The Horse Palace
Some places cannot be casually visited. You go sparingly, and when the time is right. They have a potent effect on your being, which would be dulled by regular visitation. Anyways, the benefits of going come in the days and months afterward, as you digest and reflect on your experience. These are special places.
The Horse Palace in Toronto is such a place to me.
Entering this building, you’re hit with the strong odour of horse manure. But as your nose acclimatizes, you notice the soft, sweet smell of hay and the clean scent of wood shavings. You might even smell subtle notes of old musty wood, rusting metal and peeling paint. This texture of smells permeates every square centimeter of the two-storey, 30,304 m2 building. In certain places, you can almost taste it.
Breathing in deeply, your lungs and body fill with this air – the air of a bygone era when horses were an ubiquitous part of urban life. You’re not just looking back in time; you’re smelling back in time. These smells describe a world that is impossible to articulate in words and images; the nose is a gateway into a different dimension of reality, one that isn’t reducible to the dimensions of sight and language.
As a designated historical site, the Horse Palace is a sort of museum – a bridge to the past. But while most museums forge a bridge through our eyes – with objects displayed behind glass, colourful artistic renderings and striking videos – the Horse Palace forges it through our nose. Instead of just seeing what they saw, you are able to smell what they smelled.
There is something curiously powerful and intimate about nasal experience. Perhaps it is the idea that molecules in the air are entering our body. Perhaps it is that smell is a primal sense faculty, capable of triggering primal areas of our brain. Or perhaps it is simply that few places really affect our sense of smell so our noses have become neglected and therefore hypersensitive to sensory stimulation.
Speculation aside, the Horse Palace is a powerful and intimate experiential link to a past city, a city you can only get to through your nose.
While it is pleasurable in and of itself to sniff into the past, it is also important to do so. Experiencing a starkly different version of Toronto reminds us that our city as it is today will also change. Just as automobiles replaced horses, thereby replacing horse excrement with vehicular exhaust, the smells of today will too one day be replaced.
The big question is how will Toronto smell in the future?
If we imagine a city free from noxious exhaust, and if we then desire that city, we will have a carrot on a stick that will lead us to make that vision a reality.
Wandering the Horse Palace, you find rows upon rows of vacant, eight-by-eight-foot stalls. This emptiness gives the impression of an antiquated building, rendered obsolete by the automobile. But this impression is gently called into question by the mysteriously fresh wood chips lightly dusting the hard-to-reach edges and corners all over – the residuals of a recent, good-enough, barn-style sweeping.
The Horse Palace has 1,200 stalls that still today house a variety of competition livestock during the Annual Royal Agricultural Winter Fair, which has been running since 1922. Though agricultural fairs still play a lively and essential role in the social and intellectual fabric of rural Ontario – and the urban could not exist without the rural – the smell of horses is not part of Toronto’s smell-scape nearly as much as it used to be.
Directly across from the Horse Palace, another annual festival takes place. Once a year, since 1986, herds of race cars drive into the city for the Toronto Indy. The area stinks of burning fossil fuels and rubber.
I imagine in 2081 (95 years since the Indy’s inauguration; the temporal equivalent of visiting the Horse Palace today), people will still come from far and wide to the annual race. Being there, they will be smelling back to the era when Toronto was filled with noxious, heavy, grey effluent spewing from tailpipes. As they leave to go home, they will notice a contrast in the air: a freshness wafting off nearby trees and green roofs, and an invigorating wind blowing in off Lake Ontario. I hope they will feel relieved to know they live in an age when cities are filled with clean, healthy air.