Saved By the Sidewalk
How one skinny Toronto street helped me cheat death
Cowan Avenue is a delightful street to come home to. Lined with old trees and two busy sidewalks, it feels like what one urban designer calls an outdoor living room, and models what city planners call the skinny street.
Smack dab in the center of Parkdale, a village just west of the Toronto city core, Cowan Avenue is barely wide enough to drive carefully beside tightly packed parked cars. It makes pedestrians feel safe. Though many residents own cars, most walk or ride the streetcar. Their front windows, very close to the sidewalk, act like eyes on the street, maintaining law and order. Best of all, people walk up and down the sidewalk at all hours of the day and night.
Which is exactly why, when I was stabbed five times in my own home halfway down the block, I survived to tell the tale.
Had I lived in the suburbs, with 30-foot-wide streets, cul-de-sacs, yawning front lawns, gaping garage doors, spacious homes owned by absent commuters, and deserted sidewalks, I would be dead.
It happened on the sunny afternoon of June 16, 2000. My partner Fiona was in the height of psychosis for the second time in three years. When she had tried to kill me two weeks earlier, the police jailed her for a weekend, giving me time to find asylum in a friend’s spare room in High Park where she could not find me. I arranged for a friend to look after the kids until I could work out some solution. Fiona was now housed in St. Joseph’s Psych Ward and taking meds to get back to normal. Or so we thought.
At 3:30 I drove to Fern Avenue Public School to pick up my 12-year-old daughter and we drove homeward. I was excited to see her and my 8-year-old son Tommy after at least a week. The plan was to share a spaghetti supper with their caregiver and a friend, in our own home on Cowan Avenue. Rhonda was expected to arrive home with my son within a few minutes, and Sherona said she would be back by 5:00.
I parked the car a few doors away, and Mimi and I made our way up the sidewalk. As we approached the cedar bush outside our home, we both froze in shock. Fiona was sitting on the front step.
She was obviously not in her right mind. Her eyes were bugging out of her head and she was talking funny. Mimi knew and I knew: this was serious. Aside from the rage I felt against the doctors, who had notified nobody of their decision to release her in spite of her obvious psychotic and volatile behavior, and in apparent contempt for the compromised safety of her family, adrenalin began swirling ferociously in my blood and brain. Emergency planning kicked into high gear.
First, keep Mimi safe. Then minimize my own risk until our friends arrived. It shouldn’t be long. Once they get here, they can call the police. There was no way I could call the police: Fiona would rip it out of my hand and smash it to pieces on the brick siding.
I quickly dismissed the option of running back to the car. Mimi was not fast on her feet, and Fiona could have easily overtaken her. Through seven years, surviving many domestic assaults by Fiona’s hand, I had learned how to protect myself and keep her somewhat manageable. The key was to move calmly and deliberately.
As people walked up and down the sidewalk, I opened the front door. Fiona sat down at the living room couch watching my every move while Mimi went downstairs to her bedroom. As more people walked up and down the sidewalk and cars passed by, I stirred the spaghetti sauce at the stove, a few feet away from our large kitchen window. Maybe 30 minutes, I thought. I will just keep stirring and breathe deeply. Someone else walked by our window. It wasn’t Rhonda. It wasn’t Sherona.
I smelled something funny. Cat pee. I covered the saucepot and moved towards the smell. I walked past Fiona into the bathroom. What on earth? The kittens had peed on the bath towels lying on the floor. I threw the towels into the tub and turned on the hot water.
A thud on my back. I lunged forward into the tub, my hands reaching for the tile wall for balance, hot water gushing over my sneakers.
“Fiona!”
She loomed in front of me with a long kitchen knife that glistened under the bright bathroom light. As I turned, she stabbed me in the chest and belly. Then, laughing, she slit my throat.
A thought rang crystal clear in my head:
It’s either you or me. I refuse to die. I will kill you if I have to.
This was a tall order, since Fiona has muscle and size and could easily overpower me. But a strange mix of endorphins and adrenalin took charge of me so fierce I felt no pain. After an extended struggle — all while she laughed and sang — I managed to wrest the knife from her hand.
I grabbed the large piece of firewood on the floor and banged it against her head. She just laughed. I grabbed hold of her dreads with both hands and pummelled her head against the floor tiles. She kept singing. I tried to scream for Mimi but no sound came out. Something was blocking my throat.
Another thought came to me.
Get to the sidewalk. Someone will save me.
