Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto

Concept: 3 out of 5
Execution: 4 out of 5
Yeah, but: Avoid the culs-de-sac…s.

The Long Version: Stroll is a book that I've been planning to review for quite some time. Published by my favourite printing house, Coach House Books, and written by Shawn Micallef, of Spacing fame, it's a fascinating and involved look at Toronto's neighbourhoods. Simultaneously detailed and expansive, this 279 page book finds the details that can only be seen at walking pace, and does it without being overly pedestrian.

I'm a lifelong resident of Toronto, and one with an above-average interest in local history – I once regretfully turned down a job as a tour guide. So it's with a minor sting of embarrassment that this wonderful book, with its involved and deep enjoyment of the city, was written by an immigrant. Yes, Shawn Micallef is from Windsor. Ontario. That still makes me cringe a bit.

While on the subject of cringing, I could do without the revivals of the words "psychogeographic" and "flâneur". Legitimate terms, apparently, but I'm happy to just walk.

Reading this book has taught me things that I didn't know about the street that I've lived on for a half-decade. Shawn Micallef wields an impressive level of local knowledge, and manages to do it across the entire city. His description of Main and Danforth, an intersection that I passed though regularly for years, insightfully picks out the same problems that I had noticed, and then adds context to them with local history and other subtle observations. It goes without saying that this also gives him excellent credibility when describing the places that I'm yet to visit.

Other times the author's fresh eye leads him to see the streets in ways that I don't. His discussion of Danforth Avenue – The Danforth – between Broadview and Pape is of an area that has gentrified and yuppified (do people still say "yuppie"?) far beyond my experience. But I first spent time on this strip twenty-five years ago, so I tend to see what I remember and regard the new as temporary. I'm sure my next trip there will be a different experience.

Streets, communities, and cities do change. In some cases this can create an inadvertent history lesson; the life of Jarvis Street in particular has fundamentally changed since Stroll's publication, and it's likely to change back again before a revision could be published. So while the content isn't quite 'evergreen', some of it could make for a hardy perennial.

Fortunately Stroll doesn't delve too much into the specific details that are most likely to change rapidly, and the larger-scale stuff is going to be worth knowing about even if the specific form shifts over time. So even two years after its publication, I still find the book both fascinating and relevant.

Stroll is an obvious choice for people like me, being from and/or living in Toronto, and with an interest in its built form and communities. Indeed, the local civic-political interest seems unusually strong these days, thanks to the good governance and tireless city-building of Mayor Nenshi the implosion and de facto abdication of Mayor Ford, so the market for the book could be growing.

What I'm not sure about is if anyone outside of Toronto would find Stroll rewarding. Its writing is entertaining and engaging; I like reading about the bits of the city that I haven't been to, so perhaps others elsewhere could also find it interesting even without the geographic connection. The good news is that Coach House has some full chapters available for free online, making it a no-risk inquiry. Well worth checking out – especially the one about the street I live on.

last updated 11 may 2012

Concrete Toronto: A Guidebook to Concrete Architecture From the Fifties to the Seventies

Concept: 4 out of 5
Execution: 3 out of 5
Yeah, but: It's a very dense book.


The Long Version: "Concrete Toronto: A Guidebook to Concrete Architecture From the Fifties to the Seventies" is the second book I've bought from Coach House Press, the small but vital Toronto institution located on the charming bpNichol lane. Like HTO: Toronto's Water, this is a collection of essays written by a range of experts, discussing a specific and overlooked section of Toronto's physical environment. And before I put anyone off, Coach House publishes a broad range of subjects, including fiction and poetry, and it's well worth looking through their catalog. It just so happens that I love their dedication to local subjects, and Concrete Toronto is exactly the kind of book that appeals to me.

Concrete is possibly the least-sexy building material out there, and yet it's ubiquitous. It makes our roads and bridges possible, and it's the ground that we walk on in our cities, but it is to aesthetics what powdered mashed potatoes is to cuisine. Toronto's skyline is dominated by poured concrete buildings, but it's mostly associated with the broadly-unloved Brutalist style, which even takes its name from its love of exposed concrete exteriors. A book titled "Concrete Toronto" is clearly facing an tough battle just to get picked up off of the shelf, but it's well worth it. Inside is a huge collection of essays, illustrations, and photos.

