1

Suburbia comes and goes as a topic of conversation among people who care about cities. Only a couple of years ago, popular magazines were full of it. New books about the burbs were thick on bookshop shelves. At least since 9/11, however, suburbia seems to have been firmly pushed to the back-burner. That's understandable. After all, people have many very serious things to think about (terrorism, war, AIDS, child poverty), and several others that are surely more urgent (like one's own children) than the old discussion about sprawl, malls and suburban alienation.

But perhaps because I didn't grow up in them, and am old enough to remember a time when they didn't exist, at least where I lived, the suburbs have long held a certain exotic interest for me. The world of commuting, colour-coordinated toilet seats, car culture and big-box stores is foreign--or was, until early September. That's when I moved my computer, clothes and a few books from Toronto to Oakville, and began my residency at the Oakville Galleries' lakeshore location, called Gairloch Gardens.

My introduction to suburbia had taken place a half-century before.

I recall that autumn day in 1950 as sunny and hot. My big sister and her husband had invited me to come out to the edge of Shreveport, a staid old city in north-western Louisiana, for a look at their new suburban house.

Waiting for Erin and Frank to pick me up, I could not sit still. The very idea of a "new house" was deliciously thrilling, because I had never seen one. "House," to my country kid's mind, meant something antique-the family home on Dad's cotton plantation, for instance, which had been standing a century before I was born in it. Or it meant my grandparents' ample, shadowy Edwardian homestead, with its dark wood paneling and ancient, overstuffed everything.

But Erin and Frank's place wasn't merely a new house. It was a new suburban house. I'd seen magazine photos of prim little bungalows on razored lawns, but I knew what "suburban" meant only at a distance-wonderfully, enchantingly /Modern/. Whatever suburbia turned out to be in fact, it promised not to be the country I knew, which was an unpeopled greenness penetrated by rutted, twisting roads. And it wasn't going to be the town, with its tall buildings and many large houses from another century. It was going to be paradise-I was fairly sure of that, because Erin and Frank always talked about it that way.

And when we arrived at the expanse of flat, former farmland where the house stood, I discovered they were right.

The bowl of blue sky arched over the perfectly treeless landscape, its glorious curve falling to the horizon where the newly paved street swung widely round, and disappeared. In that streamlined world, the long cement curb abutted a strip of bright green grass, and next came a strip of grey sidewalk, then a broad ribbon of clipped, bright green lawn, and finally the Ranchstyle façades, each one almost identical.

The interior of Erin and Frank's house beautifully mirrored the geometric perfection of its setting. The compact array of kitchen appliances gleamed like the flight deck of Buck Rogers' space ship, the living-room walls were smooth, hard and white-not a scrap, sag or gluey scent of wallpaper anywhere. And-I remember this with peculiar vividness--the shiny wood flooring did not creak, because laid firmly on the concrete foundation slab.

The planks in my grandparents' old house always creaked. But in this magical zone of new houses, there were no grouchy floors, no dismal shadows cast by tall trees, no roadside dirt shoulders that turned to red mud after a rain. Only a radiant dream of green lawns without trees, with many bright white walls, and a plate-glass picture window opening toward the peaceful parallels of lawn, sidewalk, street. Best of all, there was a place my sister called "the Pak-A-Sak"-the first modern convenience store I had ever seen-only a brief car ride away.

Through pictures, I had known places like my sister's neighbourhood were sprouting up everywhere. The illustrated magazines were full of advertisements. For sale: little boxy houses lined up in tidy rows, and electric marvels displayed in neat domestic settings shiny with chrome and plastic--and very unlike my grandmother's hot old kitchen or fusty dining room. Happy young wives in starched white aprons and spike heels were operating the appliances. I recognized my sister's new world from the magazines, and knew it was real. .

Being just nine, I did not know that some grownup critics believed post-war mass suburbia to be a betrayal of an older, more morally serious ideal of high-density living. Such folk were loudly denouncing the quick-build commercial developments of the 1940s and early 1950s as a sterile, anti-social hell in the making-a haven of "robotic conformity," "the apotheosis of suburban malaise," in the words of one recent summarizer of the gripes. In 1950, had I known such critics as Lewis Mumford existed, I would surely have thought him crazy for slandering suburbia as a "multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly at uniform distances, in a treeless communal waste," with brain-dead inhabitants "conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mould."

