“The dirty sugar factory on the water / Should smell sweet“
–Metric, “On the Sly”
Along the waterfront in Toronto’s Port Lands area is a small patch of sand called Sugar Beach. Like a typical city public beach, it is lined with hot sand, matching Muskoka chairs, and hefty beach umbrellas (these ones are permanent and Millennial Pink, which from the fading stickers on the bottom of each seems to be part of a collaboration with Beefeater Rose Gin). On the hot, muggy days of Toronto summer, when the humidex crawls above 80 percent and the only place to go is somewhere with air conditioning or along the lake, the deck chairs quickly fill with city dwellers seeking the shade of an umbrella.
On a recent weekday, I perched on my deck chair, digging my feet into the sand to find the coolness under the hot outer layer. On my left, a man in a business suit and half-unbuttoned shirt was taking a work call on his Bluetooth. In front of me, a family with young kids slathered sunscreen on their skin. To my right, a man in a bucket hat with no shirt was practicing handstands.
Going to Sugar Beach is kind of like going to any other beach in Toronto, except it’s extremely compressed, about a city block’s worth of sanded area, and you can’t touch the water, which is on the other side of a guard rail. Oh, and there’s a giant tanker welded to the concrete next to you, and a big office tower behind you. Sugar Beach isn’t a natural beach, it’s an installation that was created in 2010 on the concrete slab of what was formerly known as the Jarvis Street Spit.
Sugar Beach was the winning design in a contest over what to do with the space, beating out two other final proposals from design firms (a line of weird mechanical arms and a square with a weather-reflecting pixelated art wall). According to an article in Spacing, the design “[draws] inspiration from the Redpath Sugar Factory that sits on the opposite side of the slip, [making] link with the industrial heritage of the waterfront by connecting it thematically to the nearby factory.”
As far as I can tell, this thematic connection goes only as far as the name. But still I enjoy going to Sugar Beach. There is something intensely Torontonian to me about lounging on a patch of beach next to the industrial-gray concrete of factory spires.
***
I became a Metric fan when I was thirteen or fourteen years old. My father had just started a job with the corporate office of a Canadian airline, and we were taking our first family trip abetted by free international flights. This was before seat-back TVs became standard in airplanes, and I was looking for something to do while I waited for the shared screen to play something I wanted to see. I realized I could plug my airline-issued headphones into my seat’s armrest and flip through pre-populated “radio stations”—prerecorded playlists categorized by genre. I flipped the stations a few times, and suddenly I stopped, arrested by the best song I had ever heard.
The singer was a woman, and her voice was innocent in its bell-like clarity and girlishness, until she dipped down almost parodically low in her register for the la la las of the chorus. The sound was energetic and synthy, without the impenetrableness of techno. The lyrics were perfect for a malcontent on the cusp of teenagerhood. Dead disco, dead funk, dead rock and roll…everything has been done…
I’d caught the song halfway through and the DJ must have announced the name at the top. But, I realized, if I listened long enough the playlist would start again from the beginning. I sat through the entirety of the programming before it looped back around: Metric, “Dead Disco.” I wrote that down, and as many lyrics as I could catch, in a notebook so that I could look it up on the internet when I got somewhere with a computer. By the time we landed, I’d managed to catch my new favorite song a couple more times, and I spent the vacation humming it to myself, trying to keep it in my mind until I could get back home and find the CD at the mall.
A few years later, Metric would release an album, Grow Up and Blow Away (2007), a remastered version of the band’s first-ever recordings—an unreleased album recorded in 1999 and 2000 when the band consisted only of singer Emily Haines and guitarist James Shaw. (The album’s original release was killed when their first record label went under). In one of my favorite songs on the record, “On the Sly,” Haines sings,
My old flame broke the twelve bar blues, just to prove he could
He pays the airline DJs now, he is everywhere.
Strange to me that I was introduced to Metric by an airline DJ. Somehow, in my head canon, I logged this connection as important.
I loved Metric then, but Grow Up and Blow Away continues to be one of my all-time albums, somehow rising above the cringey nostalgic attachments of teenagerhood to something more transcendent. Even though it is their earliest work, the lyrics on the record feel more resonant to me, and the more experimental tracks—the playful back and forth of “The Twist,” Haines’s slightly whiny wailing on “Hardwire,” “Rock Me Now,” which is mostly a spoken-word poem—are loose, unpolished, genuine. No matter how many times I’ve listened, it never feels rote.
