[URBAN NOTE] "How Toronto learned to love the patio"

[rfmcdonald]

Spacing Toronto's Chris Bateman notes how Toronto ended up embracing the summertime patio. Immigrants and hippies, naturally, started it.

For all the time Torontonians will spend sipping lager and pinot on patios this summer, it would be easy to conclude that the people of this city have always embraced eating and drinking al fresco. Not so. It wasn’t until the 1960s and Yorkville’s counter-cultural era that prudish diners were finally coaxed outdoors en masse.

In the 1920s, outdoor restaurant seating was an impossibly exotic concept confined to the evocative text of vacation adverts. Canadian Pacific’s “Parasol Cruise” to the West Indies promised “black boys diving for pennies” and “Paris-like boulevards [lined with] cool sidewalk cafes.”

The St. Moritz On-The-Park—”New York’s only truly continental cafe—opened its own European-style outdoor seating area in the 1950s, followed by numerous others, prompting the writers of the Globe and Mail‘s “over the teacups” society column to wonder why no-one has tried a similar concept in Toronto. “With all Toronto’s new bohemian eating places, there’s nary a sidewalk cafe in the lot. Wonder why not?”

The Globe‘s assertion that there were no outdoor cafes in Toronto wasn’t entirely correct. Ice cream and milk shake stands offered patrons outdoor seating (even during the winter) as far back as the 1920s, and there are pictures of bundled up men hunching over warm cups of coffee during the frigid winter in the city archives.