EDITOR: It's circa 1973. Bert Xanadu is the Mayor of Toronto and owner of the Imperial Six cinemas on Yonge Street. Mayor Xanadu has been governing from his twitter account over the last two years and now a regular series of posts straight out of 1973 and into the Toronto fray. His first column was on banning pedestrians from Yonge Street. Here he's back in the fray, ensuring that the Port Lands mega project doesn't get all the spotlight. Photo by Sebastian Bergman. We have, in this marvellous City of Toronto, a public asset so magnificent in its nascent potential, so well-meaning in its character, so narcotic in its ability to entice people to lie down, that it has no international rival, save for those cities that also have islands. I am speaking, of course, of the Toronto Islands Park, more commonly known in local parlance as ‘the Island’ (Toronto being still admirably spartan in its civic monikers, e.g. ‘the Museum’ and ‘the Art Gallery’). I think all right-thinking men would agree with me when I say, as I am now doing, that despite the fond position the Island holds in the bosoms of Torontonians, it is in sore need of re-do. When I was a lad in the 1920’s, the Island was like what one might imagine as the horticultural love child of Frederick Law Olmstead and Greta Garbo, a fantastical floating lawn of entertainment and class warfare, of sand and sermons, of hypnotic British patriotism and hoochie coochie outbursts.

EDITOR: It's circa 1973. Bert Xanadu is the Mayor of Toronto and owner of the Imperial Six cinemas on Yonge Street. Mayor Xanadu has been governing from his twitter account over the last two years. Here at Spacing we thought if Josh Matlow can write columns for the Toronto Star, Mayor Xanadu can and should have a place for his long-form thoughts. So begins a regular series of posts straight out of 1973 and into the Toronto fray. With plans afoot to revitalize Yonge Street again, his first column is especially timely. I am, if nothing else, a reasonable man. When I was first approached, in 1970, by several erstwhile hippies, a consortium of mobile popcorn vendors, a purveyor of concrete tree planters, three down-at-their-heels jazz flautists, and the president of the Toronto Sandwich Board Advertisers’ Association, all beseeching me to temporarily close lower Yonge St. to cars, and to designate it as a pedestrian-only ‘mall’, I was intrigued but skeptical. Motor vehicles represent much of the hustle, and most of the bustle, of any thriving downtown’s hustle and bustle.  Cars, trucks and buses ‘drive’ much of the economy of the Queen City, in a way that a scrawny paperboy, or a permanently scuffed shoeshine man simply cannot. So, when this harebrained scheme for a car-less main street was presented to me, I thought first of those whose very being would be disenfranchised! What of the jovial, barrel-chested driver of the TTC’s Yonge bus, whose many years of seniority in his union-backed sinecure have entitled him to unvaryingly drive the same route, the 97X, from Gerrard to King and back again?  What of the burly but genial operator of the Kitchener salted meats truck, whose livelihood depends on his ability to deliver his tasty and well-preserved goods to Yonge’s many eateries? What of the Ladies of St. Clair and other northern parts, whose delicate natures prevent them from entering the damp egalitarian environs of the subway system? What of the haughty Bay St. captain of industry, whose chauffeur drives him ever so slowly to his magisterial Toronto-Dominion Centre office via Yonge St., so as to delay the inevitable fit of rage?