Toronto: "Shabby" or "Vibrant"?

Winter just melted, I think at this time of the year everything looks shabby. Rains such as the ones today will definitely clean things up a bit, that's what spring is for!

Wait until June and we'll see who's shabby!

I still love my TDOT -- sure it can be a bit cleaner, but really it's not bad at all when you compare to other cities around North America. We do a decent enough job, keeping it clean while still maintaining a lot of character.

Pastor: Do You Take Toronto To Be Your Loyal City, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health

Alex Delarge: I do, but she has to look good for me sometimes..she cant always be letting herself gooo..*yikes*

haha

Toronto is a bit shabby, but a good coat of green would clean things up. Spring isn't going to do it by itself, we need more sidewalks and more trees in the core, and everywhere transit is available.

There are no trees or snowbanks obscuring all the ghastly parking lots.

Royal york is the worst..
The station bellow in the waiting area has huge pubbles and no signs to caution people?
I work as a liability analyst at an insurance company and i know that there is alot of exposure for injury claims

I just got back from a drive out to East Hamilton. I feel much, much better about t.o. now.

The is a vibrancy to the city; always has been.
The city isn't exactly shabby; I say it's more
careworn than anything else.

That's what the 20-minute clean-up is all about.

As a New Yorker, I vote for "shabby" to describe Toronto's average streetscape. Even the best parts of town have real litter and landscape problems. The vibrancy is indeed awesome, but it just doesn't make up for the lack of care.

As an ideal state I would be perfectly fine with shabby but vibrant retail/architecture as long as the landscaping/streets were kept clean and sparkling.

Come on, *everybody's* seedier than Singapore!

Here's a question. Why leafy deciduous trees everywhere? Do urban planners forget that they only look good half of the year?

Let's start planting some conifers around the city when time comes for replanting. A few well placed ones will help fill the holes created when the leafy trees lose their leaves.

And even leafy trees don't look that bad without their leaves if they are given a chance to grow. Of course planters are going to look bare when the trees are frail and thin.

Get rid of the choking cement planters!

We are shabby. And vibrant. In fact there are some very personable and entertaining street people that seem to me to be embodiments of the city. That's so strange, never thought of it that way before. We're shabby and vibrant in a way that a puppy is cute but you know he's going to slobber all over you, which is disgusting. But then you pet him anyway.
Toronto has a real grungy, filthy, dusty, trash-blown, dead tree kind of honesty to it. Like the way horrible scars are beautiful.
I once said to someone while back packing in Europe: Toronto is like family, you know it well enough to know it's really f*cked up, but you love it cause it's yours.
And like apetimberlake said, just take a drive to any town south of Algonquin and you'll come screaming back to downtown TO with a new-found appreciation.

I'll betcha that plenty of supposedly less-shabby burgs have abandoned/boarded-up edifices which merit "Restore me!" graffiti. And the simple existence of such graffiti is a backhanded sign of urban health, in its way.

I once had a Japanese student tell me that all of New York looked like the worst neighborhood in Osaka, so these standards are obviously relative.

A bigger concern for me in Toronto than shabbiness is the air quality. Shabbiness doesn't affect anyone's health, and it plays a big part in making the city seem gray and filthy.

Two observers from the URBANFORUM.CA chime in saying,

" No money, no pride, a brain-dead hipster intelligentsia that views the shabby and decrepit as "having character" and celebrates the mediocre, fears and sneers at excellence, restraint and discipine, and encourages sloth, indifference and contempt of the public realm in the form of squalor ("grit", as in we're not Coburg etc.), vandalism ("street art") and endless, mindless spam-like postering ("reclaiming public space"), and there you are. Shabby is as shabby does. We get what we deserve, really. "

and

" I think Toronto's shabbiness speaks to the twin Canadian problems of being a) cheap, and, b) a general contempt toward aesthetic considerations as a 'frill'. "

Warmflash, those comments are spot on.

This city is vibrant, but shabby. And not shabby in a NYC way -- shabby as in cheaply constructed, like nobody here really gives a damn about quality or longevity.

Example of a recent offender? That urban beach nonsense at the waterfront. A cheap stunt done for magazine appeal. All the chairs were busted within a month.

Walking down Millionaires Mile last summer, I noticed most of the trees in those brutal cement planters were dead. It was liking through a dead forest.

We need more police officers to fine people for litering instead of for making a right turn at 5:59 pm. I know most of you here are "very clean" but the garbage we see is ultimately thrown out by Torontonians, and so it is fair for us to suffer for it... though we can always blane it on the 905-ers.

Good point about cheaply-constructed Patrick. Another example is BMO Field. When you have the city get together with equally tight fisted MLSE we get a zero character, multi-purpose Ikea model of a stadium.

Yup, you guys absolutely nailed it. Historically, Canada has not had the funds nor inclination to spend them on anything public, civic or visible. We've never been truly rich either individually or collectively and there is an extremely weak culture of philanthropy and civic funding relative to the States. Pick any category -- universities, stadiums, train stations, post offices, street landscaping, parks, office towers, whatever -- and I'll give you five US examples that blow them away in terms of dollars spent and result achieved. If everything is kept shiny and new, you can always say "Hey, it's not as grand but we keep things running smooth and functioning perfectly. Wouldn't you rather have modest Union instead of lovely but abandoned Michigan Central? Or the SRT over Houston's underused light rail that runs through fountains?" But once you let it go, there is no meaty grandeur to rest on and the resulting downward slide is quick.

If I was a super rich philanthropist myself, I might give everyone in Toronto a plane ticket to visit an American or European city to see where the bar really stands these days. With the blinders ripped off their eyes and their heads full of ideas, the citizenry might then be able to elect leaders who could make some real improvements.

PS - Concrete planters are death sentences for trees by the way -- no landscape architect in their right mind has used them in 20 years. Why they persist in Toronto is a strange mystery.

How is Toronto's Union Station "inferior" to Detroit's abandoned Michigan Central?

A friend came up to visit me from NYC last autumn. He'd been here before in 1998. Anyhow, after three days here he commented " What happened to Toronto? It looks so shabby. Like parts of Brookyln. Isn't this suppose to be the New York of Canada? "

I told him all I knew. Which was this. Toronto had been abandoned by everyone. Including Torontonians.

You can visit many cities in the US where there's an area they chose to make touristy, where every facade has been restored, the landscaping is perfect, and it's clean like Switzerland, but in the end it's often boring. But we need higher standards from the city, and greater efforts towards eliminating mass commercial postering and graffiti.

The overhead wires and wooden poles are symbols of our city's aesthetic failure.

Every opportunity to do something well is thwarted by the lazy, the incompetent, the cheap and, worst of all, a public too complacent to raise a stink about it. Click link above for additional proof.

Errr... link below. My bad.

I actually like the shabbiness, although the fact that I grew up in downtown Toronto might have an influence there. As a bohemian, I like the indie-grunge that practically breeds individuality. (No plastics allowed.) You don't have to be a hippie to dislike gentrification, like me. It reminds me of New York's East Village before the gentrification came in and it bumped itself up on the class scale.

I don't know about you, but in my opinion, Toronto's shabby and vibrant all in one package. And as for the litter content, the 20-minute clean up was essentially effective in cleaning some of that up, but we all know we can't BAN garbage (the same way banning certain drugs is ineffective).