The album’s release coincided with my first iPod, and I listened to it like I hadn’t listened to much else before then—pressed straight against my eardrums, in the privacy of my little white headphones, a hermetic world no one else could access, where Emily Haines could breathe the jazzy plaint of “Raw Sugar” right into my ear.
When I love art, I don’t necessarily want to know the artist—in fact, I sometimes go the opposite way, refusing to learn about their personal lives. I don’t know why. Maybe I like to preserve some kind of weird magical fiction, a belief that this thing could be mine—that this song could have sprung into being fully formed, purely for my benefit. I didn’t know much about Metric as a band, except that they had formed in Toronto. (Emily Haines was part of the loose, ever-evolving membership of Broken Social Scene, singing on “Anthems of a 17-year-old Girl” and “Almost Crimes,” some of their best songs).
It was shortly after moving to Toronto in 2017 that I first went down near the waterfront, along Queen’s Quay, and saw the towering script of the Redpath logo and Sugar Beach’s pink umbrellas. Spinning around and taking in the towering condo buildings, the human-hive tessellations of windows and the towers still half-built next to swinging cranes, I suddenly understood Haines’s seemingly random invocation of “raw sugar” next to the image of “high-rise graves.”
It’s “On the Sly” that provides this essay’s epigraph. Again, in my head canon: that sugar factory is the Redpath factory, in a shared Raw Sugar universe of Metric’s turn-of-the-millennium Toronto—a city that so exemplifies and echoes the themes that haunts their lyrics: the shiny surfaces, the empty consumerism, the urban alienation, the relationships that don’t quite connect, the private moments accidentally caught out, the constant paving over of the “old world underground,” a culture and city caught in a cycle of helpless destruction and renewal.
Though I can’t prove Haines wrote “On the Sly” about or even in Toronto—though the timing seems to line up with her and Shaw meeting here in the late 90s—somehow everything about this city seems packed into that line about the sugar factory. It should smell sweet. The song doesn’t say how it actually smells. It seems a potent metaphor.
“Toronto the Good” has a swelling ego masking an inferiority complex. It’s never quite shaken its hyper-conservative, rusted-out town roots. It can never quite decide what the city wants to be, or what to do with itself. In the Port Lands, just east of Sugar Beach, a renewal project is now under way, which includes relocating the mouth of the Don River—or rather, moving it back to where it should naturally be, after the hubris of trying to control it created years of flooding and other infrastructural problems.
As the Toronto Star put it, “this city has a long tradition of fantastical waterfront schemes.” These include, in brief: “Harbour City,” a residential community on infill lands between the city and the Toronto Islands which would have canals inspired by Amsterdam and Venice; several plans for a massive waterfront amusement park; a site for an Olympic Village should Toronto’s Olympics bid be successful; and an enormous 20-story glass pyramid proposed and designed by architect Buckminster Fuller.
In 2011, then-city councilor (now premier of Ontario) Doug Ford proposed the city populate the Port Lands with the world’s largest Ferris wheel, a monorail, a “boat-in hotel,” and a 1.6 million square foot mega-mall.
All these ideas have been in service of a formerly industrial area that, frankly, no one seems to be able to decide what to do with. As a source in the Star article, a PhD student studying the history of the waterfront, puts it, “Time after time, we have periods of long-range planning with multiple stakeholders and then there’s a change of leadership and all that planning gets thrown in the lake…We have no collective memory.”
When I moved to Toronto, the plan was Sidewalk Labs: a Google-backed “smart city” that would integrate technology with residential living. There would be heated roads! Algorithms would run city infrastructure! Wooden skyscrapers would ease environmental impact! Machine learning would announce a new era of urban efficiency.
Instead, Google pulled out and the plans were scrapped in 2021. It was also criticized for being a nightmarish vision of surveillance capitalism, in a city where, famously, racial profiling through carding (another form of surveillance) has perpetuated a disproportionately high rates of police violence and arrests in Black and other minority communities. Thousands of cameras would have lined the streets, parks, and stores, greedily “harvesting” all the data possible as people moved through their days—as if capturing our online browsing wasn’t enough.
Biking through the Port Lands to Sugar Beach, there are construction crews moving huge piles of land. There are new bridges, smoothly paved bike paths, streams and re-greened hills covered with indigenous plant life. There are large pieces of public art. It looks like something might actually—finally—be happening.
