An Urban Sensory Walk
When we experience our environment, we tend to rely mostly on our visual sense, but our other senses are always engaged, whether we realize it or not. Last spring, I took a sensory walk under the guidance of Jonathan Silver. On our tour, we visited a variety of spaces that had a special appeal to non-visual senses. By paying particular attention to these senses, we were able to experience these environments, and our city, in a unique way.
Our tour begins at a small amphitheatre tucked into the corner of Queen and Dufferin Streets in west-end Toronto. There are eight participants, including Jonathan and me. Two more join us later.
Most amphitheatres are acoustically sophisticated, but since the seating in this one is oriented toward a busy street, it doesn’t work well as a theatre. What you hear, loudly and clearly, is traffic noise. As a place for intimate discussions amid the din of traffic, it probably works fine. Meanwhile, it was sometimes hard to hear our leader speaking.
A light rain starts to fall and the aroma of dust and ozone masks the smell of traffic. Jonathan tells us that we will be visiting many kinds of spaces, but we should notice that quiet spaces in cities like ours attract people because they feel comfortable and unstressed. Sensory overload leads to loss of attention and fatigue. He suggests that we try to notice the different feelings we get from different spaces and also to notice the points where transitions occur.
Walking a short block south on Dufferin street, we turn west onto a laneway, poetically named Milky Way. It is quiet here. We stop next to a wall decorated with colourful graffiti. The rain continues but Jonathan doesn’t use rainwear or an umbrella. I see his point: if we’re going to enjoy the full sensory experience, we shouldn’t shield ourselves from parts of it. Jonathan tells us that people mostly don’t consider that our environment is a unified experience of all the senses.
Continuing west, our next stop is Gwynne Avenue. The difference in feeling between Gwynne Avenue and Queen Street, only a block away, is remarkable. The trees crowding and shading the roadway are fragrant and cool. There’s no traffic.
Another short block south takes us to a narrow footpath, squeezed between a house and a garage on the east side of the street. Walking single-file along this short path, we are suddenly, unexpectedly transported to another time and place. It’s hard to take it in. Victorian-era houses, some festooned with flags, huddle around a small, quiet, brick-paved square, shaded with broad-leafed trees, and illuminated by gas lamps that are burning, even in midday. This is Melbourne Place and it doesn’t feel like we’re in Toronto anymore.
For the past 10 years, I’ve worked in an office located not quite 500 metres from this very spot. Not only did I not know that this place existed; I hadn’t even imagined that a place like this could exist in the city that I’ve lived in all my life. Since that day, I’ve visited this urban anomaly a few times, and have discovered other tiny enclaves in the city that have a similar feel. It’s best if everyone doesn’t know about these places, but how can we exist without them?
Emerging from Melbourne Place, we travel east on Melbourne Avenue, then south on Dufferin, to its intersection with King Street. This is a fairly major intersection in the city, two lanes of traffic and streetcar tracks run in all four directions. It is quite noisy here, even on a Saturday – not a comfortable gathering space. We decide not to linger.
East on King Street, south on Mowat Avenue, and we enter a small laneway on the east side of the street, beside a building called The Carpet Factory, which it once was, but is now home to fashionable commercial lofts. Liberty Village, where we now are, is a rapidly developing residential and commercial precinct that is rich with history and historic architecture, having once been a busy industrial district, as well as the location of two prisons and an army garrison.
True to its industrial heritage, Liberty Village is a heavily textured neighbourhood: weathered brick warehouses, smokestacks, railroad tracks, coarse brick and stone paving all add a strong tactile sense. We stop in a narrow railway passage. The texture of ancient red brick surrounds us, on walls and pavement. The old railway tracks are intact, although no longer in use; a reminder of the area’s history.
We follow the railway tracks south to Liberty Street and turn east again to Hanna Avenue, where we arrive at an indoor arcade. You might be tempted to call it a mall, but it has clearly been modelled after the glass-roofed shopping arcades popular in the 18th- and 19th-century European cities. It’s a pale imitation of a European arcade. There is almost no colour and little pedestrian activity, so it is quieter and less animated than it should be. Even the coffee shop that ought to be pumping out strong aromas is under-performing. The space smells of nothing at all. The arcade is a sensory disappointment.
Backtracking by a block, we go south on Atlantic Avenue to where it terminates at the inter-city railway tracks and the elevated Gardner Expressway beyond. Much has been written and discussed about the 50-year-old urban highway, most of it unflattering. It’s unsightly, disruptive of pedestrian traffic flow, hides the lake from the city, unprofitably occupies valuable real estate and, most critically these days, it celebrates the use of the car. Without entering into this debate, Jonathan mentions another problem: in an area of the city that is otherwise scenic and quiet, it produces a steady stream of noise, pollution and, most noticeable today, noxious smells.
An underpass leads us beneath the tracks and the expressway, southward to the Canadian National Exhibition grounds. As a sidebar regarding this narrow, low-ceilinged underpass, I have used it many times on my way to and from soccer games at BMO field. It is invariably crowded, noisy and smelly. Today, it is quite different: empty, quiet and unexpectedly pleasant-smelling.
And speaking of smells, our next stop is slightly to the east and south, at a building identified as the Ricoh Centre today, but to Torontonians of a certain age, it will always be the Horse Palace. Inside the building, there is an earth-floored show ring, where a rider and a trainer are taking a horse through its paces. Surrounding the ring are aisles of stables, which add the pungent smell of dirt, straw and horse urine. Most city-dwellers would find this highly objectionable, but for some of us, this is the smell of history. Not so long ago – surprisingly recently – horse-drawn carts delivering ice, coal, milk, or bread mingled with automobiles on the streets of this very city. Objectionable, not really; nostalgic, definitely.
We’re almost at our destination now. As we head south past the EnerCare Centre toward Lake Ontario, we begin to experience the thermal effects of steady onshore breezes. On a hot summer day, they help make the city livable, provided you can get close enough to the lake to experience them. On a cool winter day, the effect is a lot less welcome.
Finally, walking south to Princes’ Blvd, east to Strachan Avenue, we head south to the lakeshore, where we stop on a concrete “boardwalk” and lean on a metal railing. The breeze is still blowing and the smell it carries is fresh and calming. My mind wanders back to days of my childhood, when our family would sometimes take the ferry to Centre Island. The smell I remember from those days is a mix of diesel fuel and dead fish – unpleasant if you dwell on it, but since we were going to a picnic on The Island, it was one of the happiest smells on earth. And typical of olfactory memories, for me, it still is.
That was where the tour ended. We said our goodbyes and walked back to our cars or to the streetcar that would take us home. Afterwards, the lessons began to sink in: if we stop to absorb the many sensory events of our cities, we can learn a lot about cities, ourselves, our collective history and about the act of being, in this visual, tactile, aural, aromatic and flavourful world.