the ALLDERBLOB

Breaking News Dept.

This story was published in the Toronto Star and Car Advertiser the other day. Written by Jessica Hume, who we understand is the daughter of Star architecture critic Christopher Hume, it’s a first-person account of a brutal mugging that took place late one Friday night in the so-called Riverdale Pocket area of the Danforth Peninsula, just south of Donland subway station. The exact location was a pedestrian path running south from the Danforth behind Eastern Commerce Collegiate, east of Jones ave, south of the Danforth.

The story’s a compelling read, and not just for folks like us who live in the area. Cross-posted to Spacing Wire, which describes the author as a “Spacing contributor,” it has generated 60 comments as of press time (it’s here that we read of Jessica’s relationship to Christopher). One of those comments mentioned the story is the third-most-read on the Star and Car Advertiser website. Jessica Hume’s story took up half the page: the other half was a story warning homeowners it’s “break and enter season.”

Don’t let anyone tell you that there wasn’t an editorial decision to ramp up fear among Torontonians, for whatever reason.

Obviously, from the comments at Spacing Wire, the decision worked. The tenor of most of them is of muted hysteria, mixed with practical advice for avoiding a similar fate, and an interesting sidetrack about how it is that Jessica’s comments found print (implying nepotism) while so many other equally compelling stories never do. We like the idea of gatekeeper by the way. We need a gatekeeper at the Allderblob [hey! pay attention! –ed.].

The fact is, no one who wrote comments over at Spacing looked at the specifics of the situation: the writer is talking about Phin park, she’s talking about a footpath that runs between Eastern Commerce collegiate and its soccer field, she’s talking about an “unlit alleyway” that her shortcut “home to Riverdale” crosses [it bears mentioning that “Riverdale” includes the neighbourhood she was in, east of Jones: vis “Riverdale Collegiate,” which celebrated 100 years in its current building, east of Jones on Gerrard, this year. –ed.].

It’s worth a look at the scene. The path leads north straight to the Only Cafe, and south into the “Pocket,” so named because all the roads in and out come from Jones Ave. But before it reaches the Only Cafe, it passes a suburban-style parking lot outside a 24-hour 7-11, a place that attracts litter and offers an opportunity to watch for victims heading for the path.

The 7-11 is the first problem. The 7-11 suggests no one cares, just because it doesn’t. It’s a place that never shovels its sidewalk in the winter. Trash bearing its logo is spread for blocks around. It’s a bad neighbour.

Then the problem is with the path itself. It’s the lack of front doors opening onto it–it’s a back alley, it’s the back yards against the park, it’s the rear of the school.

Go look at Phin Park. The back yards abutting it on the north are 200 feet long. Why couldn’t they have granny flats opening onto the park, with a little carfree path leading between the front doors and the playground? Light spilling from living room windows is a lot more effective than a streetlight at chasing away demons. Look at the “unlit laneway.” Why couldn’t all those garages have apartments built up top, providing eyes on the Eastern Commerce running track night and day?

We write from the perspective of having lived in Boston, New York, Tokyo and Portland Oregon, not to mention St John’s. But you know what? You don’t need to leave Toronto to find examples of great urbanism. The little park at the end of Wellesley street in Cabbagetown is an example of what all our parks could be: with front doors opening right onto the green. The carfree utopia of Toronto Island, with its “capped” 500-name waiting list, tells us all we need to know about what we could be building everywhere. As we say on the Allderblob, “Everyone should be able to live in a park.”

This story doesn’t holler to us about the need for a fraudulent “crime sweep” a la Rudy Giuliani–a situation where everyone poor is a suspect. Nor does it holler about the need to import solutions from “away,” using “experts” from New York, Boston, Tokyo or Portland Oregon. Hey–it’s thanks to those outside experts that we have urban sprawl (imported from Levittown Pennsylvania ), “highrises in the park” (imported from NYC “projects” by Le Corbusier wanna-bes), and motorways that “lift and separate” (the Detroit model).

What this story hollers about is the need for increased low-scale density and more eyes on the street (and the park), built on the existing models that we know work in Toronto already.

Today’s East York Mirror and Car Advertiser carried three interesting snippets. On page two was a correction regarding last week’s story, that “erroneously reported that a plan to build new Hydro transmission lines through Scarborough and down Pape Avenue was a preferred option of the Ontario Power Authority OPA).”

On page three, in a story by our cycling buddy David Nickle, the headline read: “Hydro line will not go down Pape, other options remain.”

