By Shawn Micallef
It’s hard to write about your hometown after you’ve left. It’s especially hard if you’ve moved to the big city, and harder still if the big city you moved to is Toronto and the hometown you left is Windsor. Why? Because Windsor already thinks of itself as the underdog: “Canada stops in London,” the locals say. Windsor wants everyone to know it exists, and counts, just as much as Toronto. I left the one for the other, and a sense of guilt has chased me down the 401.
There was always quite a buzz when Windsor was featured on the national news, or when a local CBC reporter filed a story that aired over the whole network. They often stood on the CBC’s Riverside Drive lawn, with Detroit in the background, or the Ambassador Bridge. “Look, it’s us,” we would say. We’d get excited even when the local news trucks from Detroit would make it over to Windsor and point their microwave transmitters back to their studios across the river. Windsor is a mid-size Canadian city that is thrust, geographically speaking, into the heart of the American mid-west. Windsor is nearly surrounded by Detroit, and exists quietly in that city’s long shadow. If it weren’t for the mile-wide river and international border, Windsor would be just another suburb in Metro Detroit’s massive sprawl. Perhaps the most remarkable feature Windsor has is its view of America. In most cities people take snapshots with landmarks in that city-in Windsor people line up at the river’s edge and pose with Detroit in the background. Windsor watches that city’s news, roots for its sports teams, drinks in its crappy bars and dates its citizens. Although it’s almost American, and even if some less rigorous folks speak with Michigan accents, Windsor is still Canadian, and its residents would never claim otherwise. Windsorites, like all Canadians, have a bit of that smug anti-American streak that defines us as a nation. We take pictures of Detroit, sure, but always from our side of the river.
After 25 of years of living here I moved away-the big move to the big city. It’s archetypal-the names could change but the migration is the same: Liverpool to London, Sacramento to San Francisco, Salmon Arm to Vancouver. I’ve returned home a lot over the past 5 years-visits often separated by a month or two. I’ve seen the city change from an outsider’s perspective coupled with an insider’s love. I have no antipathy towards Windsor, just melancholy, about the changes-perhaps more fittingly called blows-the city continues to endure. Change is fine, but when the landmarks and what they represent start going, and there’s no suitable replacement, I get worried.
On a trip back in 2002 I noticed the giant metal fish that used to hang on the side of the Loop was gone; in its place hung a “for lease” sign. The Loop is the bar we called home, a “Cheers” for the indie-minded and an extension of my living room from 1993 to 2000. It was on the 2nd floor above The Fish Market restaurant. That big metal fish has been looking pretty banged up in recent years-it didn’t light up as it should, the paint was fading and there was a rusted dent where something big banged into it. He/she was a sad fish for sure-not at all like the proud fake metal one that hung there in the 1980s when I would ask my parents if we could go “eat under the big fish.”
Similar to the big fish, there used to be a big “E” on top of the “Eastown Plaza sign at Lauzon and Tecumseh Roads. This is where we went grocery shopping for years, at the N&D supermarket, owned by local Serbians. I forget when it closed but it couldn’t compete with the giant Supercentre/Zehrs/A&P places. There was this British cashier my dad would go to each time. They made nice Coronation Street small talk. The N&D had turrets on it, which were lit from the inside, making the building look like a low, spread-out castle. I used to think people lived in there. Today it’s a big Food Basics, with all the vernacular bits removed. It was those bits, and the name “Eastown,” that made this 1960s sprawling thing a place. Probably not worthy of the sort of treatment Robert Venturi gave vernacular signage in his book “Learning from Las Vegas”, but I quite liked it. The smaller Eastown signs at the entrance to the plaza still give an indication of what it was like. I saw the E on the ground this past Easter as I drove by. It was extra-maudlin to walk up to the Eastown E and look at something that was so much a part of Windsor’s public wallpaper up close. Some horrible vulture pigeon flew out at me when I went near it. Inside it looked like years of nests had accumulated. I suppose the E will be removed soon enough, and at the scene of its fall from grace, a former Woolco-turned-Walmart will be redeveloped into some new big box.
The Walmart abandoned the old Woolco store that was in this plaza a few years ago to move into brand new location just down the street. I don’t know why they left the old location. The need for bigger aisles for bigger customers? What’s most striking about this area now are the vast empty spaces, spaces I used to think were full of life, or, at least, of something. The old store had neat bricks that were sort of like real stones. Not great architecture, but better than the new building, and like corner of Walker and Highway 42, somewhere was replaced with nowhere.
