To commemorate the fest, we commissioned 10 best-selling authors to write for Globe readers. Vancouver's William Gibson launches the series.
A friend of mine in New York has been pointing out surviving bits of what he calls his city's "gone world" to me for the past 20 years or so. When I first started getting to know New York, in the early 1980s, it consisted mostly of that gone world, or so it seemed to me. People who lived there didn't seem to believe it possible that this would change. My friend was the first New Yorker I knew who noticed that things there were changing, becoming gone.
The sewing machine spare-parts quarter, for instance (gone), or the tenement that once housed McGurk's Suicide Hall (gone). Bits and pieces of SoHo and TriBeCa and Chelsea, all gone. Had I not had so observant a guide, I certainly would have missed them, these glimpses of vanishing things, but my friend had treasured them all, and was pained by their going, and took care to show them to me. It was his conviction that they were invariably replaced by much less interesting things (to put it mildly), and I generally agreed.
But I had, in this, a secret, if only half-recognized. There was an element of déjà vu for me about this "regooding" (my friend's term) of the gone world. I felt as though I knew where it was going. I felt as though I'd seen it before, and knew where it led, though I wasn't quite aware why.
Now, in retrospect, I know that I knew it from Toronto, which had been my first city (if one didn't count Roanoke, Va., or Tucson, Ariz., or Los Angeles, none of which, for their various reasons, were quite the ticket).
Toronto was a city I discovered directly, stumbling upon it with almost no previous knowledge.
Montreal I at least had heard of. Toronto. A city. In Canada. Quite a big one, it seemed, riding the bus in from Washington, one afternoon in 1967.
It consisted largely, I found, of the most amiable sort of repurposed semi-ruins. A vast Victorian colonial seashell of blackened brick, shot through with big, grim grey bones of earnest civic Modernism. I marvelled that such an odd place could have existed without my having heard of it. North of New England, all this baroque, mad brick; sandstone gargoyles, red trams, the Queen's portrait everywhere.
New-found friends, often as not, rented high-ceilinged rooms in crumbling townhouses, their slate rooflines fenced with rusting traceries of cast-iron, curlicues I'd only seen in Charles Addams cartoons. Everything painted a uniform dead green, like the face of a corpse in those same Addams cartoons. If you took a penknife and scraped a little of the green away, you discovered marvels: brown marble shot with paler veins, ornate bronze fixtures, carved oak. In the more stygian reaches of cellar, in such places, there were still to be found fully connected gaslight fixtures, forgotten, protruding from dank plaster like fairy pipes, each with a little flowered twist-key to stop the gas.
This was mid-town, walking distance in various directions from Yonge and Bloor. And by the time my friend started citing the regooding of Manhattan, it was a gone world, massively regooded. When friends from New York returned from Toronto, and I told them that Yorkville had been my bohemia, they were baffled. I explained that it was as though the Trump Tower had been built on St. Mark's Place, but still they didn't get it, so thorough had that regooding been.