And finally on page four cyclist Joe Cooper, who was at the same meeting as us a few days back (where MPP Peter Tabuns and Paula Fletcher, together with Jack Gibbons of Ontario Clean Air Alliance and the lawyer from Sack Goldblatt Mitchell (you will know them as the team that worked to defeat Ontario Power Authority in its bid to build a hydro corridor across the town of Markham), informed the two hundred or so assembled citizens of the new plan, to run a gazillion megawatt power line across the Danforth Peninsula–on Pape or on Donlands perhaps–to the new Portland Emissions Centre)–Joe Cooper in his “Watchdog” column delved into the history of power. His point was to remind his readers that the need for conservation is not new; that the desire for beauty has ever been in conflict with the landscape-despoiling effects of electrical power generation.

So now we have Energy Minister Dwight Duncan promising that Pape avenue is not under consideration for the power lines. As David Nickle notes however, “when Jack Gibbons of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance questioned [Steve Erwin, spokesperson for Duncan] about the matter… he asked specifically about neighbouring streets – Jones Avenue, Carlaw Avenue, or Leslie Street – Erwin wouldn’t rule it out.”

Hello?

The fact is, wherever this harebrained scheme drops to earth, it’s still a bad idea. With a cost estimated at $600 million, OPA claims it will be needed by at least 2015–eight years from now–to provide the summer air conditioning needs of a growing Toronto.

They paint it as a choice between growth or no growth, but that’s not the choice. The choice is between a climate that’s hospitable to human beings and one that’s not. The choice is between stewardship of the planet and rampant, uncontrolled consumption. The choice is between the greater good–survival of the planet–and a terrible and short-sighted evil.

The term NIMBY is sure to be heard in this debate. But it’s not about NIMBYism. NIMBYs are hypocrites who reject something that’s for the greater good–something like social housing–only when it’s in their “back yard.” In this debate folks both support a greater good–energy conservation–and believe $600 million could be more wisely spent on programs to encourage it.

It’s not NIMBY to refuse programs in one’s “back yard” that despoil the landscape, reduce property values, and possibly cause leukemia and other disease, all for the sake of appeasing the basest instincts of humanity. Such programs would be a bad idea anywhere.

We were in the room when Chris Winter of the Conservation Council of Ontario told everyone his plans for a commemorative walk to honor Jane Jacobs at her birthday. With the others, including our colleagues Gil Penalosa and Paul Young, Dylan Reid and Janice Etter, we stifled a smile. Mathew Cowley, the organizer for the upcoming Walk21 conference. He smiled. Shamaz Amlani, the restaurateur and organizer of Streets Are For People, and Lisa Tolentino, of the Ontario Healthy Communities Coalition.

Smiles all around.

Talk is cheap, we were thinking. Yeah, yeah. Jane’s Walk. She sure deserves a walk. But llet me tell you about my plans to Ban Car Ads.

Good one, Chris. “Jane’s Walk.” Call us next year when you figure out how to get it rolling.

That was, what–eight weeks ago? Nine?

We have the minutes of that meeting, and we’ll say it again: talk is cheap. But take a note of item number two. And then, scroll down to the fourth from the bottom. Smiling, I tells ya:

* Opportunities Noted:

– BIA/Community Associations – become partners (shop local etc), create awareness in local economies

– ‘Ride for the Heart’ – Jane’s Walk idea – walk, play, eat and shop locally

– Work with schools for greater impact – International Walk to School Day in Oct

– Relate issue to children, ‘what does it mean to me?’ parental motivation

– Ways to build a movement – create obvious alliances

– June 2009 deadline for municipalities to conform to municipal planning documents such as PPS; still have yet to examine documents

– ‘perfect storm’ – health+environment+public opinion

– pedestrians tend not to organize

– need to find opportunities to engage public in planning

– communities not designed to be walkable, yet good number of people do not have vehicle – social justice issue

– barriers – media reporting, BIAs love cars

(From the meeting minutes by OSGN‘s Janet May).

Today, as they say in the zombie movies, “She Walks!”

And we mean that in the very best sense.

Congratulations are rare coming from a vitriol-dripping blob like ours, but we are truly impressed with the way this one has gotten off the ground. We’d like to think we’ve got Chris Winter on “our side.”

Of course, the fact that there are only two “Walks” in the whole schlemiel east of the Don is going to gall fans of the Danforth Peninsula. We can practically hear them gnashing their teeth on Governor’s Bridge and chez Ootes. But really, who’s to blame for that?

