DOES TORONTO EXIST? AND IF SO, WHY? They don’t call them the bowels of the earth for nothing.

Our city’s particular portion of the global bowel is located seventeen stories below City Hall, an ancient archives of pre-Toronto that is so foul in its Facts, so off-putting in the Historic Horrors it documents, so twisted in its undermining of our pleasant Civic Myths, that it wears its bowelesque nature honestly.

Only I, as your Mayor, and Thad Itchington, the City’s Ur-Archivist and Warden of All the Swans, have keys to this vault of truth-terror. It contains, on parchment both fetid and lovely to touch, the true purpose of Toronto --- the dark secret as to why it exists at all. I feel I can share it with you now, as I say fort-nightly to Mrs. Xanadu, if you will but endure some context…

Urban citizens, mired as they are in the muck of their thoughts, and in actual muck, can take for granted the existence of their city, without considering it could just as easily be, say, a turnip patch, perhaps the world’s largest. Nary a day went by, as I would amble down Yonge St., or an alternate Thursdays, up Yonge St., passing the potato chip advertising agencies, hairnet clubs, ukulele pawnshops, doorstop rental kiosks, bingo caller night schools and underwear incinerators that I wouldn’t think “surely there was a better, more moral and productive use for this space?’

I speak not as a cornpone advocate of the bucolic village, the misty-eyed hamlet or the sexually repressed rural assemblage of 1-2 people per square mile, but as a lover of cities, and a lover in general. My enthusiasm for big cities (e.g. the ready access a city like Toronto offers one to sample 140 varieties of denture cream, show off garish cummerbunds or snub blowhards like Pierre Berton) leads me not to question their being, but to advocate for a deeper understanding of their origins and purpose. Only with knowledge of the urbanic past can we, as citizens and civic leaders build the city of tomorrow, using the taxes of tomorrow and the union agreements of yesteryear.

Let’s take Paris, France, for example. Mostly thought of as home to the world’s finest lapels, lapins and inviting laps, it was first conceived of by a wealthy medieval baron merely as a source of raw materials for the manufacture and adornment of his many gaudy codpieces. But, with this codpiece compulsion came an array of craft guilds, crotch measurers, mud amelioration consultants, kooky French caterers and hangers-on, and hey presto, a city was born.

Or, in more recent times, the licentious and frequently driven-past city of Reno, Nevada was first constructed, mostly out of cardboard, as the set for the Eadweard Muybridge zoopraxiscope production of HARKEN UNTO MY CUFFS, a 19th century soft-pornographical head-scratcher. Its addled cast of actors lingered, as did their aromas, long after production ceased, and their presence spawned a dump, a pudding viaduct and a pet shop, three of the crucial building blocks of any city.

What of other great metropolises? From what dusty purpose did they spring? Miami? Intended to be the world’s largest towel-drying tarmac. Barcelona? It was meant to be a farm used to develop onions that don’t cause people to cry. Düsseldorf? Its intended destiny can be discerned from its very name, formed from the ancient Greek words ‘dussel’ for ‘duffel’, and ‘dorf’ for ‘dorf’.

And, so, what of our own beloved Toronto? John Graves Simcoe, the city’s founder and, if all had gone according to plan, its assassin, intended (according to a parchment document, written in his own cake-stained hand) for Toronto, then called York, to be completely denuded of its fertile soil.

Its fragrant mud would have been stripped from its innocent surface, and shipped back to Simcoe’s native England where he planned to make a fortune supplying the then-burgeoning market in mud-based dandruff treatments, so beloved by the scrofulous aristocrats of the town of Budleigh Salterton, known then as the experimental shampoo capital of Devon. But his dastardly plans went awry, thanks to the dermatological innovations of the enlightened Head and Shoulders families. And in the centuries that followed, Toronto developed into the shredder of dreams we all are distractedly fond of.

And so, when we curse Toronto’s persistent soup smell, its dingy Parcheesi parlours, its flame-sputtering escalators, and its general pastiness, we might be best advised to pause and consider the alternatives.