Of course, they tore down the giant T&T Supermarket where families would go on weekends to load up on groceries and eat steamed buns and crisp duck in the food court. A historic lift bridge was removed last year. Other heritage buildings have been preserved, like the 1920s fire hall that is being relocated and is currently sitting on a lift in a pile of dirt. Every development in Toronto is haunted by the ghosts of what came before. I’ve come to know that in the eight years I’ve lived here. I’ve learned to fear the blue-and-white NOTICE OF A PROPOSED CHANGE TO THIS SITE signs that signal a beloved spot soon to be torn down in favor of a condo building. I’ve also had my personal neighborhood losses: the old-school steakhouse diner, the ice cream parlor, the Indian grocery. I’ve seen lofty plans flop, whether that’s trying to get people to live in the surveillance state of a smart city or trying to get Torontonians to pay too much for chinos at Nordstrom Rack.
Toronto is a dirty sugar factory. What comes out the other end seems pure and sweet, but you don’t want to know how it got that way. You would think that the production of sweetness would be sweet, itself, that the waterfront would be bathed in the heady aroma of caramel. Toronto has a slick veneer, but the interesting parts are the messy parts, the parts that are less interfered-with by corporate interests. Sugar Beach is one version of Toronto, but so is Bloordale Beach.
A guerilla art installation by artist Shari Kasman, the “beach” was active for a whole year between 2020 and 2021 in the empty lot of a stalled construction site. Like the more polished and official urban beach down by the sugar factory, this one had a patch of sand and some deck chairs, and signs declaring its purpose. During the time the installation was active, the space garnered tons of positive Google reviews, an array of signs along the fence (including augmented construction signs), a small community garden, a turtle hatching area, and more.
The interesting parts of Toronto are the sugar factories on the water next to the high rises and the dive bars on the corners, and the kids making TikTok dances on a fake beach in a construction site and the passersby setting up a street memorial for a raccoon. Sometimes Toronto is a city that feels like it’s actively trying to expel its own residents, with rising rents and hostile infrastructure always threatening our ability to be here. But that doesn’t change the fact that we continue to be here, keep trying to make it our own.
In her novel Denison Avenue, Christina Wong traces the twin problems of displacement and gentrification through a character’s slow, years-long routine of walking through Chinatown and the surrounding neighborhoods, picking up cans. The character has already been once displaced, when the city razed part of Chinatown to make room for the City Hall building; now, as property values skyrocket and the neighborhood changes, she is at threat of being displaced again. Flipping through illustrator Daniel Innes’s accompanying drawings, I watched the city change, as I had already seen it once, in fast-motion; the book takes place from around 2017 to present, the exact time I’ve lived in the city. In Innes’s illustrations, the changes I’d noticed and failed to notice flipped by on the page, set down in black and white ink. A memorial.
The third verse of “On the Sly,” with its dirty sugar factory, feels plaintive. Like many of Metric’s songs, it’s preoccupied with stuff, what we are amassing and when we will hit the limit. How much is there? The feeling of “where else can I live?” is also a familiar one as a Torontonian. My friends and I say this to each other often. Where else is there to go when you’ve built a life somewhere so unstable? Where do you go when you get renovicted? When my partner and I moved here, we got a good deal on rent and stayed too long, our rented basement now so under market that we can’t afford to move to a new apartment.
There is no line of lyrics after this verse. The pace seems to slow, backing vocals echoing the lyrics (on the water). The line should smell sweet rises up expectantly in pitch, but is followed only by a breathy soar of Haines vocalizing: ah ha haaaa. And back to the chorus.
Perhaps there is no resolution, not much else to say.
—
Even such a small plot of sand as Sugar Beach attracts sunbathers, laying out with their paperbacks or with sleepy heads under towels. I’ve never seen a public space in this city go unused.
Squirming out of the deep pocket of the beach chair, I decided to walk along the shaded path next to the water, eager to keep out of the heat a little longer. Biking through the construction of the Port Lands, I was met with a mix of loose blowing dust and sewage-y smells, but here, as the wind shifted, there was a sweetness—something delicious on the air, mingling with the brine of the lake and the persistent city scent of sunscreen on sticky skin.
I rounded the corner, and it was only a restaurant’s waterfront patio. A woman sipped white wine, and her daughter dug a spoon into a scoop of ice cream and smiled.