Jesus. We were there in the room with Chris when he came up with the whole idea.

Next year maybe.

Today’s Globe and Mail and Car Advertiser had two articles on the event. Here’s the one our colleague Dave LeBlanc wrote (We reproduce it in full):

A new tour honours the late urbanist and the neighbourhoods she worked to preserve

Dave LeBlanc

Architect and tour leader Angus Skene stands in front of the Annex home of Jane Jacobs. (photo: DAVE LEBLANC)

Today is “Jane Jacobs Day” in Toronto. It is also her birthday — she would have been 91.

To honour her, I took my dog-eared copy of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) — her glorious attack on the well-entrenched, blockbusting school of urban planning — down off the shelf. Its groundbreaking ideas, manually typed almost a half century ago while Greenwich Village street life hummed below her window, are still fresh, contemporary and vital.

And then I thought about what this city might have looked like if she hadn’t come here in 1968.

“Toronto would have had an entirely different future,” says Margie Zeidler, one of the organizers of “Jane’s Walk,” a collection of free neighbourhood walking tours happening across the city tomorrow. “I don’t think we understand how blessed we are that this woman chose to come to this city. … I’ve heard many people that were immigrants to Toronto say, ‘Well, I knew Jane Jacobs moved here so I figured there had to be something special about the city.’ ”

To be sure, her beloved Annex, where she lived until her death in April of last year, would have never fully healed from the wound the Spadina Expressway would have opened had it gone ahead. It wouldn’t be a haven for lovers of street life, dog-walkers or university students, or a place for events such as these walking tours to happen.

Architect Angus Skene has agreed to give me a preview of his walk, “Jane’s ‘Hood,” which will start at 10 a.m. at the entrance to the St. George subway station. After we meet in the Annex, he gets down on one knee, produces a piece of blue chalk from his pocket, and begins to sketch Toronto circa 1793, when the British military was sent to settle the land.

“If you can get people on it, you can kind of safeguard it for the Crown,” he explains. “That’s why the city’s here in the first place.”

Expanding the sidewalk diagram, he shows how folks got around to living way up here in the Annex by 1885, when the expanding city had to annex farmland north of Bloor Street. He explains that, originally, strict controls were placed on land use — no stores, schools or institutions — so the area would appeal to the upper classes.

Proof is right over his shoulder: the 1890 Gooderham house, now the York Club. As we walk over to admire its handsome Richardsonian Romanesque details, Mr. Skene explains that many of the smaller houses in the area built afterward copied some of its design vocabulary, such as asymmetry, “massive arches,” “Rapunzel” balconies and attention-getting turrets.

He also notes that, unlike the ravine-protected enclave of Rosedale, the Annex was subject to a watering-down of those early land-use controls. “There was no way of stopping the city from just ploughing through,” he says of the eventual addition of stores, schools and institutions. “So while this was built for some of the wealthiest people in the city, it couldn’t hold out. When you’ve got bridges, you can keep the barbarians on one side,” he laughs.

Walking up and down the Annex’s people-filled streets with the pulse of Bloor never far away, it’s easy to understand why Ms. Jacobs loved this neighbourhood and why, despite her enormous success, she stayed “human” with a “wonderful sense of humour and a wonderful giggle,” says Ms. Zeidler, who was 10 years-old when she met her.

“She was a cheerleader for a lot of people in terms of them having the courage to go out and fight for the things they believed in,” she adds.

Continuing our walk, as Mr. Skene and I pass Bloor Street United Church and he reveals the secret of its rather low-key entryway (you’ll have to go on the tour to find out what that is), I ask him if he ever met Ms. Jacobs. He didn’t, he says, but he did read Death and Life when he was 16, which got me to thinking: Her prose is so conversational, reading it is like talking with her; to read her is to know her.

En route to her former home, we admire the Victorian fussiness of 37 Madison Ave., the exuberance of 1960s architect Uno Prii’s sculptural apartment tower at 35 Walmer Rd., and discuss how she’d probably approve of the infill development going up beside it.

When we reach her house at 69 Albany Ave., I immediately check out the front porch. It was from here that Ms. Jacobs would sit and watch the world go by, where she would add her own “eyes on the street,” to borrow her famous phrase.

Thanks to Chris Winter of the Conservation Council of Ontario, who came up with Jane’s Walk, Ms. Zeidler, Mr. Skene and the other walk leaders (check out www.janeswalk.net for a complete list), we can celebrate her memory by getting our eyes — and feet — on the street too.