 

2

While it has its share of sprawl and malls, Oakville, of course, is hardly the "pure" suburbia so despised by critics in the early post-war years.

The northern-most section, between the toll-road 407 and Highway 5, is slated for future development, but is presently rural. The most recently built-up part of town, south of Highway 5 down to the Queen Elizabeth Way, dates back only a few decades--and knows it. "I live on the wrong side of the QEW," said Doreen Blake, former owner of Oakville's only taxi service. "When I was growing up, the town was on the lake. Then when I was a teenager, my ex used to race stock cars at an airstrip on the North Service Road. That's what brought us to the wrong side of the QEW. Downtown is more the lifestyle I'd like to have. You would not expect any rowdiness. You would expect clean-cut businessmen in suits."

The southern tier of the town, the lakeshore below the Queen Elizabeth Way--what Ms. Blake would call the "right" side of the QEW--is in fact a mixed bag. West of Sixteen Mile Creek, a stark dividing line in Oakville's geographical vision of itself, lies the working-class district that sprang up after the Second World War, and especially after a huge Ford plant opened nearby in 1953. There one finds Kerr Street, the least self-conscious and toney thoroughfare in Oakville, and attractive for that reason alone.
The richest people in Oakville--commuters to Toronto, for the most part, who give the town its special air of anxious nouveau-riche conservatism--live east of the Creek, as close as possible to the shoreline Lake Ontario. As in Rio de Janeiro, but not Toronto, proximity to the water is an almost infallible guide to relative affluence. The very rich live closest to the shoreline, the less rich a little inland, and so on, up to the Queen Elizabeth Way, which is, to old Oakvillians, what the lagoon is to old Venetians I know: the boundary between civilization and absolute nothingness.

Toronto quickly abandoned the fine little Georgian town plan created by Col. John Graves Simcoe in the early 1790s. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, the people who counted in the city had moved west, and especially north, in the direction of present-day Rosedale, leaving the original townsite to become a zone of warehouses and other port facilities and factories. Oakville, in contrast, never forsook the splendid grid that its founder, William Chisholm, drew upon the earth east and west of Sixteen Mile Creek in 1833. Nor has the town allowed its best, earliest houses to be utterly erased.

This architectural continuity is, in itself, remarkable. While the town has endured severe economic knocks, and, in more recent times, an influx of extravagant and ignorant new wealth, the plan and most excellent elevations of the old town have survived to bear eloquent witness to the Georgian culture from which early Oakville took its shape. And according to the Right Reverend Ralph Spence, bishop of the Anglican diocese that includes Oakville (the home-town of his wife), that culture has endured along with its visible manifestation in building. "Bishop Strachan is alive and well and planted in Oakville," Bishop Spence told me. "The war of 1812, the colonial highway, the Yankees over there on the other side of the water, the old palatial estates--That psyche is there."

I was introduced to that sturdy culture by its guardians in the Oakville Historical Society. My guides to the "high-street" stretch of Lakeshore Road, the old town's principal thoroughfare, were Harry Barrett, a former mayor, and Walter Jennings, a retired management consultant and architectural enthusiast. Among the few notable buildings on or near the main street, the former Murray House Hotel (before 1857) is perhaps the most typical of Oakville architecture and culture at its best: high-minded, serious, gracious in a thoroughly down-to-earth manner. The stone Granary from the 1850s, recently overhauled to provide office space, is another instance of Georgian no-nonsense, along with numerous small shops and such along Lakeshore Road.

