Happenstance, Episode 5 (featuring Jean Marc Ah-Sen)

September 15, 2022 7:00PM

Event Information:
The site of this episode is the Baldwin Steps, which sits perched on the shorecliffs of the great glacial Lake Iroquois, formed by glacial flow during the last ice age. When at the top of the steps, one can look out towards the downtown skyline and realize that the entire city —that for the sake of convenience we call Toronto—would have been underwater. Indeed the steps mark the steepest point of the former shoreline rising twenty-three meters high above Davenport Road. A permanent stairway was built in 1913 to replace an earlier wooden version. In the 1960's plans for the Spadina Expressway threatened the steps as well as the surrounding neighbourhoods. The Spadina Expressway represented a modernist desire for efficiency, separating living and working; walking and driving; consuming and producing. The proposal threatened the meandering logic of many neighbourhoods in this area. However, by 1971 a citizen-led movement (including Marshall McLuhan and Margaret Atwood) stopped the expressway at Eglington Avenue (present day Allen Road).

Jean Marc Ah-Sen is the author of Grand Menteur, In the Beggarly Style of Imitation, and a participant in the collaborative omnibus novel Disintegration in Four Parts. His writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Maclean's, Hazlitt, The Globe and Mail, Maisonneuve, Catapult, The Comics Journal, and elsewhere. National Post hailed his writing as "an inventive escape from the conventional." He lives in Toronto.

Original Instagram Live video

This event is part of Happenstance