1. I spent the first 19 years of my life in the suburbs, the initial 14 or so relatively
contented, the last four or five wanting mainly to be elsewhere.
2. The final two I remember vividly: I passed them driving to and from the University
of Toronto in a red 1962 Volkswagen 1500 afflicted with night blindness.
3. The car's lights never worked -- every dusk turned into a kind of medieval race
against darkness, a panicky, mounfful rush north, away from everything I knew was
exciting, toward everything I knew was deadly.
4. I remember looking through the windows at the commuters mired in traffic beside
me and actively hating them for their passivity.
5. I actually punched holes in the white vinyl ceiling of the Volks and then, by way of
penance, wrote beside them the names and phone numbers of the girls I would call
when I had my own apartment in the city.
6. One thing I swore to myself: I would never live in the suburbs again.
7. My aversion was as much a matter of environment as it was traffic -- one particular
piece of the suburban setting: the "cruel sun."
8. Growing up in the suburbs you can get used to a surprising number of things --
the relentless "residentialness" of your surroundings, the weird certainty you have
that everything will stay vaguely new-looking and immune to historic soul no matter
how many years pass.
9. You don't notice the eerie silence that descends each weekday when every sound is
drained out of your neighbourhood along with all the people who've gone to work.
10. I got used to pizza, and cars, and the fact that the cultural hub of my community
was the collective TV set.
11. But once a week I would step outside as dusk was about to fall and be absolutely
bowled over by the setting sun, slanting huge and cold across the untreed front lawns,
reminding me not just how barren and sterile, but how undefended life could be.
12. As much as I hated the suburban drive to school, I wanted to get away from the
cruel suburban sun.
13. When I was married a few years later, my attitude hadn't changed.
14. My wife was a city girl herself, and although her reaction to the suburbs was less
intense than mine, we lived in a series of apartments safely straddling Bloor Street.
15. But four years ago, we had a second child, and simultaneously the school my wife
taught at moved to Bathurst Street north of Finch Avenue.
16. She was now driving 45 minutes north to work every morning, along a route that
was perversely identical to the one I'd driven in college.
17. We started looking for a house.
18. Our first limit was St. Clair -- we would go no farther north.
19. When we took a closer look at the price tags in the area though, we conceded that
maybe we'd have to go to Eglinton -- but that was definitely it.
20. But the streets whose names had once been magical barriers, latitudes of tolerance,
quickly changed to something else as the Sundays passed.
21. Eglinton became Lawrence, which became Wilson, which became Sheppard.
22. One wind-swept day in May I found myself sitting in a town-house development
north of Steeles Avenue called Shakespeare Estates.
23. It wasn't until we stepped outside, and the sun, blazing unopposed over a country
club, smacked me in the eyes, that I came to.
24. We got into the car and drove back to the Danforth and porches as fast as we
could, grateful to have been reprieved.
25. And then one Sunday in June I drove north alone.
26. This time I drove up Bathurst past my wife's new school, hit Steeles, and kept
going, beyond Centre Street and past Highway 7 as well.
27. I passed farms, a man selling lobsters out of his trunk on the shoulder of the road,
a chronic care hospital, a country club and what looked like a mosque.
28. I reached a light and turned right.
29. I saw a sign that said Houses and turned right again.
30. In front of me lay a virgin crescent cut out of pine bush.
31. A dozen houses were going up, in various stages of construction, surrounded by
hummocks of dry earth and stands of precariously tall trees nude halfway up their
trunks.
32. They were the kind of trees you might see in the mountains.
33. A couple was walking hand-in-hand up the dusty dirt roadway, wearing matching
blue track suits.
34. On a "front lawn" beyond them, several little girls with hair exactly the same
colour of blond as my daughter's were whispering and laughing together.
35. The air smelled of sawdust and sun.
36. It was a suburb, but somehow different from any suburb I knew.
37. In 1976 there were 2,124,291 people in Metropolitan Toronto, an area bordered by
Steeles Avenue to the north, Etobicoke Creek on the west, and the Rouge River to the
east.
38. In 1986, the same area contained 2,192,721 people, an increase of 3 percent, all but
negligible on an urban scale.
39. In the same span of time the three outlying regions stretching across the top of
Metro -- Peel, Durham, and York -- increased in population by 55 percent, from
814,000 to some 1,262,000.
40. Half a million people had poured into the crescent north of Toronto in the space of
a decade, during which time the population of the City of Toronto actually declined
as did the populations of the "old" suburbs with the exception of Etobicoke and
Scarborough.
41. If the sprawling agglomeration of people known as Toronto has boomed in the
past 10 years it has boomed outside the traditional city confines in a totally new city,
a new suburbia containing one and a quarter million people.