ACCOZZAGLIA

[Nota apologia: Pitched as a journal column for Torontoist. Given the green light by then-editor-in-chief David Topping in September 2008, but of my choosing, it was neither continued nor published. By the time of Topping’s approval, I was enrolled in seven courses simultaneously; my alma mater caps at six courses unless a registrar intervenes. My peers typically were in four or five courses.]

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There’s no doubt our city prides itself on the superlatives: most populous, most diverse demographics, tallest
phallic edifice in, uh, North America, wealthiest in terms of aggregated capital, and so on.

How about love? New York City <3s NY, London Loves itself, and the City of Brotherly Love is literally embedded in its name. And Los Angeles? Randy Newman really loves L.A.:

But Toronto the . . . Lovely? Uhm, it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

Our city wants us To Live with Culture, not to love it. We’re Unlimited with tourist possibilities, but Love Unlimited we’re definitely not.

We do our best to wear our urban brethren’s threads (Chicago, New York, Boston) on the plasma and silver screens, but as a character actor, we have this impossibly tough time accepting the casting call to play Hogtown.

Hogwash?

So far, seven instalments of the cop drama Flashpoint have aired with strong showings in Canada and the States. While a slew of subtle Toronto references (and lulzy aliases — “Paradise Square”, anyone?) have graced the show’s dialogue, the producers cling to an ineffable, almost shameful virginity of Toronto’s urban oblivion: “Toronto” still waits to be uttered for the first time. There’s still hope: they finally reached third base in the last epi, when “Toronto” quietly appeared on the masthead of a suspiciously Star-like Toronto Interpreter. Contrast this to other TV shows in which the metro was cast as its own character — Sex and the City, Miami Vice, the CSI franchise, L.A. Law, or even Street Legal (which only aired on the CBC) — and the starkness escalates.

Our self-deprecation sets in. Civic envy? Yeah, we know all about that.

Evidently, “we don’t cut it” because we’re not as “world class” as a NYC, London, or Tokyo. So why isn’t Toronto happy with what it already has? Our city takes great pains to tell the world and ourselves how we host world-class amenities, but wouldn’t it be even mo’ bettah if we could just bag the Olympics or rank as a tony address on a world Monopoly game board? Our city’s Lite Brite box, Toronto Life (née Yonge-Dundas) Square, aspires to be the next global Shibuya or Times Square. So does our civic love grow when our lumens beat out the night sky?

Even Creative Class castemaker, Richard Florida, who migrated to Toronto last year, explains on the one hand that living where people in your career field concentrate is a great place to be, but he doesn’t say a thing about simply living where you actually love being. As if to imply this disconnect, Florida’s reviewer grumbled how there wasn’t a category called “want to be warmer in the winter but still have to work in Canada” — amusing, as our January temperature average (-1°C)^* isn’t as brutal as Chicago’s (-2°C) or Minneapolis’s (-10°C), and yet people still love moving to those places, come blizzard or frigid sunshine. (Vancouver, at +6°C, is both warmer and Canadian.)

“Nice Place to Visit”, so named after an album by Toronto music group Frōzen Ghōst, embarks on a gently meandering walkabout to chart Toronto’s love map, revealing the ways our city shies from the idea of loving itself at face value.

Preposterous? Let’s stroll.

^{* [Climate sources: NOAA & Environment Canada]}