LOVING WHERE YOU LIVE

Recently I watched a man come out of his shop, cross the street, and pick up a bundle of paper that was blowing in the wind; blowing in the wind in our pretty little downtown park. I congratulated him. “Someone’s got to do it,” he responded.

In a nutshell, that’s what caring about the city you live in is all about.

Our Toronto Star has announced a program to attract citizens to tell them what they would like to do or have done make our city better. They cite a woman who, all on her own initiative started a program of tree planting. They have recruited a number of bloggers to write about how to return our city to its once-widely heralded slogan as “the city that works.” (They didn’t invite me and my blog.)

What I say is about the city I live in: Toronto. It can be said about almost any city anywhere and the responsibility of its citizens to make it a better place.

There is not one big thing that will remake any city. The big projects, like the Olympics in Vancouver, do help, but when those mega-things have been done, with the passing of time. We lose interest.

Toronto used to be known everywhere as a very clean city. That was about all we had to offer since our restaurants were abysmal and our architecture stuffy and our local politicians grounded in old-fashioned values. I remember the fight mayor Phil Givens had when he wanted to put a Henry Moore sculpture in front of City Hall. The council was outraged. The piece, like everything of Henry Moore, was abstract. The price was $100,000. Citizens and council gasped and recoiled. Phil went ahead and through private subscription, bought the piece “The Archer’ and installed it in our city hall square. Visitors from everywhere take pictures of it. In fact, it was Phil’s intervention that led to our AGO being given probably the world’s largest collection of Henry Moore sculpture, most of it the plasters he used to make his final bronzes. In fact, if you know the city, the Henry Moore gallery was created especially to house the collection, and the gallery was left untouched when the Frank Gehry renovation happened. The fitting finale was that Phil was remembered for his audacity and was not re-elected.

But that was then and this is now. That was when, with unwarranted grandiosity, Toronto kept referring to itself as a “world-class city.” We stopped doing that because you can only get so much mileage out of the world’s (used to be) tallest free-standing structure, and the clamshell architectural beauty of Revell’s City Hall. We sort of stood still. Our subway system moldered away after its brilliant beginning. (But remember, Toronto has the third largest urban transit system in North America.)

I have also written at length about how Torontonians, led by the chattering classes of the print media, are forever reminding us, incorrectly, of how Chicago has created a waterfront and we have simply put in condos and a gruesome looking elevated expressway.

But to return to where I began: caring about the city. If I were running for office (my wife would leave me) I would campaign on a platform that included a very high priority for cleaning up our streets of their litter careless unfeeling people lave behind. Coffee cups everywhere. Newspapers flying in the wind. Cigarette buts by the hundred on the sidewalks. It would be small things but it would matter.

Finally, I find myself thinking about what we all could do. Making a city great is not about what the political bosses want to put into it, buildings, attractions, street fairs etc. but what every citizen want to do. Of course, I could borrow from John Kennedy’s epic statement and say: “Ask not what your city can do for you, ask what you can do for your city.”