Cities are strange things in their lives and deaths. They don't live and die like people, where someone is living and eventually is gone. They live and die in the process of morphing into their next form, piece by piece. Sometimes that process of morphing involves unbridled growth where a city pops up from nowhere: a friend related the story of growing up on the edge of 1980s Phoenix, with desert stretching for miles at the end of the street. Now, the suburbs stretch for another 10+ miles, mere years later.
Some are trapped in time and slowly decompose as the forces of economic stagnation make change mostly the inevitable conclusion of nature returning things to the earth. The mill and mining towns of Northern Ontario losing the battle against economics, demographics, nature, and time; trapped in amber economically but not physically.
Cities are products of humanity, but outlive us. Our memories of what a city was are shaped by the era we were there. The skyline of Lower Manhattan still looks wrong in a visceral sense to me, more than 20 years after the towers have been gone. However, pictures of pre-CN Tower Toronto look wrong to me too, but maybe looks right to someone who loved that city before modernity hit. Even London with the Shard looming over St. Paul's seems unsettling, a splinter in the mind's eye. Sometimes it's a sudden tragedy, as the aforementioned Trade Center attests. Sometimes it's a monument that's on a proverbial death row by the forces of economics. The now-disused Superstack in Sudbury - an industrial memoir to the labour, mortgages paid, and food put on the table of families locally - awaits the Grim Reaper.
Cities live and die even in small ways. Sometimes a longstanding business leaves, and with it goes a piece of that city. At least the city
you knew. The end of Honest Ed's left a hole in Toronto that no overseas chain or condo development will fill; a city less kitschy, more refined, but somehow less distinctive. Is Toronto better or worse for it?
Why this thread, why now? A
local bakery (operating since 1936) is closing to make way for a longstanding pet project of the city: a new arena. Perhaps it's the fond memories of the smell of freshly baked bread on Sunday mornings of my youth that pulls the heartstrings so. Food is the way to the heart, the adage goes. The wistfulness comes from knowing that after the 30th, the bread of my youth will pass into memory. I should buy one last loaf.
I wonder if this new arena will be someone else's same fond memory as the fresh bread is mine.
Post your stories of the lives and deaths of cities and towns in your life.
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