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rfmcdonaldShawn Micallef's Curbed article looks at the import of Jane Jacobs locally.
The Eaton Centre is one of Toronto’s most visited attractions, a downtown mall that runs the length of a superblock between two subway stations. The massive, glass-vaulted space is modeled after the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, but instead of a neo-classical aesthetic, the massive building was space shuttle cool when it was plunked down into the urban fabric in 1977. An ongoing renovation has meant ever-present construction material, covered in a slick marketing campaign called #ToTheCity, with pictures of urbanites doing urban things like riding bikes and standing on street corners, with inspirational, urban-minded quotes scattered throughout. For many months, on what will be the Canadian Nordstrom flagship store, was a Jane Jacobs quote: "Cities can provide something for everybody when they are created by everybody."
Jacobs’s quote was next to one from hometown hero Drake, "When I think of myself, I think of Toronto." Neither the Drake nor the Jacobs quote required context or an explanation of either source's pedigree. It’s unlikely a retail management company anywhere else in North America would assume that Jacobs wouldn’t require a line of biography. But Jacobs is the patron saint of urban-minded Toronto, a benevolent specter watching the evolution of the city she called home for the second half of her life.
Jane Jacobs’s name appearing in Toronto is not unique nor a surprise, but finding it at the mall defies local conventional wisdom. The mall? Ewww. Urbanista Toronto is rife with the sentiment that the Eaton Centre is a place to be avoided at all costs. Inauthentic, crass, and boorish, it’s for people who’ve not yet been enlightened to a better urban way of life, one of cozy neighborhood strips with cafes and cupcake stores. Conventional urban wisdom here might suggest a much more appropriate place for a Jane Jacobs quote is a few kilometers west at a building well known in arts and culture circles in Toronto: 401 Richmond. A massive former factory that produced lithography on tinware products, its various sections were built between 1899 and 1923, but today it’s filled with arts organizations, galleries, studios, magazine offices, artist unions, designers, podcasters, and even one fellow who still fashions pieces of guerrilla art out of copper and other bits of metal and attaches them to utility poles around the city. Jane Jacobs quotes and pictures are here, too, part of an exhibition on her life and work that has been permanently installed inside, but her connection to this building is even deeper.
In fact, 401, which the Zeidler family purchased in 1994, is an illustration of Jacobs’s arguments about urbanism and a piece of her legacy in Toronto. Eberhard Zeidler, the patriarch, was the architect who designed the Eaton Centre. When the Zeidlers purchased 401, the old steampunk neighborhood around it, once the heart of Toronto’s schmatte trade, was dead. "There was one restaurant in the area, just a greasy spoon. Now there has to be like 20 or 30 in that section there," says Margie Zeidler, Eberhard’s daughter and the driving force behind what would become the vital building beloved by so much of Toronto today. Today that 1994 landscape is unimaginable and the building is at the heart of one of the most intense areas of development in North America, with condo towers sprouting where there were once acres of parking lots and buildings left fallow after deindustrialization.