Naturally, the prominent Toronto landmarks are well covered. The CN Tower, the Manulife Centre, and the New City Hall are all presented in considerable detail, and the book almost persuades me to like that particular government building. Less prominent buildings are also discussed, including many in the University of Toronto and Annex neighbourhoods that I see daily, and it really has given me a new way to understand the unremarkable - I can see Tartu and Rochdale from the balcony in my `70's concrete condo - and appreciate the ambitious, like OISE, Robarts, and 44 Walmer. But the book isn't just a tourists' guide to specific structures: history, preservation, technology, and city-building are all within the scope of the book. The buildings I've studied in, the suburb that I grew up in, and the highways that I drive on are all in here. And while most of the book is specific to Toronto and the area around it, who wouldn't be interested in an essay on 'The Rise of Parking Garages'? It sounds trivial, but this is the stuff that shapes our cities.

I really only have one criticism of the book: the type can be tiny. While most of the text is simply very very small, sometimes they designers have had to fit an inhuman amount of text onto a page, with a result that makes the fine print in a credit card ad seem luxurious. This isn't one to read while swaying around in bad lighting on the subway, even if you are approaching Eglinton West station on your way to Yorkdale mall, both of which are featured inside. A minor quibble is that the lack of colour photography leaves the book relentlessly grey, but I suppose that's partly the point. After all, one of the typefaces used is 'Slate' - I've always suspected that the people at Coach House have a subtle and sophisticated sense of humour.

Clearly, it's people with an interest in Toronto and its architecture that are going to get the most out of this book. I wouldn't suggest that anyone in Barstow, California should head over to Amazonto buy a copy, unless they were originally from here and were feeling an unusual variety of homesickness. But for those who like concrete architecture, cities in general, and Toronto's history and development, it's definitely worth checking out. The mix of different perspectives, the reasonable length of each essay, and the broad range of subjects within its narrow scope makes Concrete Toronto a surprisingly engaging book. I know I'll be picking it up and re-reading it, in both idle moments and dedicated sessions, for a long time to come.

HTO: Toronto's Water from Lake Iroquois to Lost Rivers to Low-flow Toilets

Concept: 2 out of 5
Execution: 4 out of 5
Yeah, but: Essay collections aren't a new idea, but they're great.


The Long Version: I like essay collections, local history, my neighbourhood, architecture, and typography. So when Coach House Press, a small publisher that's about a quarter-kilometer from my home, had an open house as part of Doors Open Toronto, it wasn't something I was going to miss. But before I went, I checked out their website, and found their great write-up of HTO here. I bought my copy with only the briefest look inside to check on the choice of typeface - in this case a nice one called freight - which is something I do with just about any book that I buy. The novel experience, if you'll excuse the expression, is that this time I bought the book in the building where it was produced, and after seeing the equipment that it was made on. That must be the literary equivalent of a pick-your-own farm, except without all of the hard work.

The essays are well-written, and cover an even broader range of subjects than the unwieldy subtitle suggests. But even with diverse subjects, the focus never shifts away from Toronto and its immediate area. A discussion of the Lake Ontario water levels over the past 135,000 years examines the levels of sediment in the former Don Valley Brickworks quarry. Essays deal with the Garrison and Taddle creeks, which once ran across what's now downtown Toronto, as well as Castle Frank Brook which once ran through Nordheimer Ravine (photo above), and the history and local conditions that lead to them being buried in the city's sewer network. A section looks at the discovery of the Queen's Wharf during construction of condominiums far from the water's edge, which I remember from early 2006; the changing shoreline is just one example of the extensive and ongoing landfill that has shaped the city.

The essays also look at the history of civic water in Toronto from the grand era when it was knows as 'public works' and created monuments like the R.C. Harris filtration plant, above - a popular movie and TV filming location - and the St. Clair reservoir that lies a few metres beneath the surface of Sir Winston Churchill park seen in the opening photo. It also offers an excellent overview of the contemporary infrastructure involved in the city's stormwater management plan and efforts to recover wetlands and rejuvenate our remaining rivers.


Toronto isn't actually the centre of Canada - that would be just south of Yathkyed Lake in Nunavut - so I'm not going to suggest that this book will have anything more than academic interest to people who don't live in, or come from, Toronto. But this geographic specificity also makes it easy to recommend for people in Toronto who wouldn't otherwise be interested. Not many people pick up book talking about the formation of river valleys and how they're affected by changing lake water levels in an abstract way - those are called textbooks, and students need to be threatened with failure before they'll read them. But it's also what formed the ravines that characterize the city, and that makes it much more interesting.


Coach House Press is an important resource both for Canadian publishing and for the city. It's hard to imagine books like HTO happening without them. They're a friendly bunch and clearly passionate about what they do, and I know I'm going to be looking for more titles from them in the future.