lobby of the mid-century modern Imperial Oil Plaza, with its mural, York Wilson’s The Story Of Oil.
Proudly embedded in this architecture of these building is the confidence of times when to be a member of the elite was no sin and the decorative arts were more available and more affordable than they are today.
Some of these buildings are less than a century old, yet they seem as beyond our capacity to imitate them as the pyramids, Stonehenge or the castles and cathedrals of medieval Europe. Their heritage is tangible and magnificent (or decadent -take your pick).
But what do we know of their intangible heritage, the people who built them with their hands, or lived, worked, prayed or played in them? Heritage Toronto’s writing and media awards recognize people who look for answers to those questions.
Bomb Girls: Trading Aprons For Ammo, by Barbara Dickson, one of 18 nominees for the book award, is about people, 21,000 of them, mostly women who filled munitions with high explosive at the GECo factory in Scarborough during World War II. Bomb Girls draws on the oral histories of an industrial city engaged in total war, when men on the battlefront depended on the armaments made by women on the home front.
GECo was huge – 172 buildings on 140 hectares of what had been farmland. It’s gone now, but its human history is preserved in Bomb Girls, while the history of the suburbs that replaced it, recorded and unrecorded, continues to unfold.
How We Changed Toronto, by John Sewell, recalls the reform council that stopped the concrete octopus known as the Spadina Expressway and saved the heritage neighbourhoods it would have devoured.
Like the late Jane Jacobs, Sewell and his colleagues knew that if a city is to work, it has to respect the communities where heritage flourishes. They also understood that cities and communities that work are rarely neat and tidy – they tend to be crowded and “messy.” Today that thinking is almost holy writ among urban planners.
But how to conserve that intangible cultural heritage? Kensington Market: Collective Memory, Public History And Toronto’s Urban Landscape, by Na Li, arrives at an interesting time – when that beloved pocket of well-ordered urban anarchy is in process of becoming a Heritage Conservation District. How will “heritage” and “conservation” be defined in a neighbourhood where “architecture” is gimcrack storefronts that have been stacked against the facades of houses up to their attics for a century or more?
The Ward: The Life And Loss Of Toronto’s First Immigrant Neighbourhood, is the final entry. The anthology provides a history of a community that was almost entirely eradicated, except for a sliver of Chinatown on Dundas between Bay and University. More than 40 authors share memories and stories told them by parents and grandparents. It’s a human history of a “slum” that was, like most slums, a community, founded by escaped and freed African American slaves, Jews, Protestant and Catholic Irish, Italians, men from China who had to pay a head tax for the privilege of living in Canada but were not allowed to bring their wives with them – immigrants of myriad nationalities who became Canadian. Out of that slum emerged the builders, butchers, bakers, doctors, social reformers, restaurateurs, entertainers, gangsters and prostitutes who gave life to late 19th and early 20th century Toronto.
Torontonians argue passionately about the virtues and vices of downtown versus suburban living, about the merits and demerits of condofication and gentrification, about what deserves to be conserved, demolished or preserved by the chimera of facadism.
We queue up for Doors Open. We join Jane’s Walks and Heritage Toronto tours to learn more about the parts of the city we think we know.
We pack community meetings whenever development is proposed. Remember the fight over the McLaughlin planetarium that was to be replaced by a condo tower? Decades after it closed, it’s still longing for a lover who’ll breathe new life into it. It may not be for much longer, but for now it’s still here.
We are learning that architectural heritage does not have to be old to be heritage: think Ontario Place, completed in 1967, the SkyDome (now Rogers Centre), opened in 1989, Santiago Calatrava’s Allen Lambert Galleria (1992) or the CN Tower, which became heritage the moment its antenna was raised by Olga the helicopter 40 years ago.
We’re also learning that architecture does not have to be “beautiful” to be heritage. Victoriana, once despised, is now revered, while mid-century modern passes through a mid-life crisis that has destroyed too much of it. So it goes with architecture: one day facing demolition, next day hailed as a miracle of its times that must be preserved at all costs – even when it’s as “brutal” as the Robarts Library or St. James’s Town and the Gardiner Expressway.
Who’s to judge what is good or bad?
What’s destined next to catch the conservationist’s or the movie-maker’s eye? Monster homes of the nouveau riche (Atom Egoyan used one in his movie Chloe), graffiti-filled back alleys that can vie with Rick Mercer’s (good news, none is as long, but there are hundreds of them), shopping plazas and strip malls? Or strip clubs?
Two years ago Jilly’s closed as the Broadview Hotel gets gentrified. This year the Toronto Preservation Board recommended that Filmore’s be designated heritage. Its owner’s response? “It’s a beautiful old building, but is it historic? No one famous has lived there.” You’d think a man in his position would appreciate the cultural heritage of an “entry-level club for dancers working their way up to the Zanzibar or the Brass Rail.”
Built heritage, intangible heritage, what’s the connection? Suburbs, downtowns and midtowns, high-rises and private homes, banks, schools, libraries, workplaces, parks, markets and what sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls “great, good places… and other hangouts at the heart of a community” are all makers of history and community.
Where we mingle, we pick up ideas (and each other), share our ways of doing things, grow what High calls our “intangible heritage.”
Buildings and neighbourhoods can be like Mason jars in which life is preserved without changing but the most interesting are crucibles in which people mingle their differences and react to create diverse, distinctive communities. It’s communities like these that make cities fascinating and great – Toronto included. But learning that fact is not easy.
Post-World War II Toronto was losing its factories and their workers to the suburbs. Swaths of heritage housing were condemned and demolished to make way for urban renewal projects like Regent Park, Moss Park and Alexandra Park. (It’s interesting that so many projects were called parks.) Fifty years later, the rebuilding of Regent Park is nearing completion. At Alexandra Park, reconstruction began two years ago, around the time Velvet Haney published The Mousehouse Years, her graphic memoir about her childhood sisters and neighbours on Vanauley Street. Will today’s urban renewals be more successful than their predecessors?
The new parks certainly seem superior. We’ll see if those built-in amenities work as well as makers of community as the bars, bathhouses, brothels, chapels and burlesque houses that emerged naturally from the slums of the past.
In the latest issue of Toronto Life – and the most recent of its many articles about life in condoland – editor Maryam Sanati describes “cranky empty nesters, party-loving hipsters and screaming babies living cheek by jowl” and “fisticuffs where the vertical city is a combat zone.” Poor construction that allows noise to percolate “like water” is an issue. So is the fact some condo-dwellers dare to breed and infants are feared as generators of noise and vectors of disease in the swimming pool. But people have lived these issues for millennia and still managed to build community
Back to earth and back to the present, the intangible history that fascinates High and all of us is everywhere. It’s in our buildings, neighbourhoods and landscapes and in the memories of the living. But it’s ephemeral – seize it while you can. If it’s your local bar or pool hall, so be it.
The Toronto Heritage Awards take place Monday (October 17) at Isabel Bader Theatre (93 Charles West), 7:30 pm. Mayor’s Reception is at 6:30 pm. $25-$35, $20 for students.
heritagetoronto.org
Richard Longley is past president of Architectural Conservancy Ontario
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