Toronto, north of the border

Posted by: on Nov 17, 2009 | No Comments

From the back seat of a cab en route to the hotel I was reminded of Sydney. The shops made of glass and steel with their bright signs showed that it was a clean and capable city, but it hardly told me much about the character. Is this what international tourists think of Sydney? Lucky we have that harbour to keep them happy. Further afield from Yonge St it was easier to see what makes Toronto different from the next city. Tree lined streets covered with autumn leaves, Victorian houses, streetcars and radical contemporary additions to early 20th century buildings

The next day we set off on foot to the western side of the city. Past the Art Gallery of Ontario with its bulging submarine-like facade, a recent addition by Frank Gehry; past the Royal Ontario Museum, an old stone building which has been attacked by a contemporary steel with pleasing results; then to our destination Kensington Market. This is an open air market where the stalls all have shop fronts, more akin to shanty-town markets I’ve seen in South East Asia than to something like Paddy’s market in Sydney. Colourful fruit and vegie displays, smelly fish shops, European delis and Middle Eastern stalls of dried fruit and nuts sat amiably next to signs of gentrification.

The area around Nassau St is one place to find the work of local designers. There’s Hardboiled printing t-shirts with designs from locals, and across the road is Kid Icarus, a stationary shop with pretty cards, paper and actual prints from locals. Can we have one of these in Sydney please?

The area has a laid back hippy vibe, helped by the shops being more like converted houses with front yards. Like stumbling into a tea party you’re not invited to, I was on my best behaviour and decided against whipping out the camera. In front of the bookshop, This Ain’t The Rosedale Library, two guys solemnly tinkered on their clarinet and guitar as if they were sitting in their own lounge room with no one else around. Girls in beanies stood around with coffee in cups and saucers, presumably from the cafe next door.

Further south and a couple of days later we would welcome more of this hippie vibe. Want soy bacon with your French toast and maple syrup? Sadie’s Diner is known as one of the few places in the city to get a decent vegan breakfast. We met a couple of ex-pat vegans there who had recently relocated to Toronto with much ease, commenting on just how pleasant the customs people were.

We also met up some some “Irish” relatives while in town. I say “Irish” because, like my Mum, this cousin of hers left Belfast some decades ago. Being chauffered along the scenic route to Missisauga showed us more than we could cover on foot. The site of the yearly fair, leafy inner suburbs, High Park, a Polish neighbourhood and a strip known for its gigs. Despite having never met these relatives before, a common history and some similar interests – music, theatre, online media – gave us plenty to talk about. And we were of course pleased to have a wonderful home cooked meal after many nights eating out. Can anyone make mashed potato as well as the Irish? I think not.

Two other great things I must mention about Toronto: shoe shops and the Art Gallery of Toronto.

The Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto is dedicated to the history of the shoe. Yes, it sounds frivolous but the best bits were thoroughly educational from the oldest known footprints (found in volcanic ash) to early shoes from different continents and religions.

So given there is a shoe museum it makes sense that there are also many great shoe shops, particularly boots. If you’re going to spend half the year wearing boots you want to have a few to choose from. Gum boots are taken to a new level, and apres ski-boots are just as fashionable as regular boots. Even Camper and Nike make snow boots.

The Art Gallery of Ontario with its $18 entry fee almost didn’t make the cut. The special exhibitions weren’t that exciting and we’d just been to plenty of museums and galleries in NY and DC. But with nineteen Canadian dollars left in my purse and a few hours before our bus left I decided it was meant to be. The stars must’ve aligned because it was the best gallery experience I can remember. The Gehry extension to the gallery made a smooth transition from looking in the gallery to looking through the windows to the park and street below. The elevator had a video installation work which went for as long as your ride (“You don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to”). There was a whole room of Henry Moore sculptures naturally lit by skylights at the request of his daughter. Canadian art was well represented and its significance explained. There were two floors of contemporary art, many rooms of drawings and a room crammed from floor to ceiling with paintings minus labels to demonstrate how women’s art used to be exhibited. I peaked around a corner from the drawings to look out the window and was invited to have a look at their study room and adjoining print archive where they store 60,000 works. They had a few works out on the tables for closer inspection, including The Vampire by Edvard Munch. The only disappointing bit was not being able to find postcards of the Gehry building in the shop!

New York

Posted by: on Nov 12, 2009 | One Comment

Driving into NY from DC had the city slowly creeping up on us in darkness. Firstly industrial, then suburban sprawl, sometimes a mixture of both and finally the traffic jam as the bridges and tunnels of Manhattan filled with people entering the city for the evening.

It’s the fourth time I’ve been to NY yet it still takes me a moment to get used to the pace. Stay to the right. Walk without making eye contact. Speak up when spoken to. Know your order when you get to the counter. Don’t stop suddenly on the pavement.

Of course, breaking any of these rules will get you nothing more than a scowl from the people around you. You soon realise it’s all a game and the more you play the more addictive the city becomes. Soon you’re crossing against the lights ahead of the locals and cursing the subway gate when it doesn’t let you through on the first swipe. You start reacting without a thought and become an unaffected urban-dweller.

Needless to say, the buzz of NY was a welcome relief after a couple of days in DC. Driving into Manhattan that night to the endless blocks of tall buildings, busy sidewalks, colour, grit and dirt woke us from our DC slumber.

The East Village would be our home for the next four nights in a warehouse called East Village Bed & Coffee. It’s a simple and excellent idea: own a warehouse in a hip neighbourhood, put a few rooms on each floor, let it run like a share house complete with little signs telling you to clean up after yourself. Provide bikes to share and a dog, Mango, to greet you when you get in.

