In the morning, I met Bruce Bell, who is, seriously, Mr. Toronto. He has had himself declared unpaid curator of so many historic hotels and other buildings that he has a different badge to put on every time he crosses a threshhold. Not to mention the plaques around town that have his name on them because he got them placed.
Why? What's so great about him? My God, Martha, he knows everything.
A walking tour of Toronto with Bruce is a kaleidoscope of history, architecture, pop culture, politics, folklore, survival skills, trivia, gossip, eulogy, design, esthetics and ice cream. He'll point out the biggies, like the CN Tower and the Rogers Centre next door, where I once watched a baseball game through the Rogers' open roof from the transparent floor of the CN's observation deck, but he'll make sure you see the whimsical sculpture and tell you the artist's name. He'll explain where the lake shore used to be before it was filled in, and where the train yards have been reclaimed for more amusing venues.
And he'll remind you when to look up. Anyone who's learned anything about urban architecture knows that most of the coolest stuff is way above eye level.
Like the Ontario College of Art & Design building that looks like some kind of weird gift package on stilts. It is, quite simply, a box (with windows) way up in the air, held up by brightly colored supports and reached by a sloping tunnel presumably containing stairs. It could only be an art school, am I right?
And then Bruce pops us into Malabar costume shop. It's truly overwhelming. You have never seen so many costumes in one place. They're grouped on racks with labels like a bookstore's or library's: Clowns, roaring '20s, can-can girls, military ... and on and on and on. Rent or buy. "This place is CRAZY at Halloween," Bruce confirms.
After taking in the grand twin arcs of the newest City Hall and the massive mall called Eaton Centre, we enter a former Toronto Dominion bank that's now a hotel, the Suites at One King West. It's grand and ornate (Bruce says, "They wanted you to look at all this and think, 'My money is SAFE here'") and still delightfully bank-y inside, with what was once the largest vault in Canada still staring sternly up at visitors from its showcase at the bottom of a flight of steps.
Another gorgeous and grand old edifice is nearby: the Bank of Commerce building, once referred to as Canada's Empire State building for its magnificence. It's opulent and gilded and massive, and Bruce says even Europeans crane their necks and goggle at the faraway, palatial ceiling.
It had an equally gorgeous sibling, but that one was knocked down to make way for Canada Trust Bank. It's hard to resent a sleek black skyscraper created by Mies van der Rohe, who also did the Seagram's building in New York. Whether you like the starkly clean lines and shiny surfaces or not, you have to concede that the effect is slick, sophisticated and heavy in the way expensive and well-made things are always heavy.
(Even lightweight top-end electronic gadgets will always hark back to that, when you close a compartment or press a button and get that solid, dense, satisfying click.)
It's also not without grace. Round glass bowls of yellow daisies sit at every corner of the ponderous marble teller counter. Bruce points them out and explains that that is not decoration -- it is design. Mies dictated their specific color and placement. ("Listen, the building's done, but only if you remember that every day you have to get bunches of daisies -- yellow daisies -- and put them in fishbowls at every corner of the counter." "I'm sorry, Hoskins, did our world-famous architect just demand that we bring the bank flowers every day? In fishbowls?" He did, and to this day, it gets them. The have a standing order with a grower. Maybe with fish, too.)
The old CEO's office, now used as a meeting space, is very "Mad Men," with its posh, '50s-looking furnishings (they're so good, no one dares change them), stunning view of the city and largest single-piece wooden table in the world (sez Bruce). It's a conference table so massive it had to be helicoptered into place and the roof of the building assembled over it. All I could think was that it must have come from one hell of a tree.
Bruce pointed out the King Edward Hotel, scene of many celebrity bivouacs. Windows in a suite at the top of the building were once looked out of by the Beatles on their first trip to Toronto, and what they saw below them was a surging mob of fans in the street. John Lennon returned there with Yoko years later for the famed Bed-In for Peace. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor scandalized the city by shacking up at the King Edward before they were married, though the far corner of the Sovereign dining room downstairs is where Burton popped the question and brought the ring bling to dazzle Liz.
