Penn Station: 1910-1963. An urban renewal victim.

Last August after 30 years I made a return visit to New York City which back then was a very different place; but then so was Toronto.

Toronto in the 1970s was just coming into its own, still experimenting with multiculturalism, outdoor cafés, art, drama, all the things that New York in spite of all its flaws had in abundance.

After returning from the Big Apple in the early ‘70s I would look around Toronto’s then-grey dull streets, the rotting harbourfront, the lacklustre stores and boring restaurants and think, “Man how I wish I was back in New York!”

However upon my return from this latest trip I felt completely different as Toronto over the last 30+ years has become a vibrant, modern, clean and exciting city that can hold its own against Paris, Rome and New York, which it couldn’t do all those years ago.

New York and Toronto are very similar cities; we are both the largest cities in our countries, we both have the tallest buildings, largest stores, greatest restaurants, biggest theatres and an ethnically diverse population. Plus our histories are very similar.

One of the reasons the early British colonists changed the name York back to the original Toronto in 1834 was because people were starting to call us “Little York” as opposed to “New” York.Toronto began to really boom that same year when the Erie Canal expanded, thus providing us with a direct trade link to New York City some 25 years before the first rail connection was established.

As both cities grew, mass immigration became the key to each other’s success and with the establishment of stock exchanges great banking empires started to take a foothold that by the 1920s saw New York and Toronto build immense skyscrapers that would dominate the skylines.

Toronto and New York also went through an urban renewal phase starting in the mid 50s in which New York lost one of its great architectural treasures, the Pennsylvania Train Station.

However the demise of Penn Station and the battle to save it also would trigger a people-led historic preservation movement that eventually would give Toronto one its great treasures, the renowned Jane Jacobs.

Penn Station, built in 1910, was one of the largest public spaces in the world covering more than seven acres and even though it made for an astonishing entrance to New York City, it was demolished in 1963 to make room for the present Madison Square Gardens.

Jane Jacobs was an American-born urbanist, activist and author who made it her life’s work to oppose expressways and making cities and neighbourhoods more livable for people and less friendly for cars.

In 1962 Jacobs as the chair of the Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway got that downtown expressway plan shelved, thus saving most of historic Greenwich Village.

In 1968 after many fights with New York’s powerful urban planner Robert Moses, Jacobs moved to Toronto where she promptly became a leading figure in stopping the proposed Spadina Expressway that would have laid waste to our Annex area.

One of Jane’s great successes here in Toronto was her significant influence on the renaissance of the St. Lawrence Neighborhood, one of North America’s finest mixed-housing development successes. Jane died at the age of 89 in 2006 here in Toronto.

As Jane was getting to know her adopted city I was getting to know the one she left behind. As exhilarating as New York was when I would visit in the early 1970’s, it still was a dirty and dangerous place where looking over one’s shoulder was a survival technique.

Thirty years ago Times Square was a scary destination, home to drug pushers, streetwalkers, pimps, hustlers and XXX movie houses. The graffiti-coated subways were appalling, the waterfront was unwelcoming, and the average tourist would never dream of going up to Harlem or into Chelsea or SoHo which back then were filled old ramshackle warehouses with rusted cast-iron facades.

Today New York has a whole different look and feel. Times Square has been wiped clean of anything remotely obscene and, as if in homage to Jane Jacobs, partly closed to traffic. The once-forbidding warehouses of Harlem, Chelsea and SoHo have become New York’s latest fashionable addresses. The crumpling harbour of lower Manhattan with its decaying Fulton Fish Market has been completely reinvented as a tourist Mecca and the subway that can take you there has been scrubbed down.

Yes, some have called it the Disneyfication of New York but for the first time I was completely at ease there. I never felt I was in a big, loud and unfriendly city as I once did. In fact, I felt much like I do in Toronto, something I never ever would have said all those years ago.

Join me April 16-18, 2010 for my first walking tour in New York City. This all-inclusive trip will include return airfare, airport transfers, 2 nights at the New Yorker hotel, dinner, and an express trip up the Empire State Building PLUS 3 guided private walking tours around NYC including Broadway, Lower Manhattan and Fifth Ave. The total all inclusive price is $1,298 (Canadian dollars per person based on double occupancy; extra for single supplement). Full details and booking information can be found on my website www.brucebelltours.ca under NEW YORK CITY tour. Please call Karen Kettle 416-449-0931 to book this unique trip.