[PHOTO] Looking north at Rosedale station

My morning commute took me someplace lovely and quiet.

[URBAN NOTE] "McMichael Canadian Art Collection bets big on past for 50th anniversary"

The Globe and Mail's James Adams describes the McMichael's celebration of its 50th anniversary.

A 50th anniversary is a big deal for a cultural institution. There’s enough history to celebrate, consider and, in some instances, reconsider. There’s the opportunity to refresh the institution’s profile and evaluate its position within contemporary art discourse. It’s an occasion, too, to strategize, to wonder, “Now what? Sure, we’ve made it this far – but what needs to be done to ensure another half-century?”

The McMichael Canadian Art Collection is in the midst of just such a rumination – an exercise brought into even sharper focus last week when the famous woodsy gallery here, 40 kilometres northwest of Toronto, named British museum professional Ian Dejardin as its new director and chief executive officer. Lest we forget, it was 50 years ago this summer that the McMichael first opened its doors to the public as a Crown corporation of the province of Ontario. The deal that, on paper at least, transformed the McMichael from the fiefdom of founders Robert and Signe McMichael into a public trust had been reached in November, 1965. However, extensive and expensive renovations to the site meant that its roughly 200 artworks weren’t ready for their close-up until July.

Called, initially, the McMichael Conservation Collection of Art, the “collection” referenced in the moniker was unashamedly Canadian. Or at least unashamedly Canuck in its devotion to art of a particular ilk, namely oil sketches, drawings and paintings by the Group of Seven, Emily Carr and their contemporaries and followers, plus work by First Nations artists. Even today, after a half-century of change and turbulence, mention of “the McMichael” in conversation is guaranteed to elicit visions of a log-beamed, stone-studded barrack purveying and defending that old-time Cancon culture, a country club for the art of (mostly) old men.

Unsurprisingly then, the McMichael is choosing to mark its 50th with an all-Canadian showcase weighted heavily toward the familiar flat rectangle (a.k.a. the painting) that’s been the collection’s signature medium. Blessedly, it’s not a tired-but-true “greatest hits” compilation but rather three distinct yet complementary presentations existing in what McMichael chief curator/exhibition overseer Sarah Stanners calls “purposeful contrast.” Taken as a whole, the three – A.Y. Jackson and Tom Thomson: Wounds of War, Colleen Heslin: Needles and Pins and Jack Bush: In Studio – constitute a 100-year haul through the collection’s complicated history and prehistory at the same time as they bring forth the ignored, subterranean or implied potentials and histories of the McMichael project.

[URBAN NOTE] "Bringing Toronto’s Don River back from the dead"

Roy MacGregor's long article in The Globe and Mail about the Don River's history and rehabilitation is well worth reading.

The Don, however, was not always “heavily polluted and laden with scum.” First Nations traders found it a perfect encampment, the waters clean and the game plentiful. There was a time when the prisoners at the nearby jail protested because they were being fed too much fresh salmon from its waters.

Prof. Bonnell, in her research, discovered that the Don Valley was considered a paradise to early beekeepers. In going through the records of the Ontario Beekeeping Association from the late 1800s, she found that the valley was often sown with clover to produce sweeter-tasting honey and that the beekeepers were the first group to raise concerns about the health of the watershed.

“They were interested in environmental change because it was in their economic interest to do so,” she says. “They were among the first to speak out against insecticide poisoning. They spoke out against roadside spraying.”

But by then, of course, the Don River was quickly becoming a lost cause.

York had become Toronto and was spreading rapidly. The river was the perfect location for early grist and timber mills, then tanneries, brick works, chemical factories, oil refineries and the growing city’s increasingly busy port.

It stands today as the most urbanized watershed in Canada, with 1.2 million people living within it and roughly 90 per cent of the catchment area having residential, commercial or industrial development.

“Over the past 200 years,” Prof. Bonnell writes, “almost all of the significant wetlands within the watershed have been drained or filled to support urban development. The six tributaries of the lower river have mostly disappeared, buried by fill or encased within sewage infrastructure.”

The river and valley were once considered prime locations for such structures as the colony’s first parliament buildings, but gradually it became a place for necessary structures that the establishment might prefer a distance away. In a time of fears over cholera and malaria, the hospital was relocated from the city centre to the Don. An asylum followed, then a shelter and reformatory for the poor and vagrants – “idiots,” as well. The Toronto Jail and Industrial Farm (better known as the Don Jail) opened near the asylum.

“Linked to perceptions of the Don Valley as a ‘space for undesirables’ was its reputation as a frontier of sorts,” Prof. Bonnell writes, “a place that harboured and facilitated a certain degree of lawlessness.”