NY highlights (in small bite-sized chunks)

The food:

Porchetta has six stools and a huge lump of slow roasted pork. The shop front, about 2.5 metres wide, resembles that of an old-fashioned butcher’s with clean white tiles and a big glass window (see for yourself in exhibit A). The pork, slow roasted with garlic, rosemary and fennel, is served either on a roll or on a plate with beans and greens. We also got a chicory salad on the side and crispy potatoes with burnt ends. These ‘burnt ends’ were delightful little shavings of crisp pork – a fairy floss for the meat lovers of the world. Wash it all down with fresh lemonade.

Joe’s Shanghai has been doing soup dumplings, or xiao long bao as they’re known in Sydney, since the mid-nineties. They’re large, highly soupy and are served with the traditional vinegar and shredded ginger. Not quite to the standard of Din Tai Fung in Sydney or the even better Hu Tong Dumpling Bar in Melbourne, but a still a reliable feast. The ma-po tofu on the other hand more closely resembled the American-Chinese food we’d had in the past, too sweet and not enough chilli.

Some French restaurant on Ave A: I love that in NY you can go out for dinner at 10.30pm on a weeknight without feeling rushed or lonely in the restaurant. The food here was fine without being spectacular, but the real joy was its cosy local vibe which somehow made the wine taste better and the moules and frites just what I was looking for.

The outdoors:

The High Line is a new public garden made on top of an disused elevated railway line which once served the meat-packing district. It currently runs from around 8th St to 20th St but it will expand further north with it’s hardy plants interspersed between train tracks and stylishly formed concrete.

The artificial rolling hills and horse and carriages of Central Park are all a bit twee, but the size and placement of this park is hard to ignore. Walking through with the tips of buildings sticking out behind the trees makes the experience feel almost like a movie set. The weather turned cold so we wussed out on the original plan to cycle all the way through it.

We walked through Tompkins Square Park everyday and NY is spotted with little local parks like this one with a many fenced off areas serving different purposes. This East Village one is flavoured mostly with dog-owners and kid-owners, although later at night it seemed a little sketchy but was still harmless.

The culture:

The Tenement Museum is a lot like Susannah Place Museum in The Rocks area of Sydney; social history told through stories of the people who resided in the buildings. The tour starts in front of the bustling little shop on Orchard St with an introduction by the guide – not a dusty old guide, but a young hip one from Brooklyn – then proceeds into 97 Orchard St for the rest of the tour.

Doing The Met Museum and MOMA in one day would perhaps be ambitious for some, but we like to wander through somewhat aimlessly and then leave again before fatigue sets in. The Met’s scale, design and collection is reminiscent of European Galleries, and its setting right on Central Park makes it a beautiful tourist stop. MOMA is always satisfying with the permanent collection, sculpture garden and special exhibitions. We borrowed a MOMA membership card from our accommodation to get us into a member viewing on the new Bauhaus exhibition before it opened. I was so pleased with it that I’ve been carting the very heavy exhibition catalogue around with me since.

From my days of working for a museum I knew The Brooklyn Museum was the envy of all for its ability to experiment online and succeed. I didn’t realise just how much this approach carried over to their actual museum. We happened to be there for Target First Saturday where the museum is open for free until 11pm with performances and a bar. You may have been to after hours events at galleries before but I bet it wasn’t like this. The place was crammed with people of all demographics: the obligatory hip, young scenesters, Japanese tourists, African American families and older locals. It wasn’t about being seen or getting in for free, the museum has become a meeting place for the local community. People stopped to chat in crowded stairwells, kids ran around looking at African art, others lined up for over half an hour to see the temporary rock photography exhibition. While this happened up above in the wings, down on the ground floor a DJ was remixing Billie Jean to a crowded dancefloor and people peered through arches two storeys up to get a glimpse of the action. So the lesson here? Throw out the conservative approach to after hours exhibition viewings and instead let the public experience the museum in the way corporate venue hire clients do.

Washington DC, or, The Canberra Problem

Posted by: on Nov 9, 2009 | 5 Comments

First rule: if you’re going to take an overnight flight, make sure the destination is interesting enough to keep you awake.

In DC I found myself making the same excuses I make in Canberra and talking up the positives of the place. Yes, the parks are lovely and the museums are great but where is the city centre with some sign of life? North-west of Dupont Circle had a certain buzz in the evening and plenty of restaurants and bars. Georgetown was leafy and pretty but it verged on being painfully quaint.

We hired bikes near the Washington Mall area to meander through the monuments and museums. I’m sure American tourists get a lot more from this place after hearing about it in school for years. My main connection was with the Lincoln Memorial where I remembered The Simpsons episode where Lisa went to him for advice. He certainly was imposing in real life. It’s a massive shrine that looks down upon the memorial pond.

The Smithsonian Air & Space Museum was next. It was huge, having to accommodate planes after all. We walked through some old planes and looked at space food sticks, so I can’t really say it was the most riveting museum experience. We then crossed the park to The Smithsonian National Gallery of Art, an imposing building, all stairs, columns and heavy doors without signs. This building was amazing, possibly more amazing than the art it contained. The rooms had the all the ambience and style of a European art gallery but without the crowds. A few rooms in was an indoor garden, green and lush with water features and garden furniture to sit and appreciate. Of course, more marble columns and a high skylighted ceiling.

Across the road at the east wing of the gallery is the contemporary collection. This one impressed with both architecture and content – Jackson Pollack, Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko and Roy Lichtenstein.

It took me a while to pinpoint what felt odd about all of the museums and then it clicked. The only people working in the museums seemed to be security guards. Security guards checking bags on the way in and more guards spread throughout the galleries. They were completely free of the usual information desks, membership signs or art students working between studying. If felt like no one was really curating exhibitions or enhancing the collection. They had a big pile of of great artefacts and art and so it’s just been housed in these museums and forgotten.

Of course, maybe I’d think differently if I’d slept the night before.