:: Foundations and feelings for a city::

While I live in Montreal now, Toronto is and perhaps forever will be the city of my heart. It is where I first forged my identity as an adult, where I made the break from family and the west that I grew up in, where I took a job that became a career and where I left my civic heart four years ago to move down the 401 to follow my new marriage.

All the same, it holds me.

And so I guess it is inevitable that comparisons between Toronto and Montreal are omnipresent for me: Montrealers are arrogant, Torontonians apologetic; Montrealers puff up their chests about their bars and nightclubs and terrace cafes where Torontonians extol their treelined neighbourhoods, streetcars and arts scene; Montreal wallow in their self-declared French europeanism, in contrast to Toronto's quieter pride in their UN-like multilingual polyglot culture. Montreal is proud of a few of their shopping streets and yet everything closes up tightly at 5:00 on most nights and there isn't a mall or drugstore open past 6 anywhere. In some areas of Montreal, even grocery stores hold to this.

Montrealers scream their virtues in the newspapers (in both official languages), on the airwaves and in conversations with others. They put down other cities achievements, belittle the sports accomplishments and commercial successes found outside their island and generally show a pettiness of civic spirit that seems to hide an actual sense of inferiority and backwardness about their place as a North American city. Outwardly they are proud, but looking inward they are scared.

Torontonians, on the other hand, self-flagellate themselves. To others, in the same venues and conversations, they will be self-effacing, openly insecure, too aware of the stereotype that the rest of the country either envies or hates them. They will state that they are second class, a good city but never quite achieving the hip bohemianess of Vancouver or the pulsing pace of New York or the gritty commercial dedication of Chicago. Outwardly, Torontonians are worried about their place, but an inward look shows they are generally comfortable with their city and their place within it.

Another major difference between the two cities is architecture. The European feel and influence may be obvious in the Old Port of Montreal, but elsewhere, the city is a jumble of endless streets of seemingly-dilapidated, graffitied, glued-together row top-down duplexes and triplexes, built for the sprawling turn-of-the-20th-century Catholic French families, on tiny lots with almost no greenspace at the front and sinuous concrete arteries as allies in the back. Toronto's landscape is more brash, more "American" it is said, at least in the business, restaurant and arts districts, but move a few streets away and you find Toronto's version of the duplex - a "side-by-side" as it is called, one roof holding two homes glued together at their centre, with greenspace surrounding it. The brick colour is mainly shades of red and the influence here is more obviously Protestant, someone like Max Weber might say, built for the more standard 4 person family plus dog and car.

I've often wondered if the increased amount of space each individual feels in Toronto is perhaps partly thanks to having ravines and a huge lake as opposed to being on an island in the middle of a marine shipping artery. Some might claim erroneously it is because Toronto is so close to the US, and yet in actual fact, Montreal might as well make the same claim, for just a bridge and an hours drive away and you can be either Vermont or New York.

I can't claim to totally understand the reason why Montreal is where people in Canada fly alone to party with others and Toronto is where they fly to do touristy stuff with their family. I also can't explain why Montreal will forever feel masculine to me -- is it the grittiness? The graffiti? The insanely-designed highways? Just as I can't explain why Toronto is forever female for me, why it feels like a well-kept lady of a certain age. The phallic symbolism of the CN Tower next to the Skydome notwithstanding, is it the family-oriented neighbourhoods? The politeness of muli-cultured people? The cleanliness of the streets? The arts scene?

One thing I can understand is why I don't much like Montreal and am therefore now content to live in one of his bedroom communities across another bridge and river, rather than living in the heart of everything the way I preferred to do in Toronto. In Toronto, living the in suburbs would be impossible for me, making the decision to live in a condo over a sprawling suburban house obvious for the payback of living in her.

Ultimately, Toronto is so much "me" that I have integrated her attitudes and gestures and habits into myself. The entire city has felt like home to me since the day I stepped off the Greyhound bus one dark and snowy late December day in 1989 and crossed the street to the enormous Eaton Centre shopping complex.

And perhaps because of the quiet fierceness of my love for her, since moving to this city of my current life and my husband's family, I have kept informed on her state and being as much as my homesick heart could handle. I have done so by reading the online version of the quintessential Toronto magazine, Toronto Life, in which I recently foundthis link to an excellent article on the architecture and feeling and foundations of Toronto.

Reading it, you will perhaps better understand her and, therefore, in turn, me.

Enjoy.