When I was growing up in Rochester, NY, “the city” for me was Toronto. New York City was a dirty metropolis a world away. It may as well have been in a different country. I remember the one trip I took to New York in 1990. My parents and I took an Amtrak down from Rochester. I remember looking out the window of the train as we pulled into New York and seeing piles and piles of garbage. (It was the tail end of New York being “real.”) New York wasn’t my city.
Toronto, on the other hand, was awesome. There were cool restaurants and this cool mall on the water front. One time, my parents and I went to see a musical called Blood Brothers starring David Cassidy and, no joke, he was great. I really enjoyed it. We went to a really cool comic book store downtown. People call Toronto a clean New York. I don’t know about that but looking back, it just seems like a cool city. I haven’t been there as an adult but I know there’s a Second City and an improv scene, The Kids in the Hall are from there for Christ’s sake! I think I’d like it.
Honestly, though, I think I loved Toronto just because I loved staying in hotels when I was a kid. There’s something about the clean sheets and the mints on the pillows. Even if I needed to have a cot, that felt brand new. I think growing up I felt a little uncomfortable in my own home (the reasons for that are numerous and varied) but whenever I was in a hotel it just felt clean and different and a little luxurious and I loved it.
The first Toronto hotel that I remember was called The King Edward. It was a nice, classic kind of hotel. At the time, though, I really only cared if they had a pool. Upon entering a hotel I was like a drug sniffing dog. As soon as we entered the lobby, if I didn’t smell chlorine, I knew there was no pool and I was pissed. If I recall, The King Edward had no pool.
But then we started staying in this place called L’Hotel (for those of you who don’t speak French, that means “The Hotel”). It was steps from the SkyDome, the brand new stadium where the Blue Jays played. Not only could I smell chlorine in the lobby, the pool was split between inside and outside and the outside was heated! There was a mall in the basement of the hotel! A mall! Below street level! And the SkyDome had a Hard Rock Cafe in it! The entire complex blew my mind.
I think we stopped going to Toronto when I was in high school. I don’t remember a lot of vacations after middle school. I’m not sure why, I’ll have to unpack that at some point. But I’d like to return to the New York trip that I took in 1990 with my parents. For half of the trip, we stayed in a hotel that was smaller, not as nice, and I’m sure far more expensive than any place we stayed in Toronto. But for the second half, we stayed in our friend Mimi’s apartment. Mimi was one of my mother’s oldest friends. She had, and still has, an apartment in the East Village. I remember sleeping on her couch there and looking out the window at the buildings lit up at night. It was mesmerizing then as it is now. It was the same way I felt staring out the windows of L’Hotel in Toronto.
I think that part of the reason I like living in New York is that every place you live, unless you are fabulously wealthy, feels a bit like a hotel. You have a room with a couch and a TV and a space with a bed. There’s comfort in the simplicity of it. No one leaves a mint on your pillow and I’ll never live in a building where I smell chlorine but something about it fits.
I blame the underground mall and the Hard Rock in the SkyDome. That’s just too cool for a seventh grader to experience.
