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the dirty city

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Kenny's figured out that Toronto is dirty. Compared to super-clean Tokyo, I'm not surprised.

It started the other day when we were having a chat with his grandmother in southern Kyushu. He told her, "Come to Kenny's dirty home!" By which he meant a home with little furniture, plenty of boxes and packing materials, and a general sense of untidyness.

But he stepped it up today with a comment about the subway we'd been on. "It's a dirty trian, isn't it," he said as we got off. And he'd been very right. Dirty barely covered it. From top to bottom, it had been a disgrace.

The ceiling looked not unlike the inside of a bar as seen under the pale light of morning. The oversized circular air vents were dinged, dented, and caked in grime. There were literal traces of some dark water spiralling away from them. The surface of the ceiling was blotchy, grimy, and uneven.

The walls and windows were scratched with graffiti and stains on the inside and on the outside were caked with that grey-brown winter filth that coats the city in the winter. The upholstered seats were dotted with gum and stains from spills.

And the floor. It wasn't caked with grey-brown, it was lined. A constant surface of salt grains and mud, broken up only where a newspaper had been dumped or where a discarded coffee had run across the terrain like a toxic river.

Toronto's a pretty cool place to live in many ways but ye gods clean it's not. And the TTC is leading by example.