City Stories: Fact, Fiction and a Little of Both
There is No City That Does Not Dream
– a poem by Ann Michaels
Do cities actually dream? It seems fair, since we frequently dream about them. We know that cities have a unique character, that they stimulate certain kinds of thought, and that they can sometimes encourage us to take action. In this sense, cities are capable of speaking to us, in a language that is universal.
Cities are constructed of narratives. Whether they are actual, mythological or purely fictitious makes little difference. Take founding stories as an example. Beijing, we’re told, was founded by proto-humans, a half-million years ago. Artifacts have been found to support this theory. Romulus and Remus, famously suckled by a wolf, are credited with founding Rome, although we have only a legend and an anonymous sculpture to corroborate this. Manhattan Island, the heart of New York City, reportedly began with a 60-guilder business deal between native Americans and Dutch colonists in 1626. The whole thing was recorded in a painting by Peter Minuit in the same year.
Just as importantly, cities spin off stories as time goes on. While founding stories give the backstory that helps to establish a native character, it’s the evolving stories that breathe life into cities and develop their personalities. Like writers, film makers, painters and photographers, architects and planners play a role in the development of city stories. Streets, parks, neighbourhoods, communities and buildings make up the physical fabric, but it’s the people and the stories that lend individuality, shape and permanence. To understand how to create, enjoy and preserve our built environment, we need to begin with its stories.
There are countless city stories. Every city has at least a few. As the announcer in the TV show Naked City used to say, “There are eight million stories in the naked city.” What follows are three very different stories, consisting of fact, fiction and a little of both.
VENICE IN FICTION
For this writer, Venice is not one story but several stories, most of them written by Donna Leon.
Venice is more than a city. It is known around the world as an architectural gem, a tourist mecca, a cultural treasure and a shaper of world history. You would be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t know what or where Venice is.
As a city of mystery, romance and intrigue, Venice has fascinated artists, writers in particular, for centuries. Many of them, such as William Shakespeare, Thomas Mann and Ernest Hemingway, have used this “Floating City” as a setting for enduring works of fiction. When you’re telling a story, it’s easier to establish mood and push the story along if your listeners or readers are already familiar with the locale. Even if they have never been to Venice, they already have a mental impression.
When visiting the city, especially for the first time, it’s impossible to take everything in. There’s the spectacle (It’s just like in the pictures!), the ancient architecture, the water, and the twisting, seemingly unplanned, labyrinth of alleys. It is in reading stories that are set in Venice that the soul of the city is revealed. As with many other world cities, Venice isn’t just the setting for a story, it’s a main character.
Some of the best storytellers are crime fiction writers, and where better to set a crime than in mysterious, romantic Venice? At the suggestions of a few architect friends, I have started to alleviate my COVID disorientation by reading the books of Donna Leon, whose fictional hero, Commissario Guido Brunetti, acts as our Venetian guide.
If we could experience Venice as Commissario Brunetti does, not only would we see the entire city (there are 25 Commissario Brunetti books), we would also gain insights into the Venetian brand of benign cynicism, ad hoc politics, overpriced real estate and dark history, not to mention a fresh appreciation for the collective spirit that has kept the city afloat – literally – for two millennia.
Brunetti’s Venice is not the tourist Venice: tourists get little sympathy from him. Venice is, instead, a city that is rich in sensory stimuli, good and bad. In Dressed for Death, Brunetti is saddened by the view from the causeway, by “the clouds of grey, white, green, yellow smoke billowing up from the forest of smokestacks in Marghera.” Looking in the other direction, he sees “Murano and, beyond it, the distant tower of the basilica of Torcello, where some historians said, the whole idea of Venice had begun more than a thousand years ago.”
More than a century earlier, architectural critic John Ruskin observed from the same vantage point, “From the long-hoped-for turn in the dust perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first time, the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset.” Ruskin was a romantic, much like a tourist; Donna Leon is an optimistic cynic, like a true Venetian.
In The Order, Daniel Silva, another mystery writer, adopting a similar Venetian worldview, summarizes the city by describing a typical November day: “Life went on as normal. A minor acqua alta flooded a portion of Santa Croce; a colossal cruise ship plowed into a wharf on the Giudecca Canal.”