I tried to run, but she grabbed me. I darted into my office and started dialing 911 on my phone. She yanked the cord out of the wall, smashed the phone against my head and pinned me against the open door.
The message in my head got louder:
The sidewalk. Just get to the sidewalk.
She twisted the collar of my polo shirt around my neck to choke me. I looked into her bulging eyes. Without thinking, I extended both arms and bent over towards her. My loose blue shirt, now a much darker color, flew off me. Fiona lost her balance and fell backwards onto the floor, my shirt in her fist.
I turned and ran. Down three stairs to the living room, across the kitchen, out the front door and down the front steps. Head spinning, body covered in blood, I lay down on the sidewalk.
Somebody’s knees beside me on the curb. Somebody’s hand to my bleeding neck. Hurried footsteps. A warm shirt against my neck. More hurried footsteps, then a towel. “Yeah, 101 Cowan Avenue. Looks like knife wounds. I’m a doctor, but she’s bleeding bad.”
A doctor? I looked into the eyes of the man with one hand around my neck and the other holding his flip phone. I asked him his name, mouthing the words as I whispered. Blood and saliva had flooded my lungs.
“Dr. Rifaat Kamil. I work at CAMH.”
The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Of all things.
Neighbors gathering around. Voices, shouts. My dear Mimi standing beside me wailing, a neighbor holding her tightly. My beloved Tommy kneeling over me bawling, “Don’t die, Laurie, please don’t die.” Rhonda crying. A siren getting louder. Slammed doors. Uniforms and a stretcher underneath me. “We can’t get a pulse.” Two minutes later, I am in the ambulance, zooming down the Expressway to St. Michael’s Hospital.
The next day, after surgery and a tracheotomy, I woke up in the Intensive Care Unit with tubes sticking out of all parts of my body including my throat, nose and belly. The surgeon introduced himself and informed me how lucky I was.
“The doctor who rescued you says you missed death by ten seconds. Ten seconds earlier, and he would not have arrived in time. Ten seconds later and he would have already passed your house and would not have seen you. You could have bled to death. He was just passing by when you ran out of your house. You lost so much blood they could not get a pulse.”
Ten seconds. My rescue had been engineered in an instant by complete strangers walking down the sidewalk, a driver, and next-door neighbors. I learned later that, as soon as I reached the sidewalk, the doctor driving by stopped his SUV and ran to my aid, cell phone in hand. A passerby joined him, yanking off his T-shirt to help stop the blood flow on my neck. Someone else ran towards me bearing a towel. They seemed oblivious to their own danger. They did not care that whoever attacked me could also attack them. They just flew into action.
My kids and I never stepped foot in our beautiful house again. To this day we miss Parkdale, and we certainly miss Cowan Avenue. It offered us a rich urban experience that I have discovered is relatively rare.
We loved being a half block away from the Community Centre, and the Public Library, and a few blocks away from the butcher. We loved being close to the King streetcar and a short bicycle ride to the Ontario Place, enjoying free fireworks and air shows. We miss the street-long Halloween affair and street-long yard sale in June.
Homes are occupied by folks as diverse in color and class as the globe — rich and poor, black and white, renters and owners, old and young, blue-collar and Bay Street, ex-cons and school trustees, single entrepreneurs, young families with newborns, sober and drunk, sane and not so. At breakfast, lunch and dinner, my partner Fiona and our two kids would watch people go back and forth.
Some of these sidewalkers were dressed for work, heads held high, anxious to catch the 8:05 streetcar. Others sported worn-out shoes, grubby jeans and a carefree gait on their way north to the corner store, returning five minutes later drinking chocolate milk through a straw. Some walked in pairs eager to play the new game they borrowed from the Vietnamese shop on King Street where a window sign declared “Video rentals” and “Fresh fish.” Mothers with strollers and young children sauntered back and forth. Every day, winter and summer, a demented old lady would pause on her journey, stand behind a parked car, stare at the license plate, grumble something unintelligible with a wagging index finger, and proceed on her way shaking her head.
By late afternoon, sidewalkers heading south looked downwards more often, weary from a day’s work. By nighttime, the children disappeared but the pace continued — a few more crazies, more couples arm in arm eager to get home and make love, groups talking about the movie they just watched at the Revue Cinema, and the odd drunk meandering across the road or passing out on a front lawn. Cars passed by every minute or two.
