Fables of a Yonge and Dundas reconstruction

Given how reminiscences of Yonge and Dundas are the most intriguing element of The Humanitas Festival, the window between the end of an era and nostalgia for how it used to be has been narrowed to three-quarters of a decade – less time than its taken for the reinvention of the area to be complete. The ambient electronica heard on the new website for the Metropolis complex even boasts a late-’90s retro sound – as an NYC-based communications company is actively seeking advertisers for a plum spot on the exterior, whose gaudy rendering was the subject of a few days of online debate back in the dead of winter. Those brand logos will be mounted by next spring, at least six months before an AMC megaplex, Canadian Music Hall of Fame and Wolfgang Puck’s Café fill the space formerly occupied by a dismal flea market that deigned to call itself a shopping mall. But the ghosts of Dundas Square have provided the latest fixation for the [murmur] project, whose latest historical stories audible via cellphone will focus on a block curiously recalled more for selling jeans, books and burgers than records, hash pipes and pornography. This undertaking is part of The Networked City, a five-pronged outdoor art installation bridging the lower Yonge strip with the waterfront – other elements include the opportunity to transmit Morse code to the flashing beacon in the alcove at One King West, a recreation of the CNE’s lamented Bulova Tower capable of blowing bubbles, and a pigeon feeding sanctuary amidst the condo construction. Billed as “a month-long festival of what was, is and could be”, a whack of locally-minded events are grouped beneath the Humanitas banner, although a week-long forum series at the Cooler By the Lake Tent at the foot of Yonge acts as headquarters for the first week. There’s also an Airstream trailer set to crawl around the city, recording conversations about the experience of local neighbourhoods and landmarks. (Reserve a time and place here.) And the website MemoryArchive is concurrently collecting Toronto fodder. But the seediest era of Yonge St. is also being promoted as part of the festival, as OMNI 1 rebroadcasts their doc The Shoeshine Boy on June 3 (9 p.m.) and June 4 (8 p.m.), which dusts off 1977 footage related to the murder of 12-year-old Emanuel Jaques – providing a rare opportunity to see Yonge and Dundas in the initial throes of its late 20th century squalour. But that’s because nobody at Global has unearthed tapes of their nocturnal time-fillers, a test pattern alternative which consisted of a camera maneuvering through the streets to a sombre jazz soundtrack, a premise which wouldn’t be as soothing when confronted with billboards flashing neon at 4 a.m.

The Humanitas Festival [official website]