There Will Be Gardens

Elisabeth Anne MacDonald teaches English at the University of Western
Ontario.

As a memoir, this book would probably be of little interest to the
social historian intent on details and dates. But it does live up to the
promise of the backcover blurb to provide “a map of a city’s
mind.” This is a memoir of the east end of Toronto, an area bisected
by Queen Street East and dominated by the “Doom Dome,” the tin
cupola of 999 Queen Street—the Ontario Lunatic Asylum. Although the
book’s collected memories are never specifically located in time, they
are loosely attributed to the Depression and a period described as
“postwar.” Boissonneau leads the reader on a walk through the
streets of a former Toronto, pointing out physical features of the urban
landscape, offering glimpses into the lives of its inhabitants, and
showing “how streets become matrixes shaping people’s lives.”

This is not a nostalgic text. The author describes the “grey presence
of the streets”; she recollects the “look of poverty . . . the look
of neglect” and the “wasteland atmosphere.” Her entrée into the
lives of the women and children she fleetingly recalls—a few men
appear in these pages—is her apparent role as a case worker, which is
reflected in the vignettes of hardship and loss. Her memories are
interspersed with those of Fred, who recalls an even younger Toronto.

Neither historical document nor urban narrative, There Will Be Gardens
takes the reader into an almost forgotten past and, without nostalgia or
false sentiment, conveys a brief vision of a city’s soul.