Back in the day, a wrestler named Tuffy Truesdell lived on Ferrier Avenue in east-end Toronto, not far from where we live now. I never knew him, but the uncle of one of my in-laws did. The wonderfully-named Tuffy kept a succession of alligators in his basement, all of them called Rodney. He wrestled them professionally, sometimes underwater, and Susan’s Uncle Bill occasionally ran into him taking an alligator for a stroll down the sidewalk. 

An article from 1970 by Frank Deford in Sports Illustrated sets him up. “Tuffy Truesdell, who says he was the last middleweight wrestling champion of the United States and the first man ever to go into the water to wrestle alligators for a living, took the martini from his wife, who was mixing them in the seat behind him, and sipped from it. As befits a man of patience and serenity, one who has traveled the breadth of the land for years, Tuffy drives at a leisurely pace. Lee Truesdell occasionally bids him go just a bit faster, but she has herself learned to be comfortable on the road as long as there is a guaranteed booking ahead…

“At this time they were headed out of Green River, on the martini leg of the day’s journey, bound for Price, Utah, where they expected to find a good meal and lodging for the evening. If Victor, a huge Canadian black bear who rides in the back of the elongated, airport-type limousine, should express interest in some hors d’oeuvres for himself during cocktail hour, he will be provided with peppermint candy. It is a high level of civilization that Tuffy presides over. The man who has his wife, a redhead, mixing martinis in the middle seat of his limousine and a contented bear who responds quickly to his orders domiciled behind her may be said to have found law and order.”

Toronto is generally known as a smug, grey, boring place filled with smug, grey, boring people. Even Torontonians can fall victim a slightly despairing chip-on-the-shoulder feeling that the city is second rate, and the best you can say of us—of Canadians in general—is that we’re nice. 

But maybe we’re a little more interesting than that. Pick up a couple of new books, re-read a literary classic and take a dive down the Tuffy Truesdell rabbit hole and a completely different picture of the city emerges: a city with a raucous past peopled with eccentrics, visionaries and modernizers; with immigrants and Indigenous people from many nations living in a welter of neighbourhoods; a place of both constant change and forgotten corners. Statistics Canada now counts 7.1 million people living in Toronto and the surrounding area in a grand, expanding, remote-working sprawl reaching (by StatsCan’s reckoning) as far as Lake Simcoe, more than 70 kilometers outside the downtown core.

Shawn Micallef is remarkably well versed in the quirks and individuality of the burgeoning city. A weekly columnist in The Toronto Star, he’s a flâneur, a walker of the city’s many neighbourhoods. Micallef has recently updated his 2010 non-fiction title Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto, published by Coach House Books As he says in the introduction, he thought the update would be easy. Instead, the city has changed so much that he had to do a total rewrite, taking into account all the new buildings popping up to replace historic structures—few of them particularly distinguished—while meditating on the migration of old ethnic neighbourhoods en masse to the suburbs.  

My friend Yvonne gave me a copy of Stroll for my birthday last November after we took a long walk through the west end. It was part of my flâneuse-y project to stop by some of the city’s Little Free Libraries, distributing copies of two of my backlist titles sent my way by a bankrupt publisher. 

Micallef doesn’t describe the territory Yvonne and I covered, but he seems to have strolled everywhere else. Flâneuring northeast of our route, Micallef comes across a residential high rise at the intersection of St. Clair Avenue and Yonge Street. It’s now called the Imperial Plaza, but he notes that it was built as the Imperial Oil headquarters in 1957. 

“Originally a contender in the New City Hall design competition in the early 1950s,” he writes, “this building was designed to double as a hospital in the event of a nuclear attack (its hallways were built wide enough for beds).”

Details jump off every page. Moving west on St. Clair, Micallef writes about the “golden stretch” of Bathurst Street, site of literary fame. 

“Just before Bathurst flies over the Cedarvale Ravine, it’s home to 1599, the building where Ernest Hemingway lived for a few years in the early 1920s while writing for the Toronto Daily Star. In the National Post in 2003, Robert Fulford explained that Hemingway originally ‘came to Toronto as the male version of a governess, hired to babysit a young fellow whose rich parents believed he needed a masculine role model…’

“Fulford goes on to explain that Hemingway’s mentor, Ezra Pound, held a certain disdain for Toronto, and addressed his letters to Hemingway ‘Tomato, Can.’”

