Suburbia: alien to some, very real for others

There are dozens and dozens of photographs on display at Wide Open World: A Celebration of the Suburbs in Toronto, the new exhibit at the Toronto Archives at 255 Spadina Rd., but you'll only need to look at one to truly grasp what suburbia meant to the Silent Generation (those born between 1925-1942).

In front of a cinder-block wall on a lot recently cleared of brush and weed-trees, the shirtless, Polish-born Rowan Sedzicki – who'd spent most of the Second World War as a PoW in Germany – dips his hoe into a wheelbarrow of cement. Mixing that cement with a shovel is his fiancé, 19-year-old, Canadian-born, Helen Muchowski; her thick hair braided and netted, Ms. Muchowski is wearing a work-site-appropriate plaid shirt and, incongruously, a pair of open-toed heels adorned with a bow.

"Maybe she was tipped off the photographer would be there," laughs curator Manda Vranic, "but you can see there's mud on the shoes, maybe it's her least favourite pair of old shoes."

A partial answer is found by calling up The Globe & Mail story that accompanied the 1951 photograph, Helpmate Literal Term for Wives of Suburbia . The chauvinistic term "helpmate" notwithstanding, the story profiles three young couples that chose not to wait for Don Mills, Ionview, or Bathurst Manor to be built, but rather took bricks and mortar into their own hands, literally, to build their own futures.

When asked why he came to Canada, Mr. Sedzicki says, simply, "Europe is tired." In the short three years since he'd arrived, "I have a house, a good girl for my wife and my freedom." Another couple, identified only as Mr. and Mrs. John Dennis, who called "[t]wo rooms at Dufferin St. and Dundas St. W." home, said: "We want a place of our own. And out here, north of Wilson Ave., the air is good. There is no traffic. We're close to a new school. … Faith Avenue is going to be a happy spot for us."

And while I can't speak for the Millennial Generation (I'm Gen X), I suspect they'd prefer, as would most of my generation, to live in the downtown house the Dennis' were renting rooms in rather than the Faith Ave. home they were building. They'd probably prefer to restore a tiny, three-room cottage on Lippincott St. rather than live in the six-room Sedzicki-Muchowski bungalow at 2 Drake Cres. in Scarborough, too, despite the view of the Bluffs across the street.

But that would be missing the point. Some dreams last only a few generations, and the dream of a calm, rational, democratic suburbia – as opposed to the horrors of war or the unpredictability of the downtown core – was one such dream. Which is why I'm pleased that Ms. Vranic, who grew up in the suburb of Ajax, chose to eschew editorial content in favour of allowing the photographs to speak for themselves.

She also chose to include the 1970s and eighties. "When you say suburbia, people think of the very specific era that they grew up in, so some people think of the little postwar houses, some people go to sixties ranch, some people go to those eighties [houses] with the big three car garage in front." She also wanted to represent apartment living, since "the suburbs are not just houses," and Toronto's ethnic diversity.

To wit, there are photos of 1940s saltboxes surrounded by acres of green where white children play, as well as a multicultural basketball game in the shadow of a 1970s high-rise.

The idea for the exhibit came about, she says, when the Archives got a recent injection of material from the former municipalities of North York, Etobicoke and Scarborough. The borough/city of Scarborough, she says, "had a photographic unit with a professional photographer who documented things happening in Scarborough, and it was everything from community events to paving roads." Combine that with collections by newspaper photographers, such as John H. Boyd, a Globe staffer from 1922-1964, along with amateur shutterbug Ellis Wiley (an accountant who loved documenting his city), and all she had to do was "choose the pictures that spoke to me; and then when I went to organize it, the pictures suggested the different segments of the exhibit."

And the segments – all cheekily named using Canadian songs such as Kim Mitchell's Patio Lanterns – take gallery-goers from the sidewalk fronting newly minted, single-family homes (you can almost smell the fresh paint) to the insides of neighbourhood rec centres where young, moustachioed men learn to disco-dance, all the way to the opening of Etobicoke's 6 Points Plaza or the Scarborough Town Centre, where actual rising and falling hot air balloons once delighted shoppers, to picnics in the park and local celebrations. There's even a photo documenting the building of sewers.

Aerial photographs do the heavy lifting by showing how, often, developers had to leapfrog over semi-rural patches in order to follow sewer-lines and other necessary infrastructure, and the exhibit's cases are filled with appliance and flooring brochures, and pages from the Stylist magazine (produced by the Grand Rapids Furniture Makers Guild and available through Simpson's), to show the "imagined" suburbia of popular media.

While one photograph shows a woman fixing the staircase of her hastily built veteran's home only a few years after construction, the majority of the homes and apartments Ms. Vranic was able to identify still stand (including the Sedzicki-Muchowski bungalow, although it's got a mansarded second storey and a coat of stucco); some, such as the pair of buff-brick rental apartments at Bathurst Street and Briar Hill Avenue, have been converted to expensive condominiums without too much exterior intervention.

That's because while many of the images at Wide Open World represent an alien world to 2017 eyes, for others its remains a very, very real and desirable place.

Wide Open World runs until August, 2018. Admission is free. The Toronto Archives are open Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Saturdays 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.