Why, in diverse Toronto, do different generations barely mix?

BUENOS AIRES—In Canada we hide our old people out of sight and we don’t much like to hang out with them. There’s little intergenerational mixing, which is the case in much of North America. When out socially, people tend to segregate by age. There are appropriate places for each group, but few that can effortlessly welcome everybody without somebody sticking out. Same rules apply to children and, especially, teenagers. Nobody wants to hang out with them.

We may not notice this until we go somewhere else. I’m spending two weeks in Argentina, and have been struck by how often the generations are together.

In Buenos Aires, old and young are out at the same restaurants and bars, late into the night. Kids walk with their parents on streets around midnight, or are asleep in strollers while parents have a drink and talk. At a tango performance the other night in a dark, boisterous hall, ages ranged from early twenties to people well into their seventies, all eating, drinking, and equally enthusiastic about the show, sitting at tables so close to each other our elbows touched when we moved.

Toronto’s rightly proud of its ethnic mashup. Why is it, then, that our generations barely mix?

I can’t remember the last time I was at a cultural equivalent in Toronto with people from the same span of ages enjoying such a vigorously social atmosphere. Whole parts of the city seem off limits to some age groups. A seventy-year-old at Dundas and Ossington at 10 p.m. would be treated like deer or coyote that made it’s way out of the ravine, lost in a sea of skinny jeans and beards, soon returned safely to the nearest Swiss Chalet.

It’s as if when retirement age is reached, people are expected to limit their socializing and give up on the rest of the city.

There are venues here in Buenos Aires that remain the domain of the young and young-ish, like discotheques, but generally socializing is much more fluid. In Toronto it ismicromanaged, relegated to very specific areas like main streets, where just the same it often faces resistance. Bars and restaurants are found throughout Buenos Aires’s residential areas, even on the ground floor of what would be condo buildings in Toronto, with people living just above sidewalk patios that are busy late into the evening — restaurants here only start to fill up after 9 p.m. There’s a level of comfort, with life going on at at all hours, that Toronto hasn’t begun to accept.

Though it doesn’t happen in mainstream, the generations do mix in pockets around Toronto, especially in the ethnic meeting halls,strip mall social clubs, and church basements belonging to cultures that have traditions of being all together socially.

Growing up partially in the Maltese-Canadian diaspora, with a culture similar to Argentina’s, I remember being one of those kids out very late, overhearing parents and grandparents conversations over rum and cokes and cigarettes, while we played under the tables, passing out exhausted on the ride home later. Those were the best nights.

It’s a mystery that with so many cultures in Toronto that mix intergenerationally, it hasn’t become part of our wider civic life.

Toronto Star May 25th
Wander the streets with the Star’s

Shawn Micallef on Twitter @shawnmicallef