In his book Stroll, Shawn Micallef tackles Toronto street by street

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Shawn Micallef stands at the foot of University Avenue, looking north, his head craned towards the sky. He is taking in the (rather) new RBC Centre, the shimmering 43-storey office tower completed last summer, rising to the west of the traffic island where he’s standing.

“I haven’t seen that building from here,” he says. “It’s really glassy.”

For Micallef, every walk about the city gives the 36-year-old writer an opportunity to see new sights, find new secrets and uncover new angles and ways to look at Toronto. And walk he does. For the past six years, Micallef has penned his column, Psychogeography (formerly Stroll) for Eye Weekly, and in the process has become Toronto’s unofficial tour guide, the flâneur of Hogtown. He revisits and expands his popular columns in Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto, just published by Coach House Books ($24.95).

Looking quite dapper in short pants, a low V-neck white T, blazer and chunky black-frame glasses, and slightly jet-lagged from a 10-day trip to England, Micallef soldiers on, northwards up what he calls Toronto’s “grandest street,” though he admits “nobody ever talks about it.”

It’s obvious why: dull buildings and bland fast-foot franchise outlets pepper this end of the avenue, a lone residential building the only thing keeping people here after work.

“At night there’s nothing,” he says. “It’s a ghost town.”

That may soon change. Micallef stops at the construction site of the Shangri-La condominiums, on the west side of the street between Adelaide and Richmond. This will soon add 66 storeys to the strip; coupled with the Trump Tower on Bay Street, and the condos going up all over nearby clubland, “it’s becoming a 24-hour neighbourhood rather than 8 to 6,” he explains.

Further on, University widens into a grand boulevard, what Micallef dubs “pageantry scale,” with parkettes dividing the north- and southbound traffic. The intersection at Queen Street is particularly impressive: Stately Osgoode Hall occupies the northeast corner, the massive South African War Memorial divides the street in two, and on the southeast corner one finds the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, its glass façade allowing pedestrians to glimpse inside.

“When it’s full of people, it’s magnificent,” Micallef says. “It’s like a doll house.” He continues north, walking up the parkettes, past the homeless sleeping on benches and people enjoying their lunch breaks in the sun.

“This is the most fortified building in Toronto,” Micallef says, passing by the American Embassy on the street’s west side. Then, just south of Dundas, he stops to look at the soon-to-be-demolished Royal Canadian Military Institute, which will make way for a condo.

“People don’t have an attachment to it,” he says in reference to the lack of outcry surrounding its demise. “And there’s cannons in front. That’s intimidating.”

North of Dundas, the avenue becomes “a virtual canyon on sickness, recovery and death,” as Micallef writes in Stroll. Hospitals rise up on both sides of the street. He points out the waterfall decals on the old 1935 Art Deco-style Hydro Building, one of his favourites in the city, which has since been consumed by Princess Margaret Hospital; hydro vacated the property in the 1970s and moved next door, to the horseshoe-shaped building on the southwest corner of College Street.

Micallef walks across traffic to Queen’s Park (“It’s a weird place, Queen’s Park — you can’t get to it, as a pedestrian, very easily”) where he came one day in 2000 to drop off a résumé but ended up being caught in a “riot” between the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and police.

“There were bricks flying over my head … I saw a brick hit a cop in the head,” he recalls. “I’d never seen such spectacle, as horrible as it was.”

He walks east, around to the large park at the back, and finds a seat at a picnic table in the shade.

“Stroll is a book about Toronto, set geographically in Toronto, [but] it can be seen as a book about Canadian urbanism,” Micallef explains. “I’d like the second book to be much more explicitly about that. Canadian cities, on the whole, from places like Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Halifax, down to Saskatoon, Calgary, Winnipeg — the downtowns still have people that live around it. Our inner cities were never evacuated in the ’60s and ’70s the way so many American cities were. So there’s a particular way of Canadians doing urbanism that seems to work, and I think that has value and should be explored.”

In the meantime, he’s continuing his work with Spacing magazine, where he’s senior editor, Yonge Street magazine, where he’s managing editor, and Eye Weekly, where he’ll continue to write his columns “for the foreseeable future.” He admits he’s already thinking about the sequel, exploring parts of the city not included in the book.

“I feel a little guilty that there’s these huge areas of the city I didn’t touch,” he says. “Toronto is so big.”

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