Re: RENOVATE THE EATON CENTRE!
I forgot that I wrote about the Eaton Centre & it's bathrooms in my eye column just before christmas:
STROLL
By Shawn Micallef
A money-removing machine with washrooms
stroll
On a rare family trip downtown in 1982, by the northern exit of the Queen TTC station, I encountered a clown who was handing out flyers. Her makeup was happy but her real face was very sad -- so sad that I started wondering why she had to hand out flyers. I thought about her for years. I think it was my first urban experience that had a hint of unpleasantness attached. That it happened next to the Eaton Centre, which I thought was the most futuristic place on Earth, was an added complication.
Certainly an eight-year-old's vision might be a bit suspect, but the Eaton Centre is an abrupt shift from the wilds of public space to a quasi-public private space. Inside, Toronto's quick urban pace slows to an insufferable suburban waddle. I want to yell "We're still downtown, get moving!" but, at most, I just make loud, equally insufferable sighs. Perhaps that it was modelled after Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II shopping arcade causes people to move at a slow, European speed. Michael Snow's famous hanging geese -- "Flight Stop" -- are entirely Canadian though, and not just for their fowl content. With Snow v. The Eaton Centre, a lawsuit triggered by the red ribbons the mall tied around their necks one Christmas, a landmark intellectual property decision that upheld an artist's moral rights to his or her work was established.
The original plan for the mall would have destroyed Old City Hall and Church of the Holy Trinity. Sanity prevailed and the centre was scaled back, but it could still boast the 18 screens of the now-closed Cineplex, the largest multiplex in the world at the time. Toronto did lose Terauley, Louisa, Downey and Albert -- streets and lanes that live on in our right to cross through the mall 24 hours a day where Albert Street once existed.
Though one of Toronto's top tourist draws, the brochures don't mention its utility as a fine public bathroom. The fifth floor of the Bay has an old-fashioned men's toilet with floor-length urinals (I expect somebody to start shining my shoes when I'm in there) while the Sears née Eaton's store has modern loos on each floor. However, the building really is, as U of T geography professor Ted Ralph says, "a machine designed to take money out of your wallet."
STROLL APPEARS EVERY SECOND WEEK.