Venice is not unique in possessing a widely recognized personality. Even though the labels may be superficial, outdated or just plain incorrect, other major cities have become equally well known: romantic Paris, bustling New York, laid-back Los Angeles, festive Rio. For designers of the built environment, it’s important to acknowledge that not just big cities, but literally every spot on earth has some unique quality, variously called its authenticity, its personality, or its genius loci, although you may have to look for it. And just like fiction writers, designers can and should build on that story.
WOKING, IN FACT & FICTION
Woking’s story is unusual: it’s about something that didn’t happen there, more than 100 years ago. It’s not a creation story, but a destruction story.
Woking is a town, rather than a city, that serves as a bedroom community – part of the “commuter belt” – just west-southwest of London, in Surrey, England. Its current population (as of 2014) is 99,400 and shrinking. When the writer HG Wells lived there, at the very end of the 19th century, it was a staid Victorian community of about 9,000 souls, nestled in the English countryside. It was hardly the sort of place that an extraterrestrial expeditionary force would target for annihilation. But that’s exactly what the Martians did in Wells’ classic novel War of the Worlds. Landing at the edge of Woking, in Horsell Common, and martialing their forces there, the invaders – giant metallic tripods – blew Woking to smithereens and then proceeded on to London.
Since this never really happened, Woking is perfectly intact today, and few people in the town relate to the story after all this time. If it weren’t for the tripod statue in the middle of town, Woking’s central role in the story would be forgotten. Many more people are familiar with the Mercury Radio broadcast of 1939, in which fictitious Grover’s Corners, New Jersey, replaced Woking. And since that time, radio plays, movies, musicals and comic books have borrowed from the theme, but avoided any reference to Woking. The most recent TV series (2019) is set in rural France, and casts creepy robotic dogs in place of the tripods. Critics have described this production as “dry and overlong,” “intense and…just brutally bleak.” A British movie created by Pendragon Pictures was faithful to the plot and setting of Wells’ book but was a critical failure.
Missing from almost all of these adaptations is a sense of the setting itself. In sci-fi stories, what matters is the bug-eyed monsters. The locale serves mainly as something to destroy as quickly and dramatically as possible. But, in Wells’ account, the town’s features are described in detail as they were then and, in some cases, still are. When the storyteller is leaving town, he abandons his cart near an orphanage next to a mosque (the first in Britain) that still exists.
I know this area well because my daughter and her family live there, about 400m from where the narrator left his cart, then proceeding on foot up the hill and right past what would later be my daughter’s front yard.
Why wouldn’t Woking make a bigger deal about a story that put the town on the map by fictionally wiping it off? The story behind the story, revealed over the years by various biographers might hold some clues. It seems that Wells spent some happy years in Woking, living with his second wife, Jane Robbins, and learning to ride a bicycle. But his cynical streak was often evident. In the Epsom and Ewell History Explorer, Linda Jackson1 quotes Wells as saying that he would like to “completely wreck and destroy Woking – killing my neighbours in painful and eccentric ways – then proceed via Kingston and Richmond to London, selecting South Kensington for feats of peculiar atrocity.” Who hasn’t dreamt of blowing up annoying neighbours from time to time? Wells managed to do it without causing any real physical harm.
Being despised by one of Britain’s greatest writers is certainly a thing worth celebrating.
Several weeks ago, NASA landed a rover on Mars. It’s 2021, so no one was expecting that alien inhabitants would greet them, or that we would seek revenge for their fictitious and repeated destruction of our planet. But still, now that the shoe is on the other foot, would we destroy their planet? The answer is probably yes, but only slowly, over time. Nevertheless, a few weeks later, on March 20, a bright meteoric object was spotted over southeast England – not unlike what Wells described 123 years ago as a “line of flame high in the atmosphere,” except maybe a little brighter, and accompanied by a sonic boom. No one saw it land and it has been assumed that it burned up in the atmosphere. Curiously, though, the point of origin was established as just beyond the orbit of Mars.
In Woking itself, the fictional Martian landing spot, the Sandpit, is still noted in Horsell Common, the tripod statue still stands proudly, and Wells’s home on Maybury Road is marked with a plaque, although it is barely noticeable at all.