I knew before reading Stroll that Davenport is one of Ontario’s oldest roads, originally an  Indigenous portage route running between the Don and Humber Rivers. Yet I hadn’t heard that when developers were digging up Scarborough’s Tabor Hill in the 1950s, they came across an ossuary where more than 500 Indigenous people are buried, a site now marked by a plaque. Had no idea that many other ossuaries in Scarborough are left unmarked along creeks and river valleys, both through neglect and in an effort to protect them from grave robbers. (Grave robbers. In Toronto.)

Near the end of the book, I learned that I shared my spotty knowledge of the city with some kids in Thorncliffe Park, not far north of where I live. Thorncliffe is a heavily immigrant high-rise neighbourhood built around a mall that has become a town square. The subway doesn’t reach there yet and people rely on buses. Micallef spoke with Ahmed Hussein, executive director of a program for newcomers, who took the kids downtown on a sailing trip. It turned out that some of them had never ridden the subway or seen Lake Ontario. “‘A lot of the kids, when they saw the lake, said, ‘Oh, we didn’t know it was a sea next to the city.’” 

Yvonne and I plan to take more walks in the spring. Stroll will be an excellent guide, full of toothy details, a sense of the city’s long history, and a look to the future of what Toronto could become. Not necessarily will become, but could, at least if visionaries get their way.

That brings me to the second Toronto book, another recent non-fiction title, this time by York University teacher Paul McLaughlin. The Suicide Magnet: Inside the Battle to Erect a Safety Barrier on Toronto’s Bloor Viaduct was published in 2023 by Dundurn Press. A local history baked with studies of suicide, McLaughlin’s book tells the story of the contentious construction of the Luminous Veil, a barrier erected to prevent people jumping off the elegant and deadly Bloor Viaduct, which opened in 1918 and for decades drew suicides to its unguarded edge. 

Unlike Micallef’s episodic book, The Suicide Magnet is a story: a classic David-and Goliath narrative centred on two ordinary Torontonians who fell into a years-long political battle with Toronto’s civic politicians, its bureaucracy and skeptical members of the media. Both came from families traumatized by mental illness, and both worked with the Schizophrenia Society of Ontario, a volunteer organization which then had an annual budget of about $2,000 largely raised from garage sales. 

They soon learned that about six people a year had jumped to their deaths off the viaduct from 1990 to 1996, with a spike of 17 in 1997 after three highly-publicized jumps. Even six a year added up to almost 500 suicides since the bridge had opened, making the Bloor Viaduct one of the world’s most lethal suicide magnets, up there with San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and the Empire State Building. The two men believed it was common sense to put up a barrier to keep people from jumping, and decided to get it made. 

Al Birney was a loquacious Irish-born salesman, 67 years old when the campaign began in 1997. Michael McCamus was a 26-year-old journalism student at what was then called Ryerson University. By their own admission, neither knew anything about civic politics when they began their campaign, and they bumbled through a series of meetings with city councillors, some helpful, some hostile. Yet Birney brought the luck of the Irish to the campaign, and only six months after they came knocking, Toronto city council agreed to budget $1.5 million for a barrier. McCamus and Birney were elated—at least until the council reneged, caving to critics who argued that the project was a waste of money. If people were prevented from jumping off the viaduct, they would simply find another bridge. 

McLaughlin’s book details several psychological studies of suicide, some showing the contagious effect of widely-reported deaths, as happened here in 1997. After Marilyn Monroe killed herself in 1962, the suicide rate in the U.S. jumped by 12 per cent compared to the same months a year earlier, leading mental health experts to advocate for media restraint in covering suicides. Other studies showed that after suicide barriers were erected in several different cities, every city showed a notable drop in the number of jumpers. People didn’t head to another bridge. Many reconsidered their impulsive decisions and lived. 

After four years of waffling, the city council finally approved a budget for the barrier. Construction began, and the barrier was finished in 2003.

McLaughlin teaches interviewing at York, and has a keen ear for a good quote. The book is lively with the voices of people either involved with the project or touched by mental illness. While Micallef describes how Toronto looks, McLaughlin demonstrates how we talk: salesmen, politicians, architects, first responders, people living with schizophrenia and the subway drivers left traumatized after suicides. This includes a pair of married drivers, Kevin and Shelley Pett, who each faced a jumper only two and a half months apart.

