Walking Through Toronto's Laneways with Graeme Parry

This past Sunday I had the pleasure of attending a free walking tour of Toronto's laneways led by Graeme Parry. We met at the corner of Queen and Bathurst and soon the group had amassed to more than 60 people; the largest group for a tour yet, Parry said. The tour took us on a winding route through the graffiti-filled alley just south of Queen West and then north-west up to Dundas and Ossington.

I have always had a bit of a love affair with alleys, jump-started, I think, by an interest in the street art found in Vancouver, a city I explored as a suburban teenager and eventually moved to in 2003. Alleys were always my best bet to get a glimpse of colourful murals and quickly-drawn tags that were too often scrubbed clean from any wall facing a more public area.

Soon, however, I began to appreciate more than just the thriving graffiti in the alleys. There was something else intoxicating about wandering the back-streets of a city. A feeling of being off-the-grid, even though you are very much still on the grid. It's a private space that is still public, quieter and, as this Spacing article points out, less commercial than walking along the street. Alleys can be dirty, filled with garbage, and not well lit, but they also challenge your view of your city, force you to acknowledge the existence of a different part that may not always be displayed or sanctioned.

Vancouver always had a bit of a scrubbed-clean feeling to me -- a toy recently removed from its shrink-wrapped packaging -- and the alleys showed me a different, grittier side to the city. A side much different than the world-class clad-in-glass image Vancouver attempts to portray. Vancouver's alleys, especially in the Downtown Eastside, can be home to sleeping bodies, needles, and drug deals. Once, photographing the graffiti in an alley running parallel to Granville Street I encountered a man smoking crack who identified himself as "Bent Brent" because his arm had been partially severed and reattached at a strange angle. He lifted his t-shirt to show me the scar, then told me to be careful with my camera.

Walking with the tour through Toronto's laneways, we were shown examples of laneway housing, a type of residence being built inside laneways. In cities looking to increase density, it seems a good idea. Vancouver passed a motion allowing laneway housing in 2009 and saw the first opened in 2010. Objections to privacy, access to city utilities, and fire and garbage truck access have become issues and barriers to laneway housing; however, we came across several successful laneway housing projects, including a townhouse complex built on a former parking lot. One, more sleek example of a laneway house, is even featured on page 74 of the Guidebook to Contemporary Architecture in Toronto and can be found pictured here. Laneway architecture needs to be more inventive, using a smaller space ingeniously. There were some strange buildings, but the one pictured below, with its folded-over peak like a flopped Orca fin, caught my eye.

Parry led a casual, but informative tour and managed the large group well. The laneways we travelled through were mostly empty of people, except for a few curious residents who came to check out the strange mass of people taking pictures of their houses. However, there was one traffic jam created at a laneway intersection where we had to negotiate space with several large cars.

At the end of the tour, Parry explained that one of the things he loves about laneways is how you can get lost inside them in your own city. He asked us how many of us had felt disoriented in the laneways only to dump out at an intersection or street we knew. It was this exact experience that I find so compelling about laneways and one of the reasons why I walked them so much in Vancouver. It seemed a way to renew my vision of the city, wipe away the fog that builds up when you live in a place too long and allow yourself to be surprised again.

all photos taken by me on September 5, 2010 on walking tour route.

City as Conversational Hardware

Yesterday, when in the alley taking out the trash at work, I noticed that our dumpster had been spray-painted with the words: I love u. I wondered who this was for. Was it for a certain person who the painter was hoping would see? Was it a general message to anyone who walked by? Was it written ironically on the side of a dumpster as a form of protest against garbage? Perhaps a declaration of undying love for Smithrite?



Further down from my work, on a sign advertising a public garden, there is a Jim Pattison sticker and someone has used Sharpie to scribble out his name and then write "sucks". What was the purpose of the Jim Pattison sticker in the first place? Was it put there, again ironically, because Jim Pattison owns so much space in Vancouver, but doesn't own the public garden? And who scribbled it out and wrote sucks? Was it the same person, or someone different that came along and decided to join in on the conversation.


It's these kind of questions that make graffiti, tagging, bombing, stickers, or the inside of bathroom stall doors so interesting. These are pieces of city hardware--walls, doors, alleys, dumpsters--that are being used to open a kind of public discourse, a conversation which anyone with a Sharpie marker can join in with. City's treat graffiti as visual garbage to be painted over and swept away. But really it's the most democratic form of conversation there is, combining the anonymity of the internet with the wide audience of a public podium.


Imagine our city like a metaphorical message board where you can leave messages for strangers who can then respond back to you. We have a digital version of this on the web, but it's impersonal compared to stumbling upon "Good Bye" painted on the side of a discarded mattress in an alleyway. This mattress has a story to tell. Was the writer saying goodbye to the mattress? To the person that used to sleep on the mattress? Or is the mattress saying goodbye to me?

Street artists, like Banksy, have been using, abusing, and reassigning public property as message boards for quite some time, making political and social statements. But what if we opened this up to everyone? What if we did away with the metaphorical message board of alleyway writing and quickly scrawled fuck yous on bus shelters, and set up--somewhere in the city--an actual message board.

No doubt such a message board would garner crude and offensive material, but it would also, as the dumpster with I Love U scrawled on it shows, collect other kinds of conversation. But maybe taking these messages out of alleys and billboards and bus shelters and collecting them all on a sanctioned wall would miss the whole idea behind them, kill the conversation before it even starts. There is something strangely engrossing about reading an intricate web of arrowed sentences on the back of a public washroom stall that you might lose exposing it on a public wall. Perhaps, oddly, these conversations are meant to be private in public, reaching out to other city dwellers from the safe anonymity of a dark alley or locked stall door.

Meanwhile, somewhere in a dump, that mattress still lies, shouting its mournful Goodbye to any passing birds that happen to fly over.