TORONTO – IN FACT
Toronto is a private city that finally became public, and gradually acquired a desire to be seen and understood. Slowly, often by accident, sometimes by reluctance, it has learned to disclose itself.
The significant moment of change can be precisely dated: Monday September 13, 1965, opening day at the New City Hall and Nathan Phillips square, both designed by the Finnish architect Viljo Revell.
– Robert Fulford. Accidental City: The Transformation of Toronto.
Toronto: Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1995, p. 2
This last story is a true story that adheres to the basics of storytelling: a beginning, a conflict, rising action, a climax, a solution and a denouement. It’s an uplifting coming-of-age story that unfolds over a half-century and is still unfolding. The hero is the City of Toronto. Like many good stories, this is a tale of multiple disappointments, betrayals, difficult problems, and even the death of a main character. But it begins and ends on a positive note.
TORONTO THE GOOD
The facts surrounding the design and construction of Toronto’s New City Hall are easy enough to find, with a little concentrated digging. But the real story is much more fascinating than the bare facts reveal, or than most Torontonians are aware of.
Post-WWII Toronto was like a well brought-up adolescent: it was polite to strangers and kept itself clean and tidy. As late as 1987, actor Peter Ustinov claimed, “Toronto is a kind of New York operated by the Swiss.”
Local liquor laws exemplified that observation. At the time, the boundary dividing the then-City of York from the then-City of West Toronto Junction ran run straight through the Wedgewood Restaurant at Bloor Street and Riverview Gardens (now the site of a proposed giant condo building). Since “The Junction” was dry (and stayed that way until 1996!) and York was wet, the front of the restaurant was alcohol-free, but the back housed a fully stocked bar. In Toronto the Good, one could dine with puritan decorum in the restaurant at the front, while sneaking a legal drink at the bar in the back. But you couldn’t drink on the street or in plain view, even on your own porch.
Toronto was growing rapidly, about to become the largest city in Canada. But it was badly in need of two things: a new identity, and a city centre that would express this identity, in keeping with the great cities of the world, with an impressive (today we would say iconic) structure, and a generous civic plaza, where Torontonians could gather in orderly fashion, to stage public events, express their views and coalesce as an urban polity.
A 1953 proposal for the new city centre that solidified the city’s boring image was put forward by local architects but was surprisingly rejected by the public and City Council. Even more surprisingly, in 1956, Mayor Nathan Phillips came up with the idea of holding an international design competition that would attract talent from around the world. This was widely considered a dangerous tactic since a non-English-speaking “exotic person” might be named the winner. How would Toronto cope with such an outcome?
On the plus side, the site selected necessitated the complete destruction of a particularly unsavoury downtown neighbourhood. Two for one: the newly formed historic preservation group would be pleased that Old City Hall would be saved, and the protectors of orderly society would be gratified by the destruction of a sinful urban blight.
THE COMPETITION
And so the competition proceeded, with respected Canadian architect Eric Arthur directing a jury of five renowned international architects. In an explanatory booklet, the aspirations for the new building and associated public square were summarized:
“One of the reasons for this competition is to find a building that will proudly express its function as the centre of civic government…to achieve an atmosphere…that suggests government, continuity of certain democratic traditions and service to the community.”
– Conditions of Competition
As for the civic square itself:
The competition conditions…didn’t leave much instruction as to what was wanted in the square, other than that it would be primarily “a landscaped open space of great beauty serving as a forecourt to the city hall, and as an open space for the pleasure of citizens.”
– Mark Osbaldeston. Unbuilt Toronto: A History of the City That Might Have Been.
Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2008
By the deadline date, April 18, 1958, a stunning 509 entries had been received from 42 countries. The jurying process began by eliminating entries that showed little promise and shortlisting the rest for a stage two re-evalution. Here, the plot took an odd, very un-Torontonian twist: one of the jurors, American Eero Saarinen, arriving late, asked that the process be re-started. “Show me your discards,” he politely demanded. The other jurors were understandably miffed but agreed. Saarinen salvaged one notable entry from the discard bin.