Says Shelley: “This guy jumps out in front of me, and I didn’t want to remember any of this, I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to hear it. And I tucked my feet up, and I covered my ears with my hand, and I closed my eyes, and I screamed. “I just kept, I remember saying to everybody, my husband just had this suicide, there’s…this can’t be happening, there’s no way.

“Having to go to bed was probably the scariest thing I ever had to do. But I thought, how do you do that? How do you know that…you were a part of someone’s death? How do you go to sleep? My house has never been so clean. I’d stay up till three or four o’clock in the morning, scrubbing my floors, just because I didn’t want to sit down and think about what had happened.”

Suicide Magnet and Stroll are very different books. McLaughlin’s is a fine work of reporting, while Micallef moves more elastically and elliptically from one era to another, one community to another, portraying Toronto as both puzzle and palimpsest. Yet the two books share one similarity: repeated references to Michael Ondaatje’s 1987 novel, In the Skin of the Lion—and not just because the Bloor Street Viaduct plays a major role in Ondaatje’s story. I hadn’t opened In the Skin of the Lion in years, but I read the two other books with a background sense that it’s the best novel ever written about Toronto, granting the city a mythic heft. 

The architect who designed the Luminous Veil agrees. In The Suicide Magnet, Dereck Revington says he was inspired by Ondaatje’s character Nicholas Temelcoff, a daredevil worker who saves a nun as she falls off the viaduct. Says Revington, “A barrier needs the same kind of elegance and grace as Temelcoff.” 

The quote inspired me to re-read Ondaatje’s novel. When I mentioned what I was doing, a friend asked, “Does it hold up?” 

I’ll end on that cliffhanger, and write about In the Skin of the Lion next time.

Actually, I lie. 

I can’t resist ending with another excerpt from the Runyonesque Sports Illustrated article about Tuffy Truesdell, even though I think it’s 70 per cent hokum. The bear in the opening paragraphs, Victor, is an important part of the story, but since Susan’s Uncle Bill saw Tuffy walking an alligator down Ferrier Avenue, I’ll go out on alligators. 

“Tuffy came late in life to wild beasts,” Frank Deford writes. “Victor was the first one he had ever attempted to train, although he had experienced somewhat less sophisticated dealings with another kind of creature. These were alligators. A promoter called him up and asked him if he would like to wrestle gators. Outside of the Everglades, this was pretty much a new act.

“Tuffy agreed and went to Corpus Christi, Texas, where the incumbent gator wrestler was in action. Tuffy was supposed to watch this fellow, who was from Florida and well-schooled in the art, pick up all the tricks and then go out on an alligator circuit of his own. Unfortunately the fellow with the gators was not cut out for his work and to prepare himself for wrestling them had taken to depending on large quantities of intoxicants…

“The afternoon Tuffy arrived the gator man was already pretty warmed up for his evening match and, while showing Tuffy how to feed an alligator, he got his hand badly bitten. With that, he gave up the business on the spot and headed back to Florida, leaving Tuffy to wrestle the gator—Tuffy never having seen one up close before, much less having wrestled one.

“Tuffy did not know much about caring for the reptiles either, and usually he kept them alive by having them sleep in his hotel shower and jamming food down their necks with yardsticks. ‘Alligators got no devotion,’ Tuffy says. ‘They’d just as soon starve to death as work with you.’

“Moving north from Corpus Christi, Tuffy came to London, Ontario, where his ungrateful alligator expired one night in the shower. This spiteful gesture was aggravated by the fact that there was a big advance that night. So Tuffy put the dead gator in his box and took him to the arena. In the ring he got some attendants to sort of shove the alligator out of the box. Tuffy grabbed the gator before he slid to a halt and, with lots of activity to compensate for the alligator, who was providing none, Tuffy wrestled and pinned the reptile before a very appreciative crowd.”

Next time: In the Skin of the Lion revisited. Also more on Tuffy Truesdell, speaking of mythic Toronto. And Sarnia, as it turns out.

By the way, the photo up top of the man running alongside the Luminous Veil was taken at peak polar vortex, when the wind chill dropped temperatures to -26°C.

Torontonians are also pretty tough.