Much good work has been demolished along the way. But few main-street survivors are remarkable. What has persisted, remarkably, is the integrity of the streetscape. While individual nineteenth-century buildings along Lakeshore have come and gone--victims of fire, dilapidation, demolition and sometimes hideous renovation--the visual sense of an English high street of late Georgian times is reasonably intact. The Victorian extravagance of, say, Queen Street West in Toronto's Parkdale neighbourhood is almost completely absent. The architectural messages given us by the low facades of downtown Oakville are Tory restraint, a certain reticence about consumerism, and the feel of good, useful things, like rope and bolts and saddles. (For readers not familiar with Oakville, I should add that this is all purely a matter of architectural effect. The reality, behind the Georgian shopfronts, is merely Affluent Suburbia Anywhere, including a couple of the most appallingly ritzy and pretentious pet boutiques I have ever seen.)

Later on the afternoon of the main-street walkabout, I was toured through the residential streets of oldest Oakville by George Chisholm, a former president of the Oakville Historical Society and a scion of the town's founding family.

Though he dutifully stuck to his notes during our delightful walk together, Mr. Chisholm belongs wholly to the place--at home and at peace in the civilized corner of the world known as Oakville, whose old homes are more like old friends to him than historic buildings. The dates of the best surviving structures--1835 for the plain, fine David Patterson House on Navy Street, to name one--are either very late Georgian or early Victorian. But all the finest ones, even those built far along in the Old Queen's reign, look back to an earlier ideal of unaffected classicism, of rational balance and plain service to the needs of ordinary people. While a few instances of extravagant and quite bad nineteenth-century taste (and more recent examples of gruesome architectural judgement) can be found in the old town, the characteristic aesthetic is simple and practical, and, one might even say, moral, if that word can still be used to indicate what's old and upbearing and good.

3

Until I got used to it, I was surprised at how often the topic of fear came up in conversation with Oakville people.

When speaking with a successful local real-estate agent, I asked her to pretend I was a professional who had just landed a good job in Toronto, and was currently in the throes of deciding where in the GTA I was going to buy a house. What unique thing could Oakville offer me that downtown Toronto could not?
Her instant answer: safety.

I found this reply mildly insulting to my home town. In the more than 30 years I have lived in downtown Toronto, I have never felt, or been, threatened by anyone. I have gone out of my way to be surprised, delighted, provoked, simply because that's the way anybody learns anything new. So what is it about the city that's so fearful one has to escape to Oakville?

"It's not fear of being shot," said Craig MacBride, a young journalist who grew up in the town. "It's fear of being offended."

As Mr. MacBride explained, it's fear of seeing a homeless person, or being hustled by a panhandler. Fear of seeing a drag queen, or some other surprise that comes with everyday life on big-city streets. More gravely, it's the fear of losing the financial security that enables one to live and flourish in Oakville. And, according to the people who work at Oakville Galleries, and some townspeople, this fear and loathing of uncertainty extends even to critical and intelligent contemporary art.

"I love the wit, materials, the beautiful crafting in contemporary art, its engagement with social issues and its optimism," artist and activist Jane Coryell told me. "I love its belief that art can change the way people think. I have no problem looking at contemporary art, but a lot people in Oakville do. They explode in rage. What they resent is space and time and effort being given to some of the subject matter that shows up on the walls. They resent having their noses rubbed in indigence. We don't have indigents on Lakeshore Road, we would not tolerate them."

While Ms. Coryell is probably speaking about a minority in this town of well-educated persons, her contention that some citizens do feel this way rings true. Francine Périnet, director of Oakville Galleries for the last several years, told me that the town "is not small enough to shape a tighter community, not big enough to sustain anonymity. It tends to isolate people. Here you are protected, privileged, you don't live in the real world…They are aware of the world, but afraid of the world."

This fear of the provocative, the different and surprising--a feeling very remote from my own sensibility, and that of many another urban man and woman--is at least understandable in light of Oakville's last century of development.