This constant activity not only endeared us to Cowan Avenue. It turned out to be the difference between life and death. Jane Jacobs and other city scientists can explain exactly why.
The public peace of cities, Jacobs claims in her 1961 classic, The death and life of Great American cities, is not kept primarily by the police. “It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.” A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street.
“Eyes on the street” become natural proprietors of the neighborhood, notes Jacobs, simply because people love watching other people. We may like to see a lovely landscape or a seaside vista, but our heads will turn irresistibly when people arrive on the scene. We watch them walk, fly, skate, laugh, talk, cook, run, cycle, ski, swim and play. It’s not nosy. It’s not a violation of privacy. It’s a natural mix of caring and curiosity, and it’s in our DNA.
Observation turns to action when we see something amiss. While living in both New York City and Toronto, Jane Jacobs witnessed the “thousands upon thousands of people who casually take care of the streets and observe everything that is going on.” It’s a basic form of entertainment that doubles as “do-it-yourself surveillance.”
The more people use the sidewalk, the more interesting it is to watch. The more interesting it is to watch, the safer it becomes. The formula seems too simple to be true. “Interesting” equals “safe”? That’s what it comes down to, and that is why Jacobs harped on it for decades.
How do sidewalks get busy? People need a place to go. If there are no destinations within walking distance in both ways, the sidewalks will be deserted. This is why Jacobs and the most successful city planners emphasize mixed-use neighborhoods.
With Cowan Avenue, for example, residents head north towards the corner store on King, the King streetcar, the shops on King, then further north to Queen Street with its own iconic streetcar, the grocery store, the shops and restaurants at the center of the village, and the Community Centre and Library.
Your typical suburb offers none of this walkability. Many suburban residential mazes are, at their best, boring, and at their worst, downright spooky. Few people ever use the sidewalk in the suburbs: they all use their cars, or what some call “isolation chambers” that behave as antisocial tools often bordering on weapons.
With nowhere to go within walking distance, sidewalks remain a waste of a city budget. Many homes are also too far away from connecting transportation, which discourages would-be pedestrians and encourages driving. Even if the suburbs did have busy residential sidewalks, pedestrians are too far away from the kitchen windows or the odd front porch for anyone to see clearly.
Further, most suburban residents are not at home during the day. If not already at work, they are imprisoned in what bikers call their cages, drumming their fingers on the steering wheels and poising their right foot over the brake waiting for the bottleneck to clear. Nobody is home looking at the sidewalk, and there is nothing interesting to see anyway.
Cowan Avenue sports what Jacobs calls “intricate sidewalk ballet,” a dance between the public and the private. Neighbors in cities are essentially strangers who silently agree to respect each other’s privacy, while enjoying the comforting presence of ordinary public human activity. “A good city street neighborhood,” says Jacobs, “achieves a marvel of balance between its people’s determination to have essential privacy and their simultaneous wishes for differing degrees of contact, enjoyment or help from the people around.”
Narrow streets with parallel parking on the curb are essential to this balance. Though often deemed difficult to navigate for emergency vehicles, on June 16 it took two minutes for the ambulance to arrive halfway down our block, navigating a lane only 9 feet wide. In Portland, Oregon, one of the most notable innovators of the new city, the Fire Chief himself promoted skinny streets and parallel street parking to ensure a thriving pedestrian life.
I imagine my near-death scenario someplace else. What could have happened in ten seconds? Had we been living in the suburbs, the typical large front lawn would have taken me much longer to cross, and would have required more energy. If I had made it to the sidewalk, I would have lost more blood. Minutes would pass before a neighbor spotted me, if indeed anyone was home or looking out their window. I could not have screamed: I had lost my voice. If a neighbor saw me, they would then have had to cross their own lawn or cross the street. How long would that have taken them? By the time the ambulance arrived, would I have still been alive?
I owe Cowan Avenue my life. Of course, I was not saved by a sidewalk. I was saved by sidewalkers, a doctor driving by within a yard of the curb, and my neighbors. After they ran to my aid, they stood on the sidewalk watching the ambulances drive south into the afternoon sun. They gradually dispersed, returning to their homes and resuming their post at their front windows, no doubt a few degrees more vigilant than before. They remained kind strangers and wondered whatever became of us.
This story is a tribute to them. They may claim they were not heroes — they were merely doing their jobs. They may say this is what a community is all about and they are just good neighbors. I agree. All they needed was a skinny Parkdale street and a sidewalk within a few feet of their front doors.
