Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 9, 1995 TAG: 9507070091
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: F-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: TORONTO LENGTH: Long
Be polite - that is something of a religion here - and have a look. But keep in mind that this is not why you came.
You are here for the subway musicians who submit to auditions every August to assure their proficiency.
For the ticket scalpers at ball stadium entrances who commonly call their customers ``sir.''
For the Saturday night crowd in the Bovine Sex Club, a bar in the city's bohemian Queen Street West neighborhood where, as you might expect, pierced, tattooed and leathered young Torontonians slouch like thugs. But they remain Canadian. Meet their gaze, pose a question and they speak so amiably and thoughtfully that a discussion of Margaret Atwood's early fiction seems likely to break out at any moment.
And you are here to savor the greatest strangeness for an American
in Toronto: the pleasure of wandering through a metropolis studded with ethnic neighborhoods, swollen with recent immigrants yet notably affluent, largely at peace with itself, courteous to strangers and orderly to boot. Bright lights, benign city.
I came to Toronto in spring without much of a tourist strategy. When I left five days later, I still hadn't come up with one, but I had eaten old-fashioned Chinese, newfangled Chinese, Indian, Greek, Italian and an agreeable lunch at a place called Palavrion that I can only describe as U.N. cuisine. On a city tour and on my own, I walked through miles of neighborhoods; shuffled merrily through first-rate museums of art and history (the Art Gallery of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum, respectively); passed up the chance to visit the highly recommended Hockey Hall of Fame, the just-opened Bata Shoe Museum, the zoo and the science center, and twice ascended the CN Tower, a.k.a. the world's tallest free-standing structure.
This city is a mosaic, to use the prevailing metaphor in most Canadian discussions of multiculturalism. Among the 3.9 million residents of greater Toronto counted in the 1991 census, nearly 1.5 million had emigrated from other lands - from Europe, Asia, Africa and elsewhere in the Americas - and about 860,000 had arrived since 1971.
The immigrants cluster in not one or two but five distinct Chinatowns (the most prominent and central at Spadina Avenue and Dundas Street West), in the Corso Italia (St. Clair Avenue, west of Bathurst) and Little Italy (College Street near Bathurst), in Little India (Coxwell and Gerrard Street), in the Greek district along Danforth Avenue, in fast-expanding Caribbean pockets here and there, in Portugal Village (along Dundas Street West, Ossington Avenue and College Street), in Koreatown, in Little Poland and so on.
Happily, many of these immigrants run restaurants. Others take stalls in the Kensington and St. Lawrence markets downtown, where thousands of Torontonians buy their fresh fish, meat and produce. And all around, neighborhoods grow, shrink, shift and spill into one another, so that a stroller on Queen Street can chart a global journey of discovery in the space of a few blocks: A Ukrainian Baptist Church stands around the corner from a Portuguese bakery, which lies but half a block from a Mexican cafe, which is abutted by the Prague Deli.
The mix yields all sorts of images. In Little India, clothing shop workers drape silk saris on pale-faced window mannequins, then complete the transformation by applying decorative dots known as ``bindis'' to the mannequins' foreheads. On the Corso Italia, bank tellers do business in English and Italian, while a table-top radio blares updates on the O.J. trial. In Cabbagetown, where Irish families once raised vegetables in their yards and which in the 1960s was derided by a local author as ``the largest Anglo-Saxon Slum in North America,'' a state of diversification and quasi-gentrification prevails. There's now cheap Indian food, cheap Caribbean food, strolling yuppies, a naughty video store or two and a doodad shop displaying busts of Elvis.
On most of my mornings in town, I hustled down to the subway at 9:30, when weekday rush hour ends, and bought a day pass for unlimited city subway travel for about $3.85. (In the early 1950s, about the time Los Angeles was committing itself to a future of freeways and lone drivers, Toronto was building its modest but efficient subway system.)
Climbing down the subway steps one morning, I came across a musician packing away her guitar after a performance. I had heard the subway entertainers were government-regulated, so I bluffed a little:
``Excuse me,'' I said. ``Can you tell when this year's auditions are?''
``August,'' she said. Then she warned me that there were only 75 available spots.
``The first year I auditioned, there were 450 applicants, so work on your chops,'' she added, and hollering back as she ran for a train: ``Practice, practice, practice!''
Instead, I walked and walked and walked, and wondered why there is a doughnut shop on every street corner in Toronto, and sampled neighborhoods.
On the Corso Italia, northwest of downtown, I stepped into a bar and ice cream shop called TriColore, and found myself standing mute with my banana gelato while 10 men, none under 50 and none speaking English, joshed in the language of the old country and appraised a large-screen satellite broadcast from Italy.
On Danforth Avenue, the Greek stronghold, I stepped into the Ouzeri restaurant to escape a pounding rain and ended up surrounded by blue, green and yellow bar stools, eating a highly satisfying lunch sampler that began with artichokes and squid and continued through another 10 or so plates.
In Chinatown, I found a wizened man rooting in a storefront barrel for the perfect chicken's foot.
Along the narrow, handsome and heavily browsed streets of Kensington Market, next door to Chinatown, I found a tropical grocery with a special on durian: $4 a pound for the spiky, smelly football-size Asian fruit. I was more comfortable a few doors down the street, where a gruff pizzeria counterman took my Canadian $2.50 and handed over a delightfully greasy Yukon gold potato pizza.
``People in London and Paris haven't discovered it yet, but we have a world-class city coming up here,'' said Sursur Lee, who was born in Hong Kong and came to Toronto 16 years ago at age 20. Lee, chef and owner of the high-toned, out-of-the-way Lotus restaurant, each morning ventures down to the waterfront to choose among the fresh fish, meat and produce, then draws up his daily menu by hand and runs off enough photocopies for his dozen tables:
Seared Quebec Foie Gras w/ Thai crab salad w/ peanut & mango & sweet & sour glaze ... Roasted Ontario rack of lamb, marinated in curry paste w/ fresh ground Thai coconut green curry sauce, w/ polenta croquettes ...
This eclecticism, Lee said, ``started growing on me when I saw the produce at the markets - all those things from all over the world.''
About now, close observers will be tempted to object and point out that for a few years now, social cracks have been widening and crime has been increasing in multicultural Canada. It's true. Last year, Toronto police took 249 reports of hate crimes, most involving ``mischief'' or assault against black or Jewish victims.
But before you start mourning for Canada's largest city, however, consider this: In 1994, Toronto police, patrolling a population of 2.5 million, counted 64 homicides, up from 59 the year before. Los Angeles police, patrolling a city of 3.5 million, counted 836 homicides last year, down from 1,057 the year before.
by CNB