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May/June 1998 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Feature: War on city geese Our Home and Native Tongue Sense of place

Illustration by Daphne McCormack

The midnight mallards of Harbourfront paddle through a dockside gone daffy. I hear them muttering in the greasy black water as I walk from the streetcar, as I head for the 30-storey pile of bricks where my apartment is perched. They are wondering what humans could possibly think of next to butcher the beauty of the downtown lakeshore that is, despite everything, Toronto’s best place to live.

Serenading us, the Frederick G. Gardiner Expressway issues its satanic roar, mingling, in season, with groans from the SkyDome as the Blue Jays flub and flounder, and the salsa or sitar, klezmer or calypso, or whatever other music festival might be on stage at the giant amphitheatre down the block.

Across the street from my domicile, a new museum of maritime history is being retrofitted into what used to be a restaurant called the Whaler’s Wharf. Two more condominium towers are going up next door to me (and at least seven others within three blocks). Pile drivers are punching the foundation of a new pier into the lake bed to the west and, to the east, the largest Loblaw’s in the Milky Way is nearing completion, directly across from the sweetly stinking Redpath sugar refinery.

A single street links these civic treasures — plus an abandoned grain elevator, a brand-new primary school, two upscale hotels, the "largest artificial outdoor ice rink in the world," the Toronto Islands ferry docks, a buffet restaurant composed of old railway boxcars, the rehearsal halls of the National Ballet of Canada, a bubble-roofed tennis stadium, the headquarters of the Toronto Star, the hindquarters of a couple of ocean-going freighters and the processing labs of the Charles Abel (no relation) photo-finishing firm. All within a kilometre or two.

The boulevard that links all this natural majesty and concrete monstrosity is called Queen’s Quay, pronounced kwy, kwee, kway, kue and (rarely but properly) key. This is Toronto’s avenue of last resort, a four-lane fairway that runs right along the water from Parliament Street on the east to Stadium Road on the west, where the minor-league Toronto Maple Leafs used to play baseball under the famous (and still surviving) Tip Top Tailors sign.

Queen’s Quay might have become Toronto’s wave-kissed showplace, as historic as Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, as eclectic as Vancouver’s Granville Island or as manicured as the banks of Boston’s Charles River. Instead, a rat pack of governments and developers gnawed morsels of the lakefront for themselves, leaving the area as blotchy and incomplete as ever, but with some great condos rising above the pox.

To dwell in one of these highrises is a privilege that ennobles all of us who own or rent down here. We are a stylish and self-conscious lot, with our fitness rooms and rooftop barbecues, our northward vistas of the great metropolis and our magnificent southern skyline of islands, water and clouds. On summer weekends, we are joined by tens of thousands of local and foreign tourists seeking what we residents take for granted — the rare experience of Toronto as a maritime city. Then everybody else goes home and leaves the lake to me and the fog and the ducks.

As homely as it is, Queen’s Quay remains a haven for cyclists and expert rollerbladers (comme moi). A dedicated recreation trail is smooth enough around Bathurst Street, just north of the Toronto City Centre Airport (where else in urban Canada can you walk from downtown to your flight?). But it dissolves into grit and gravel behind my building and from there onward, you take your chances with the buses, trucks, trolleys and cars.

For nearly two centuries, the neighbourhood was preoccupied with water-borne commerce, with barques and steamers and brigantines hauling cattle and cookstoves and coal. There would have been a night boat to Kingston, Ont., and a liner to Montréal. Then it became a forsaken place, cut off from the city by the elevated freeway, a valueless relic of the days when cities were built on sweat, not software.

Now, in summer, we have kayaking classes, flea markets and a flying trapeze. There are dinner cruises and sailboats, plus the occasions when I have looked down from my window in utter amazement to see the H.M.S. Bounty, the Bluenose II and a nuclear submarine in port on the street where I live.

There are far lovelier neighbourhoods elsewhere in Toronto, livelier bar scenes, more coherent planning, finer houses, tree-clad streets. But they do not have what I have in the mornings, when all is silent save the creaking of the boats in the yacht basins. Then comes the epiphany that no amount of concrete can immure — to awaken and hear the mallards and the black ducks muttering, down on beautiful Queen’s Quay at the quack of dawn.

Allen Abel is a Toronto writer and broadcaster who lives 23 floors up. On a clear day he can see Hamilton.

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