The jury and organizers must have been aware of Saarinen’s reputation for this sort of behaviour. He had done the same thing a year earlier in Sydney, Australia: showing up late for the jury, and insisting on dragging an Opera House entry out of the discard bin. But, despite his disruptive actions, history has viewed Saarinen kindly. His eleventh-hour interference in both cases resurrected proposals that not only won the competitions but went on to become architectural icons. His resurrected entry in Sydney was the wildly improbable sail-roofed proposal by Jørn Utzon. In Toronto, he salvaged the modernist-brutalist scheme by Finnish architect Viljo Revell.
As in Sydney, the rejected entry that went on to win was not unanimously popular and the price seemed too high. Toronto’s mayor disliked the scheme, and two jurors threatened to resign. Subsequent TV and press coverage was favourable, and the competition was declared a success, although Frank Lloyd Wright disparaged the scheme as “a grave marker for a cemetery.”
Members of the jury explained the basis of their selection:
The three major building elements] stand out clearly in the urban landscape. The square is carefully shaped and enhanced by the enclosing arcade which gives both shelter and definition. The two office towers are superb aesthetically, their carefully related curves achieving balance, strength and dignity.
– “A Resume of the Report of the Jury”, RAIC Journal, (vol 42, no. 9, Sept., 1965).
PROBLEMS BUILD
Being awarded the project was a significant triumph for Revell, but as the work progressed through working drawings and construction it became a target for tragedies, large and small. Pressure had been applied to select John B. Parkin Associates as local partners, but mistrust arose when one of the finalists accepted a position with Parkin. There were structural problems, political problems, strikes and walkouts, turf wars among city departments, civic indecision and unhelpful suggestions from politicians who would have been much happier with a “dignified” and economical neoclassical office building in the first place. Torontonians were losing patience.
And there were the inevitable financial problems. Where Nathan Phillips had been, by Toronto standards, a visionary, his 1962 replacement Mayor Donald Summerville was a bean counter. Cost overruns that should have been acknowledged earlier became a major issue. But the money problems weren’t isolated to construction costs. The architect himself was in dire straits, facing Canadian taxation problems, fee disagreements with the city, and in one area where Revell had hoped to realize some profit – the interiors contract, which he believed was integral to the building design – the city betrayed him by awarding it instead to Parkin. Any possibility that Revell would pick up local work to keep an office running in Toronto were dashed by the local rules that prevented him from practicing in the province.
THE TURNING POINT
As a final blow, a bronze sculpture by Gerald Moore, which Revell had specially commissioned as an essential component of the square, and a counterpoint to the geometry of the two towers, was rejected by the City, which refused to finance it. Mayor Sommerville passed away, in office, on November 19, 1963, and it looked like anyone with an interest in the project or knowledge of its history had vanished from the scene.
Just as Utzon had become disillusioned and alienated from Sydney and the Opera House, Revell and his Finnish partners were now alienated from Toronto and the New City Hall. Revell never got to see his completed building, or the effect it would have on the city that showed so little sympathy toward him. On November 8, 1964, Viljo Revell passed away in Helsinki from a heart attack.
But you were promised a happy ending.
The new mayor, Philip Givens, showed both leadership and vision by stepping up and helping to organize a private fund for the Moore sculpture that the City had declined to pay for. It was financed in part by the sculptor himself, who subsequently left his collection to the Art Gallery of Ontario, located a few blocks to the northwest.
THE REST IS HISTORY – STILL BEING WRITTEN
The building, as we all know, was completed very much as Revell envisioned it. The main square, which some had considered nothing but wasted space, became a source of civic pride. Since then, Nathan Phillips Square has gained a Peace Garden, a Toronto sign, a bandshell and a skating rink. It has been the setting for everything from dance and music performances to art shows to revelries of every imaginable kind. A recent celebration of the Toronto Raptors NBA victory drew a crowd of possibly more than a million delirious fans. This was remarkable since, when Nathan Phillips Square was first conceived, the words Toronto, basketball, championship, and “more than a million delirious fans” could not have been imagined to occur in a single sentence.
So, who is the actual hero of this story? Just as we said at the beginning, the City of Toronto is main character, beginning as an innocent ingenue, taking advantage of an unlikely opportunity, shaking off adversity, and finally emerging as a self-confident participant on the world stage. Toronto the Good may now be more accurately described as Toronto the Great.
If you live here, this is a story you should know.
NOTE:
www.newstatesman.com/2018/07/war-of-the-worlds-2018-bbc-hg-wells