[URBAN NOTE] "John Bentley Mays’ Emerald Toronto"

[rfmcdonald]

Spacing Toronto's Shawn Micallef mourns John Bentley Mays, a Toronto writer whose writings helped Toronto know itself.

When I first moved to Toronto in 2000 I spent a lot of time at the Reference Library, ostensibly looking for a job on their computers and in their newspapers. Job-hunting is no fun so there was lots of motivation to procrastinate, and the library is a good place to do that. One of the things I picked up was John Bentley Mays’ 1994 book Emerald City. The subtitle was “Toronto visited” and this book certainly did that.

Divided into sections with titles like “Thinking Places”, “Shopping”, and “Suburban Idylls”, Mays wandered through the well known and less well known parts of the city, visiting the Port Lands, Garrison Creek, Don Mills, Mississauga and dozens of other places, many of them on the edge of things or peripheral places. He starts off with his first walk through the city when he arrived here in 1969, zigzagging from Deer Park down to Exhibition Place. Then he makes the case why this is a city worthy of a second thought and some deeper contemplation. Then goes on to deeply explore it in the book.

Mays had an eye for the overlooked details and weaved Toronto observations and history with his deep understanding of literature and art. Toronto was placed among other world cities and metropolitan cultural movements, a context that foresaw the kind of city Toronto has continued to grow into over the next two decades. He dedicated the book to his daughter, Erin, calling her a “city kid,” something I had always wanted to be, and perhaps now that I had moved to Toronto, was becoming myself. As a newcomer to this place, Emerald City was providing some of the back-story and identity I needed to become that.