The city may not be getting me down by neil
by Neil Balan
I work at a harm-reduction youth shelter. At times, it’s intense. Often, upon completion of my shift, and feeling suffocated and small, I decompress with a walk home. I usually ride my bike to and from work but on the nights that I don’t I take the TTC down and usually walk home. Routes are myriad and I am usually greeted with a multiplicity of encounters, which is to say that I exercise a small but satisfying kind of pleasure with the choices open to tackle the task of getting home.
I put the gearing down into “strolling” mode, assuming an interest in little beyond mobilization, locomotion, and directing my eyes toward the nearest and clearest. Sometimes, I make attempts to listen; often, I hear, which is to say that the resonating sound in air reaches my insides but, alas, those poor waves dissipate with little register (intertext: know that I have yet to resort to the earplugs). Sometimes I speak to those I come across on my trajectory. I suspect my nose (and my mouth) is most always sensing so I’d be hard-pressed to say that it is ever shut down and similarly my skin is always switched on, those little neurons tweaking hairs and such in empirical efficiency.
So, as I saunter west, I attempt to attune myself to my surroundings, the trips of paved ecologies we all inhabit here in the town of the hog. I try to adjust in equivalence with the things around me, in input and output. On weekends, when the peasants all come out for a night of mixed barley sandwiches, there is enough abuzz to strip the sense from my wares, which is to say that I am absorbed by the circuit of physiognomy around me. It’s comforting in someways and rarely is it ever daunting.
One of my better routes, or rather, many of my routes, take me through Trinity-Bellwoods Park, an expansive two square-kilometer chunk of green-space right off the Queen West strip.
Know that the park is a buffer between the locally-known, geographically-defined densities of Queen West and Queen West West. West of the park is the massive Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, which provides another threshold that opens to zones both ways.
I like Trinity-Bellwoods.
I have an affinity for it. I feel safe and secure, though I suspect that sometimes my heteronormative, male, and ostensibly “white” body may help. No guarantees though; maybe the park enables an urban benevolence. Trinity-Bellwoods is a Toronto park (along with Dufferin-Grove and, to a lesser extent, High Park) that **feels like Montreal. There is a familiar and detectable sense of place to it, one with an efficacy that staves off the non-place status of most of Toronto’s green (and other?) spaces. For me, people use the park in abstract ways that somehow constitute an image of park use in Montreal.
The most wonderful thing about the park is the gigantic “pit” that sits in its north end, just south of the Dundas Street entrance. The pit is one of several massive concave bowls that are the remains of what was once a small valley housing Bellwoods Creek. The creek, along with two others, which now run underground, were pushed under by the last 150-year development of the city’s built environment. The largest “pit”—more generally known as another park, Christie Pits—sits up at Bloor Street, a few kilometers away and it’s the initial point of what used to be a consistent north-south geographical formation. There are places on Harbord Street where, according to some I know, you can dig no more than two feet down through the grass beside the sidewalk and street and begin to excavate the old bridge that once straddled the valley, now reduced at the point to another “pit” on the north side adjacent to the street.
Anyway, in the Trinity-Bellwoods “pit”, the bottom of the pit (about two hundred square metres) is usually a leash-free dog area. It’s self-contained, significantly bounded by slopes all around its ellipsis-like perimeter. Yet, what’s more, at night—and because of its subterranean status—it is territorialized as a massive gathering place for any number of constituents and people. It’s below-ground status removes it from repressive lines of sight; it’s off the horizontal plane, like those river valleys in Saskatchewan that open up out of the prairie to swallow you whole. Scenes unfold in the pit nightly with ongoings proceeding well into the wee hours. The pathways in the park are oriented in such a way so that any wandering pedestrian can walk right along the edge of the pit (it is a relatively drastic incline; counter lines would be packed tight) and peer downward to observe things.
This evening, there was close to two hundred people gathered in the pit in front of the small stage sitting at the bottom. Someone was reading and the group replied repeatedly in what was an obviously shared call-and-reponse operation; these folks had rehearsed this, were oriented to this conventional form, and were participants in a set of mini-knowledges in what seemed to create a normative event.
As I walked by, a hint of contempt and dismissive-ness took hold, followed by a self-scolding as I realized that regardless of how mundane I thought it was or how removed and divorced I was from these things, I was really mostly jealous at having been excluded from this very wonderful little assembly below. I was curious and energized by this serendipitous little thing before me. It fascinated me: who joined forces in affiliation and appropriated this space on a Friday night? How did they do it? Could I Google this? More, could I go down there and be openly welcomed? I knew the pit was there and I was aware that these sorts of things tended to occur there but, as I continued to stare down, it seemed as if the park’s undulations had unfolded for me. I was thrilled: a mini-cultural commons; literally a temporary and carnivalesque sphere of public practice that tickled me the whole way home.
I was so taken by the commitment to remake the space, to fill it but also to recognize the ways it could be used to meet the group in question’s own needs and desires. There was sharing of this desire, an exchange that reminded me of a creative sentiment I have borrowed and hold dear these days: “The world cannot exist outside of its expressions.” Those expressions are things and images and activities that are malleable, that allow wriggle room, articulated in couplings between spaces and things and objects and people. It is very much territorial and in this case, in a moment that was so minor but elegantly simple, it was encouraging.
As I write this I am still smiling. It’s a feather in my cap and what’s more, I just went over to the shelf and grabbed my “Toronto” jar. I am tearing a little shredded strip of “renewed faith” off of my own self (generated from this event) and am placing it carefully into the jar, hoping I’ll soon have more to add.
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