Top, 10 Toronto St. was Toronto’s seventh post office in the 1850s and, more recently, the headquarters of Conrad Black’s Hollinger Inc.
Below, 167 - 185 King St. East is one of the oldest lines of commercial buildings still in the city.
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As cities go, Toronto is more plugged in than most. It has been widely reported that we rank highest in North America on the popular public networking website Facebook — with more members than New York and Los Angeles combined — and, judging from the number of iPods on our streets, we have a love affair with private technology as well.
In the past decade or so, this younger, technology-savvy generation has also discovered a love for our architectural past and urban infrastructure, as evidenced by digital photographers (or photo-bloggers), the "murmur" cellular storytelling project, and publications such as Spacing magazine.
It was inevitable that the two interests should come together.
Thankfully, the marriage of technology and heritage appreciation has arrived in MP3 form courtesy of Heritage Toronto, the Toronto Public Library and Michael Redhill, author of Consolation, the award-winning 2007 novel that deals, in large part, with 1850s Toronto. Released just two weeks ago, on offer is a free, downloadable podcast walking tour narrated by Mr. Redhill.
With a storyline that time-travels effortlessly between the muddy streets traversed by Jem Hallam, a newly arrived English apothecary struggling to make a living in the growing settlement, and the paved, modern 1990s metropolis of forensic geologist David Hollis, Consolation makes for delicious tour fodder.
But it's not necessary to have read the book in order to take the walk, says Mr. Redhill: "I think it can stand alone; it uses sections from the novel to situate the person who's taking the tour both in a fictional space and in the real space. But if you know the book, then there's another layer to the walk."
After a brief setup, iPod-clad walkers are asked to begin at the corner of King Street East and Jarvis, where Mr. Redhill paints a picture of the steepled-and-treed skyline that would have greeted Hallam upon his arrival in August 1855. He tells the walker that at this, "one of the oldest intersections in the city," it would have been common to see wooden ladders against homes and businesses "to afford easy access to a burning roof" or to "sweep off heavy accumulations of snow" in winter.
He directs our gaze to 167-185 King, "one of the oldest lines of commercial buildings still in the city," and then we take in St. Lawrence Hall and its gas-fed streetlamps, still burning today. Now primed on how to "see" Hallam's Toronto, we walk south to a specific corner near the St. Lawrence Market on Front Street. Politely, the author reminds us to press pause on our MP3 player until we get there. A reading from Consolation and an education on the market's history await, as does a geography lesson about the downward "slope" of Lower Jarvis Street.
And so it goes, along streets such as Toronto Street, where we can admire the "heavy, powerful columned building" that was Toronto's seventh post office in Hallam's time and, more recently, the headquarters of Conrad Black's Hollinger Inc.; on Yonge Street, we listen to a passage from the book describing a chase between Hallam and another man.
Applying Mr. Redhill's historic filter over your eyes is difficult at first, what with sidewalks teeming, airbrakes belching and horns blaring but, little by little and via his soothing, hypnotic tone, the layers of fantasy are applied. By the time he asks us to "picture Hallam coming around the corner in his hat and long coat, lost in his thoughts," he has us. However, unlike on guided walking tours, we can break the spell at any time if we're cold or tired by simply hitting pause and ducking into a coffee shop.
Mr. Redhill says the idea for the book came about after he saw a panorama of 13 photographs of 1857 Toronto taken from the rooftop of the five-storey Rossin House Hotel (the King and York site where it once stood is one of the tour stops). But the 41-year-old author says he has been fascinated by images from the city's past since his early teens, when he had a "bizarre obsession" with the faded, painted advertisements on the sides of old buildings. "That was my earliest sense that there were people here before me," he offers.
He hopes the tour is not an "emotionally cheap way" to bring the past to life, but rather something that helps people feel that they are "walking through a place that contains not just them but so much more, and a lot of that so much more is things that they can only imagine, but imagining it is powerful."
With minimal walking between stops and the pleasure of Mr. Redhill speaking privately into your ear — sometimes offering insight into his creative process — the hour-long tour is a real joy. It's also a forum, at times, for him to vent about Toronto's abysmal record of heritage preservation and even offer solutions.
"For whatever reason, here in Toronto, we have spent a century living in a contingent place, a place always on its way to becoming something else. And yet, there is a Toronto already here, one that can speak to us of who we are, who we were, and why we call this city our home. If we could learn to live in harmony with that Toronto, the citizens of this city might begin to want to protect it and to continue to build their city in a spirit of honouring all of its residents, past and present. Only then will Torontonians feel they are a part of a story that they are telling for their own sakes."
Perhaps, in plugged-in Toronto, the podcast will be the perfect way to tell these stories.
Written by Mr. Redhill with Heritage Toronto's Gary Miedema and Nancy Luno, the walk is available for download at: www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/ktr/onebook/audio/walking_tour.mp3
CORRECTION
In the print edition of this story, published February 29, the following quote should have been attributed to author Michael Redhill, who narrates a tour of Old York:
"For whatever reason, here in Toronto, we have spent a century living in a contingent place, a place always on its way to becoming something else. And yet, there is a Toronto already here, one that can speak to us of who we are, who we were, and why we call this city our home. If we could learn to live in harmony with that Toronto, the citizens of this city might begin to want to protect it and to continue to build their city in a spirit of honouring all of its citizens, past and present. Only then will Torontonians feel they are a part of a story that they are telling for their own sakes."