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There have always been rumours that the Loop-the bar above the big fish-would disappear and be redeveloped into something else (perhaps a parking lot, a Windsor tradition). Any time culture is fostered at a particular location, the imminent loss of that location brings fears that the culture will be lost as well. Things happened at the Loop, and I’m beginning to realize that as the physical structures attached to my memories disappear, the memories fade a bit too, like a dubbed VHS film that’s been played too many times.
What exactly would Windsor lose if the Loop went? Gone would be those consistently flooded bathrooms complete with swarms of fruit flies and urinals covered in garbage bags, the stalls with no doors, the “Jesus was rocked by an alien” graffiti, the worn-out floors, the dripping sewer pipes, the shitty chairs, the tables painted one artful Monday night in 1996, the ugly murals, the tin ceiling painted black by DJ Liam and the spaceship DJ booth that used to be the front desk of a shoe store on Ouellette. Lost would be the view from the one window that looked North towards Detroit, where I stood in 2000, looking down at RCMP riot officers glaring back up at me during the OAS summit that turned Windsor’s downtown into a walled fortification. There’s the sick and dirty couch where Jody and I gave Melissa a hello kitty comb for her birthday in 1996, the spot by the pillar where Russell and I almost got in a fight with the Italian coke-dealing monkey-boy who elbowed me in the eye and called me a “punk ass bitch”. The nights waiting under the bright lights for the people I was driving home to finally say goodbye, or the nights spent saying goodbye to people I don’t remember anymore, people who, like me, left town for distant places, perhaps too far away to visit. The regular things that, for me, add up to the sum of my home town, happened here. And there’s a particular comfort in knowing a place like this still exists, and that there will be some familiar faces in it. It’s like that Thin Lizzy song “The Boys are Back in Town”-somebody has to stick around and acknowledge that you’ve returned. Somebody has to sing the song.
When I drive back through Windsor to my mom’s house, my old house, I think about all this, probably making it more heavy than it ought to be. I often drive up Walker Road and turn left onto Highway 42-it’s a massive suburban corner now, six lanes wide in every direction. There is so much empty space there now. It used to be a countryish, four-corners sort of place, near the airport and the strip motels that service it. The Chinese restaurant that looked like some kind of colonial Peking stucco castle is gone, in its place an Applebee’s. The windowless Airport Tavern, another Archie Bunker joint, is gone. That space has now been given over to the expansive parking lot of a Tim Hortons. Across the street the Country Style donuts has been torn down and is now the parking lot for the Jet Stream 24-hour car wash and is lit up stunningly with 500 watt lights. We used to stop at that one when I was a kid and buy donuts when we went visiting family friends in Amherstburg. I didn’t associate those places with coffee like I do now, just donuts. They had those pull-type cigarette machines that were always in the vestibule. What they’ve done here is textbook “how to make an intersection as ugly as possible.” It was never pretty, but at least it tried.
I don’t live in Windsor anymore, so who am I to say what’s good and bad, and why should I trust my perceptions of a place I see once every month and a half? And who really cares? It’s just a bar, a fish restaurant, an intersection and a shopping plaza, like any other in any Canadian town.
Windsor bothers me because I like it and it’s comfortable. But I like it and think it’s comfortable for all the reasons that, at the same time, upset and make me hate it. And those reasons make me think about the reasons why I’m glad I left-and though over the past five years my psychological attachment to the city has shrunk as I invest more life and commitment and emotion into Toronto, I still feel like I’m cheating on my old life sometimes. It reminds me of Morrissey’s immortal words:
The last night on Maudlin Street
Goodbye house, goodbye stairs
I was born here
And I was raised here, and
…I took some stick here
I left Windsor because I had to; there was nothing left for me to do there-or at least that’s how I felt after 25 years. When I visit I don’t exactly feel like a traitor, but I feel as if I’ve let the place down, like the city shrugs as I pass the city limits, saying “you again”. I want and try to care about what happens to the place, because big chunks of it are still inside me, and maybe if it goes I go too. But I’m always slightly relieved that I’m not responsible for it anymore, and that I can slink back up to Toronto on the 401, where new roots are slowly wrapping around that city’s buildings, café tables and sidewalks.
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