City planning

Have you ever noticed that the most livable neighborhoods in any city are those that were developed before the invention of the "urban planning" profession?

Take my old 'hood in Guelph, "The Ward."

By the time my clan got there in the '50s it was pretty much all immigrants. A smattering of Germans and Greeks and Ukrainians, but for the most part, Italian.

The quality of life was incomparable. Everybody walked everywhere. Everybody had a garden. Everybody who wanted to work had a job. In a lot of cases, if you lived in The Ward you could walk to your job at Fiberglass or Omark or Malleable Iron, or Woods or Harding Carpets.

You'd find 30 by 80 foot lots with a 900 square foot bungalow planted in the middle that still had room for dozens of tomato and pepper plants and grape vines galore. The gardens would take up the front yard, the side yard, and the back yard.

Anybody with enough get up and go to get up and go to work could afford one of those plots on a factory wage. There was absolutely zero "urban planning" involved in the evolution of that neighborhood.

Contrast that to the lifestyle that the children, grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren of those immigrants enjoy in Toronto today, a city that never tires of broadcasting the savvy of its urban planners, who have made downtown Toronto a wonderful example of a "livable city."

They've moved on to Toronto for better opportunities. Education, jobs, and so on. Once they've got the education and the job they stay for the "action."

After all, downtown TO is where the action is!

Indeed!

All the cool shit happens in Toronto!

You probably won't be able to afford 900 feet anymore; that's a million bucks easy in a downtown highrise. So settle for half that.

And of course, that magnificent garden your Noni had on that 30 by 80 foot lot in Guelph is out of the question. If you have the extravagant good fortune to own a balcony, you'll settle for maybe two each of peppers and tomato plants. Forget the grapes.

But you're where the action is!

You are but a mere walk or a very short transit ride from the ACC or Rogers Centre, where you can go to see the corporate Leafs or Jays play ball!

You've got dozens of chain restaurants to choose from; you know the ones... everything comes from head office flash frozen and your chef heats it up. At $150 for two, with wine and tip!

And you're just a jaunt from half a dozen corporate music and arts venues where you can, for a pretty penny, view the latest avante-garde artsy spectacle that the corporate media has been raving about!

What's not to love about life in downtown Toronto?

Well, for one thing, anybody who remembers the rhythms of an authentic neighborhood, like The Ward, for example, is going to find it sterile in the extreme. Corporate condo towers, corporate dining, corporate sports and entertainment...

For this you want to mortgage your life?

I think not.

But... it's too late to go home to The Ward.

The urban planners have done f@cked it good. There's condo towers galore in downtown Guelph now, and they've been seeping into The Ward for at least twenty years. The corporate developers have been marketing them to folks who commute to Toronto. After all, that half million dollar condo in Guelph would cost you a million and a half or more at the other end of that GO Train ride.

But if you follow the market real close, you might still get that 900 foot bungalow on a 30 by 80 lot. True, it might run you half a million... but it would be two or three or four millions in downtown Toronto.

Obviously, no factory hands are moving to The Ward today.


But our "urban planners" are doing a great job, aren't they?

The shoemaker's children

If I had to do it over again, one of the career paths I would seriously consider would be shoemaker.

Shoemaker? Get the f@ck outta here you say...

Let me explain.

I never actually made any career decisions. I only got into welding because the welders at the GE plant where I was working at eighteen years of age made a couple of bucks an hour more than the rest of us. Seemed like an easy enough gig if you had basic hand-eye coordination and could read a blueprint. The fact that you'd be spending your working day inhaling toxic fumes wasn't discussed at the time. Most of my work-mates from that era are either dead or dragging around oxygen bottles wherever they go.

Becoming a shoemaker, on the other hand, would have entailed a wage reduction of a couple of dollars per hour. What kind of moron would you have to be to buy into that?

At the time, there was still a bit of shoemaking culture alive in the general area. Kitchener, a mere ten miles away, hosted the plant where Kodiak work-boots were built. Kodiaks had major brand recognition back in the day. They were hugely popular even among folks who'd never done a lick of work in their life. They looked great at the pub, and they were supremely comfortable. Their brand eclipsed Doc Martens right up until the invention of the Mohawk haircut.

My dear daddy, a German DP from a refugee camp in Denmark, almost invested in a shoe company in Guelph. He'd been hoarding his money from his job at Omark. He quit there shortly after getting his commemorative ten year wristwatch. Back in the day you got a Rolex for working in the factory for ten years.

He worked in that little shoe company for a few weeks and decided against making an investment. He felt the business was changing. More and more shoes were coming in from cheap foreign producers. He decided to go into real estate instead.

While he was busy making career decisions, another European DP was busy revolutionising the global shoe business. Thomas Bata was becoming "shoemaker to the world." That meant driving traditional shoemakers the world over out of business with a tsunami of mass-produced crap.

Meanwhile, an "old stock" Canadian lad in Preston quit high school to take a job at Weston's Bread. He started off driving a bread truck door to door in what is now known as Cambridge, Ontario. He rose through the ranks. By the time I got to know him, as the uncle of my wife at the time, he was a senior VP at Weston's. We had many fine times at his lovely home in Oakville. He was Galen Weston's faithful sidekick for many years, and it was universally assumed that he was destined to be the next CEO of Weston's.

Alas, a guy half his age with an MBA got that job instead. Forty years of ass-kissing went down the drain overnight.

So let me draw these disparate strands together. I was nosing through my weekend Globe today, and I came across an interview by Jeanne Beker with Alex Weston. Alex married Galen Weston Jr., son of Galen. His family has a net worth estimated by the folks who concern themselves with this stuff, as somewhere north of ten billions.

Alex is the granddaughter of Thomas Bata. Family net worth? Somewhere north of four billions.

So here is the question Jeanne Beker had for Weston:

You and your husband, Galen Weston Jr., have two children, aged six and seven. How are you juggling having a young family, working and keeping it all together?

Seriously?

I don't give a shit about how the children and grandchildren of billionaires "keep it all together." I'm sure they make out OK.

What I would like to know is how single mothers working two jobs at our niggardly minimum wage are keeping it all together.

Can you help me with that, Jeanne?


But back to that shoemaker thing. I had no idea when I was making or not making career decisions fifty years ago that the world would soon be awash with billionaires and the children of billionaires and their heirs who think nothing of spending five grand on a pair of bespoke shoes.

Guess I missed the boat on that one.