The Toronto Spectator/The Big Donut
Marin, Rick
THE TORONTO SPECTATOR THE BIG DONUT by Rick Marin W hen Americans visit Toronto they can't help noticing how darn nice the place is. It's so . . . clean. Hollywood movie crews import their own...
...As the MacKenzie Brothers might say, "Get out, eh...
...Oh sure," she says, with a dollop of knowing sarcasm...
...Even now, it's still overcompensating for the mud and hogs...
...Toronto the Good, it used to be called...
...But in dozens of typically Canadian ways the city isn't quite the flash cosmotown it thinks it is...
...It has a film festival invariably described as "world-class," an abundance of trendy restaurants, a sprawling Chinatown, money, the world's tallest freestanding structure (the CN Tower—a Freudian monument if ever there was one), a working subway system, elegant neighborhoods, good schools, a brand-new domed stadium, Major League baseball...
...The New York column boasts such bold-print "rich 'n' glam" beautiful people as Carrie Fisher, Teri Garr, Blaine Trump, and Oscar de la Renta...
...Oh, wow...
...Business boomed...
...G otham Envy dates back to the late 1960s, when Toronto (pronounced 71rnma by the natives) latched onto the counterculture movement and created a groovy simulacrum of Greenwich Village called Yorkville, now an elite shopping district...
...One night I wound up at a back-alley Jamaican Rasta joint, where to get a real drink a secret code was required...
...In cosmopolitan cities, don't people just go to the corner store...
...says she...
...He had one of his customary blond love-slaves in tow, the kind who normally won't give me the time of night—until she finds out where I live...
...The reality is more prosaic...
...Break out the gondolas...
...Fine...
...And if they leave the rubbish unguarded, the city sweeps it up...
...It was close enough...
...The States...
...Political and economic circumstances combined with the decade's contagion of material greed: red Pierre Trudeau was out, quasi-Reaganite Brian Mulroney was in...
...Speak the word "Manhattan" and out would come a glass of murky yellow liquid, allegedly "fruit juice," spiked with some vile grain alcohol...
...Look out...
...Well, almost none...
...Yikes...
...Ask for a "Brooklyn" and the bartender would serve up a rum-and-Coke...
...Its front-page headlines scream in jumbo sensationalese, it has a bikini-clad "Sunshine Girl" on page 3 seven days a week, its politics are rabidly right wing...
...And yet try as it might the Sun won't ever be a full-blooded tab because there's no crime in Toronto...
...The Big Apple of the north" is of course the ideal formulation...
...No more...
...The big thing when I was last there was a gang of suburban skinheads surrounding people at the Eaton Center (downtown's mall mecca) and asking victims for their leather jackets...
...It wants to be hip, big, bad...
...Occasionally, an old lady gets mugged, falls down, and scrapes her knee...
...It pairs two columns, one from New York's high life, the other Toronto's...
...Buildings got taller...
...A town whose most cosmopolitan concern used to be what those "goldarn" Maple Leafs were up to Saturday night...
...This is a variation on "the Harvard of the north," which the 50,000-student University of Toronto has been calling itself for years...
...The Sunday Sun magazine's gossip/ society page is also telling...
...Every time I make the pilgrimage back to my once-humble hometown it strikes me how desperate this New York Envy has become...
...It didn't matter that my address was Washington, D.C., not NYC...
...Which is fine if you don't mind traveling several blocks—or miles—in search of a cinder-block bunker to be served state-licensed six-packs by a tattooed guy named Brian...
...It bore no relation to the conventional Manhattan highball...
...The Sun is a tabloid...
...Another casualty of Canadianism is the Toronto Sun...
...Very cool...
...The Sun's headline: "HIJACK TERROR...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1989 49...
...It wants to be New York...
...Almost overnight, Toronto became "T.O...
...Not content to be North America's most livable—most pleasantly unAmerican—city, it prays for the day when some U.S...
...Hollywood movie crews import their own garbage to make Toronto streets look more like the good old USA...
...Men kissed each other on the lips...
...You live in the States...
...Suddenly, I'm getting her full attention, eyes wide and flashing "Green Card" like Fred Flintstone's ringing up dollar signs...
...See aforementioned bar-closing time and donut obsession...
...metropolis will want to call itself "the Toronto of the south...
...I n its earliest days as a British colonial fort, Toronto was called York, Muddy York because the streets were paved with mire...
...Tragically for T.O., most Yanks would likely say the same of the Big Donut today, aware only that it is a city—a very clean city—somewhere north of New York...
...Okay, in some ways Toronto is a cosmopolitan burg...
...Suddenly, the city was swimming in cappuccino...
...My most recent nocturnal excursion there landed me in the company of my friend the entertainment lawyer (the ultimate New York Envy job...
...All of which might have been remotely flattering, libido-wise, except for one thing: she gave my wife exactly the same treatment...
...As a full-blown collective neurosis, however, the phenomenon didn't take hold until the early 1980s...
...Women kissed each other on the street...
...As the fledgling financial capital grew it became known as "hogtown" because it sucked up the resources of the rest of the country and gave nothing back—also because swine had free run of the place...
...Below it: the Toronto party report, filled with names like Mel Lastman, Dr...
...South of the border Canada is revered as a beer drinker's paradise: a virgin wilderness where off-duty lumberjacks and their spirited womenfolk sit around campfires, frying thick wedges of bacon and quaffing ice-cold bottles of Molson...
...With more and more American movies and TV shows shot there all the time, Toronto has taken to calling itself "the Hollywood of the north...
...A non Toronto but quintessential Sun event transpired in April when two Lebanese "terrorists" hijacked a Canadian bus en route to Plattsburgh, New York, and commandeered it to Parliament Hill in Ottawa...
...Like my friend's green-eyed companion, Toronto feels its inadequacy most sorely by night...
...people begin rooting out their only recourse: the elusive after-hours bar...
...At this point the "cool" Rick Marin, an expatriate 7brontonian, is television critic for the Washington Times...
...A pattern emerged: the code words were all New York boroughs...
...A church on every corner, or else a 24-hour donut shop...
...But as Al Capone once said, "I don't even know what street Canada is on...
...All alcoholic beverages must be off the table by 1:30...
...How do you like Toronto...
...Which crowd would you rather sip Manhattans with...
...Last call is at 1:00 a.m...
...Dimitrios Oreopoulous, Tobie Bekhor (with husband Ted), and Hy Isenbaum...
...But in an interesting new Euro-twist, a Toronto Star article forecasting the city as the site for Expo 2000—the world's fair of the next millennium—introduced "Venice of the north" to the popular vocabulary...
...It's still that way...
...Having reached the nation's capital, the outlaw Greyhound got stuck in the mud, the Lebanese surrendered, and no one was hurt...
...Toronto—population three million, vortex of the Great White North—doesn't want to be Good anymore...
...Citizens of Toronto are forced to procure their brew from a monopoly of official outlets owned by the Province of Ontario...
Vol. 22 • November 1989 • No. 11