OK, I'm starting to go all tabloid. It's truly frightening how easily that comes. I should also mention that we saw, I think, three out of four or possibly even four out of five Toronto city halls, only one of which is still used as City Hall (you can't fight it, but you can move it), many other distinguished old buildings and the St. Lawrence Market -- which incorporates the facade of the first city hall as an inward-facing wall. All the while, Bruce was dropping in tidbits like, "Queen Street is blocks and blocks of trendy shopping. It's well-known and an icon. If you say to friends, 'Let's do Queen Street tonight,' everyone knows what you're suggesting and what that'll be like. And it's descriptive too, in a way everyone immediately recognizes. As in, 'Oh, she's very Queen Street.'"
And, as we passed an unfortunate, ragged woman sitting against a building babbling to herself and banging two rocks together, "She's an heiress. Her family has a fortune, but they don't care, just let her sit here and bang her rocks."
There are a lot of ragged people in Toronto. The city has the same homelessness/panhandling/mental health issues most major American cities have. I find this both reassuring and profoundly depressing. If Toronto has this problem, we're not alone, and it must be a hard nut to crack. On the other hand, if Toronto has this problem, that means even the Canadians can't solve it, with their well-developed social saftey net and generally more inclusive, less Darwinian attitude toward the impaired. Maybe there is no way to solve it.
I also glimpsed the famed PATH, the network of passages and stairs that links most big downtown buildings to most others, so that Torontonians can get all over the place without having to go outside. You make your way down to big pedestrian concourses -- their retail makes them look like sunken shopping malls --and move from building to building to stay out of the cold and snow. The weather may be bad here in the winter, but Toronto has gone a long way toward making weather optional.
For dinner, I went right to the top: 360, the spinning (verrrrrry slowly) restaurant up the CN Tower. The food was good; the view was outstanding. You just sit there with your wine and your girlled salmon, and you watch Toronto rotate slowly beneath you. You can pick out your hotel or the theater you've gone to, admire the lake, watch planes take off and land at the little city airport and watch the sun sink and the lights come on. Unfortunately, my visit coincided with a train-wreck evening that left people standing and waiting for their tables for over half an hour. Getting into the tower is like getting into Ft. Knox, so it seemed a bit much for people with reservations to have to wait so long with nary a bench or chair to take a load off. The maitre d' assured the cranky that this was absolutely not normal.
But that view ... makes you forget ... and a little fruit crumble helps too ...
Why? What's so great about him? My God, Martha, he knows everything.
A walking tour of Toronto with Bruce is a kaleidoscope of history, architecture, pop culture, politics, folklore, survival skills, trivia, gossip, eulogy, design, esthetics and ice cream. He'll point out the biggies, like the CN Tower and the Rogers Centre next door, where I once watched a baseball game through the Rogers' open roof from the transparent floor of the CN's observation deck, but he'll make sure you see the whimsical sculpture and tell you the artist's name. He'll explain where the lake shore used to be before it was filled in, and where the train yards have been reclaimed for more amusing venues.
And he'll remind you when to look up. Anyone who's learned anything about urban architecture knows that most of the coolest stuff is way above eye level.
Like the Ontario College of Art & Design building that looks like some kind of weird gift package on stilts. It is, quite simply, a box (with windows) way up in the air, held up by brightly colored supports and reached by a sloping tunnel presumably containing stairs. It could only be an art school, am I right?
And then Bruce pops us into Malabar costume shop. It's truly overwhelming. You have never seen so many costumes in one place. They're grouped on racks with labels like a bookstore's or library's: Clowns, roaring '20s, can-can girls, military ... and on and on and on. Rent or buy. "This place is CRAZY at Halloween," Bruce confirms.
After taking in the grand twin arcs of the newest City Hall and the massive mall called Eaton Centre, we enter a former Toronto Dominion bank that's now a hotel, the Suites at One King West. It's grand and ornate (Bruce says, "They wanted you to look at all this and think, 'My money is SAFE here'") and still delightfully bank-y inside, with what was once the largest vault in Canada still staring sternly up at visitors from its showcase at the bottom of a flight of steps.
Another gorgeous and grand old edifice is nearby: the Bank of Commerce building, once referred to as Canada's Empire State building for its magnificence. It's opulent and gilded and massive, and Bruce says even Europeans crane their necks and goggle at the faraway, palatial ceiling.