After a decline in prospects during the mid-Victorian period, the town enjoyed an influx of growth and new wealth when it became a resort for wealthy Torontonians and a day-trip destination for holiday-makers out from the city for a good time. The urbanites, rich and not so rich, fled, in other words, at the very moment (from the 1890s until the First World War) when Toronto was suddenly hit by a tidal wave of immigration, mostly British and working-class, and by the cultural earthquake that always comes with rapid urban agglomeration. The city was no longer Toronto the Good, as the title of Christopher Clark's 1898 book-length lamentation named it. Old Torontonians no longer recognized the new, broad-shouldered industrial city, with its slums and burlesque houses and strangers--So they left town and came to Oakville to find the gracious life they felt was disappearing in the city. A second great wave of immigration, after the Second World War, brought new strangeness to Toronto, and inspired a younger generation of professional people to become commuters living in Oakville, where they also felt happily distanced from the turmoil and dissonance of urban culture. As Teresa Casas, Oakville Galleries public programmes officer, remarked several times during my stay: People came from Toronto to Oakville chasing an ideal of life they believed had become unattainable on the concrete streets.

This elusive ideal, as I found in my numerous conversations with townsfolk, is summed up in the word "community." I have never liked the word. It conjures up in my mind visions of the small Southern town of my grandparents, with its network of surveillance and gossip, rigidly enforced conformity, and a certain contempt for those actually enjoy the anonymity of which Francine Périnet spoke, and the many opportunities offered by big-city life to grow and learn. I stayed in Oakville hardly long enough to conclude that "community" plays out there in its full-blown, authoritarian and exclusive form--though I must admit wincing a little every time I heard the word.

I am inclined to think that at least a little malignant communitarianism is at work in the body of the town, having seen (and been shocked by) some things Oakville appears to like very much. Terrible new architecture seems to be, not merely allowed by the town, but encouraged. How else are we to account for the proliferation of the house-type I've called, elsewhere, the Oakville Special?

This is a pastiche from historical sources as various as Victorian, Georgian, Château, English Edwardian and Frank Lloyd Wright and the Magic Kingdom--almost any kind of historical fashion, in fact, except Twentieth-Century Modern. ("The problem with Modern houses," says leading Oakville architect Gren Weis, "is that they did not spell success. People want more pretension, more pomp. You can't make a business in Modern architecture.") The houses that result from this whimsical design process speak less about the intimacy, retreat, family life and other values so often mentioned by the communitarians, than about philistine show-off. They are instances of poor taste made visible: overscaled, busy with frivolous historical ornament, sentimental.

But what are we to make of other arts the town applauds? I am thinking here specifically of Neville J. Bryant's film Amusing Grace, a film set in Oakville and which premiered there in September, 2003.

Here's the story. A white, stubborn, substantial and totally boring old matron meets, in Oakville, a white, spry, yappy and totally boring old codger. He invites her for lunch, she declines. Then he invites her for lunch, whereupon she declines again. And so forth and so on, in a seemingly endless and unfunny procession of tedious interchanges, hammy skits and dead-handed camera work.

The house gave Mr. Bryant's movie a rousing ovation, which took me by surprise. I only later was given to understand that Oakville applauds usually its own, no matter how terrible the product. (Its own, in this case, was the director, a long-time Oakville resident.) "Oakville is circles within circles within circles," Jane Coryell told me. " If I were to make public my response [to a play or performance by local people] I would choose my words very carefully. I see the same faces, I travel in narrow circles."

Such taste for the insipid, whether in theatre or architecture or at, is learned, not inherited. Children are naturally curious, and it takes a mighty force to stamp out that curiosity. But one's taste has an impact on life far beyond the aesthetic realm. Once schooled thoroughly to enjoy what is worthless and to shun the pain, exaltations, and needs of real humankind, one may have a hard time simply discerning what is real and what isn't.

By universal account, Oakville people are great volunteers, doing good works without ceasing. That said, Wendy Perkins, a fund-raiser for the Salvation Army's Lighthouse, a service to Oakville people in crisis, told me of the professional frustration that comes from working in a place where so many people are both busy and blind.

"Good fortune allows us to be people with teeth, who aren't losing them because of poverty or quality of life. There are problems here--alcohol problems, debilitating depression. Marital breakdown, crashes in worldly status, addiction, gambling. But there is a deep denial that this could happen there. Friends, neighbours and family can't believe it. Some people here will support homeless shelters in Toronto and Hamilton, but not in Oakville. They just don't have a clue that there is homelessness here."