For some it’s the first ride on the Ferris wheel or the bumping cars. It might be that first night public skating and holding hands with someone of the opposite sex. For a lot of young people it’s Prom night. I guess it depends on when the parents in the equation think the son or daughter is ready to move from childhood toward adulthood. For me, that move came at an unusual moment. It came, after harassing my mother for months, when she finally relented.
“OK, OK,” she said. “You can go, but you have to go with friends.”
You see, when I was about 10 or 12 years old, the place we considered the ultimate destination was the Royal Ontario Museum. For us kids, in the late-1950s, living in what was the small village of Agincourt, on the outskirts of the borough of Scarborough, the ROM had all the cache of being a great escape. It had exotic insects from the South Pacific. It had weapons (with what looked like blood still on them) from Medieval Europe and North American aboriginal totems that stretched from the museum basement up the stairwells to the third or fourth floor. The ROM had models of ancient Greece and an Egyptian mummy. And, of course, it had dinosaurs!
But perhaps the most exciting aspect of the ROM was that it was located all the way downtown in the heart of Toronto. Could there be a better place to escape to? Could there be a greater adventure? And if we could go there almost alone, had we then left childhood behind? The ROM was the rite of passage.
I mention this because this week – on March 19 – the ROM celebrated its 99th birthday and by all accounts the people planning its anniversary events have big plans for the ROM’s centennial in 2014. Mind you, as Robert Fulford pointed out in a National Post story this week, the Royal Ontario Museum has enjoyed a prestigious history from its very beginnings. On March 19, 1914, the building was christened by Governor General, the Duke of Connaught (Queen Victoria’s son), hence the designation “royal.”
As Fulford added, the ROM has endured controversy – in 1936, for example, when an amateur prospector James Edward Dodd sold the curator an axe and part of a shield as being genuine Viking artefacts, and another in 1989 when a show of African sculpture was criticized by protestors as a racist exhibit. Despite the controversy, Fulford claimed the place has always redeemed itself.
“The ROM was the pace where [visitors] warmed themselves around the fires of culture,” he said. “It was the castle of time.”
But, you know, there was something else about a trip to the ROM that made it a rite of passage. In order to get there – all the way downtown – in the days when I was almost a teenager, it meant a bus trip down Dawes Road, a TTC transfer, and then a long ride westbound on the Danforth Avenue streetcar all the way to the intersection of Bloor Street and University Avenue. Like so many things about exploring when I was a kid, getting there was almost as exciting as arriving there.
And that’s where these so-called mega tourist destinations are going to find themselves in trouble in a few years. If they can’t get people up off their couches … if they can’t provide a genuine attraction more exciting than a computer game or a 99-cent app on a cell phone… if they can’t keep alive the human fascination for exploration and discovery, then they’ll likely wither and die.
I think that goes for any attraction, whether it’s sitting at the corner of Bloor and University in downtown Toronto or, for that matter, near Brock Street and Concession 6, at the Uxbridge Historical Centre (Uxbridge-Scott Museum), or north to Concession 7 and the Sanford Side Road at the Foster Memorial. For any big city attraction or rural community historic site, the onus is on those who orchestrate events, set up exhibits and organize tours to maintain that sense of excitement. The ROM is already hard at work chasing its 2014 customer base.
“Submit your favourite memories, reflections, photos, and spoken words to our chronicle of the ROM,” the ROM 100 website says. “Share with us your fondest memories, funniest stories and most memorable moments.”
The competition is thick for our attention from tourism promoters to casino operators to the video and smart phone game inventors. If the trip getting there and the experience upon arrival can’t match the virtual world at the end of a fingertip, a potential visitor will be lost. Maybe what all contemporary attractions need these days is a little parental trust and more kids eager to try the equivalent of a first solo ride on a TTC streetcar.