It had an equally gorgeous sibling, but that one was knocked down to make way for Canada Trust Bank. It's hard to resent a sleek black skyscraper created by Mies van der Rohe, who also did the Seagram's building in New York. Whether you like the starkly clean lines and shiny surfaces or not, you have to concede that the effect is slick, sophisticated and heavy in the way expensive and well-made things are always heavy.
(Even lightweight top-end electronic gadgets will always hark back to that, when you close a compartment or press a button and get that solid, dense, satisfying click.)
It's also not without grace. Round glass bowls of yellow daisies sit at every corner of the ponderous marble teller counter. Bruce points them out and explains that that is not decoration -- it is design. Mies dictated their specific color and placement. ("Listen, the building's done, but only if you remember that every day you have to get bunches of daisies -- yellow daisies -- and put them in fishbowls at every corner of the counter." "I'm sorry, Hoskins, did our world-famous architect just demand that we bring the bank flowers every day? In fishbowls?" He did, and to this day, it gets them. The have a standing order with a grower. Maybe with fish, too.)
The old CEO's office, now used as a meeting space, is very "Mad Men," with its posh, '50s-looking furnishings (they're so good, no one dares change them), stunning view of the city and largest single-piece wooden table in the world (sez Bruce). It's a conference table so massive it had to be helicoptered into place and the roof of the building assembled over it. All I could think was that it must have come from one hell of a tree.
Bruce pointed out the King Edward Hotel, scene of many celebrity bivouacs. Windows in a suite at the top of the building were once looked out of by the Beatles on their first trip to Toronto, and what they saw below them was a surging mob of fans in the street. John Lennon returned there with Yoko years later for the famed Bed-In for Peace. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor scandalized the city by shacking up at the King Edward before they were married, though the far corner of the Sovereign dining room downstairs is where Burton popped the question and brought the ring bling to dazzle Liz.
OK, I'm starting to go all tabloid. It's truly frightening how easily that comes. I should also mention that we saw, I think, three out of four or possibly even four out of five Toronto city halls, only one of which is still used as City Hall (you can't fight it, but you can move it), many other distinguished old buildings and the St. Lawrence Market -- which incorporates the facade of the first city hall as an inward-facing wall. All the while, Bruce was dropping in tidbits like, "Queen Street is blocks and blocks of trendy shopping. It's well-known and an icon. If you say to friends, 'Let's do Queen Street tonight,' everyone knows what you're suggesting and what that'll be like. And it's descriptive too, in a way everyone immediately recognizes. As in, 'Oh, she's very Queen Street.'"
And, as we passed an unfortunate, ragged woman sitting against a building babbling to herself and banging two rocks together, "She's an heiress. Her family has a fortune, but they don't care, just let her sit here and bang her rocks."
There are a lot of ragged people in Toronto. The city has the same homelessness/panhandling/mental health issues most major American cities have. I find this both reassuring and profoundly depressing. If Toronto has this problem, we're not alone, and it must be a hard nut to crack. On the other hand, if Toronto has this problem, that means even the Canadians can't solve it, with their well-developed social saftey net and generally more inclusive, less Darwinian attitude toward the impaired. Maybe there is no way to solve it.
I also glimpsed the famed PATH, the network of passages and stairs that links most big downtown buildings to most others, so that Torontonians can get all over the place without having to go outside. You make your way down to big pedestrian concourses -- their retail makes them look like sunken shopping malls --and move from building to building to stay out of the cold and snow. The weather may be bad here in the winter, but Toronto has gone a long way toward making weather optional.
For dinner, I went right to the top: 360, the spinning (verrrrrry slowly) restaurant up the CN Tower. The food was good; the view was outstanding. You just sit there with your wine and your girlled salmon, and you watch Toronto rotate slowly beneath you. You can pick out your hotel or the theater you've gone to, admire the lake, watch planes take off and land at the little city airport and watch the sun sink and the lights come on. Unfortunately, my visit coincided with a train-wreck evening that left people standing and waiting for their tables for over half an hour. Getting into the tower is like getting into Ft. Knox, so it seemed a bit much for people with reservations to have to wait so long with nary a bench or chair to take a load off. The maitre d' assured the cranky that this was absolutely not normal.
But that view ... makes you forget ... and a little fruit crumble helps too ...
1 comment:
"You can't fight [City Hall], but you can move it." Ha! Brilliant line Sam. -- Joff
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