#ataratiri

I think we might all owe John Steckley an apology. In 1989, the Humber College professor was the one to suggest the name "Ataratiri" for the new neighbourhood that the provincial and municipal governments intended to build west of the Don River's mouth. Ataratiri—prononced "a-tar-a-TEER-y"—had been a Huron village, located right around here, before the Iroquois destroyed it in 1649. It was a "natural choice for a name," Steckley told the Star after a city committee okayed it, especially since the Huron once called the land the new development would be on home, too. When it came to what the word "Ataratiri" translated to, though, the newspapers at the time couldn't get their stories straight. The Star said it meant "soil, clan and strength" (March 22, 1989), "clay soil found near rivers in southern Ontario" (April 28, 1989), "clay soil by a river mouth" (July 14, 1989), and "supported by clay" (March 19, 1992). The Globe said no, actually, it meant "village by the river built on clay" (April 28, 1989 and May 19, 1989), "supported by clay" (March 7, 1990), "village by the water" (February 2, 1991), and "built on clay" (March 14, 1992 and December 22, 1995). Soon, after the millions-over-budget project was cancelled, the name became little more than a punchline: in an editorial titled "Boondoggle, in English," the Globe mused that the translation should be "village by a major expressway in a derelict industrial area prone to flooding, built on contaminated soil" (March 13, 1992). Eye Weekly (April 30, 1992) wondered whether "it's a PR person's word for 'confuse the hell out of the public.'" Later, the Financial Post (March 27, 2006) joked that it was "an old Indian word that roughly translates to 'Swamp of the Taxpayer.'" I had a hunch that what it really meant would matter, though. I'd been researching the project, and the name Steckley gave it, for a short feature I was writing about the West Don Lands, the new name for the new master-planned neighbourhood that's being built right now where Ataratiri was once supposed to go. (You can read more about what happened to Ataratiri there.) Across the southern and easternmost points of the neighbourhood, underneath Don River Park, there's something called the Flood Protection Landform, or FPL. When a once-in-a-lifetime storm hits, the FPL is designed to deflect the water surging down the Don out towards the Port Lands and into Lake Ontario; otherwise, it could flow over and flood downtown as far east as York Street and as far north as Front Street. And it turns out that what's doing the most to keep the Air Canada Centre from being underwater one day is layer after layer of strong, dense clay. It's built in "lifts," Waterfront Toronto’s Director of Parks, Design and Construction, James Roche, told me, meaning that “you place it, compact it, place it, compact it, place it, compact it,” until it settles, he said. The more research I was doing, the further away I was getting from a single, definitive definition of "Ataratiri." If it meant "village by the water," or "clay soil found near rivers in southern Ontario," then, yeah, sure, that'd be worth me knowing, but saying so in whatever I was writing wouldn't have added much. But if it meant something closer to "built on clay"—if it meant that "Ataratiri" had, a quarter of a century later, become a truer name for the plan that was actually getting built than the one that never did, I wanted to find out, and say so. John Steckley, fortunately, is pretty easy to track down. He's still a professor at Humber, and seems to have spent the last twenty-four years growing a prodigious beard, racking up positive reviews on Rate My Professors, and writing books, including a Huron to English and English to Huron dictionary. When I called him at his office, we joked a bit about how out-of-the-blue this all must seem, and then he told me what I'd been hoping to hear: that atara "usually means 'clay'" and tiri means "support." A good English translation of "Ataratiri," he said, is "supported by clay." Perfect. To the description of Don River Park and the Flood Protection Landform I'd written, I added one sentence about what Waterfront Toronto's James Roche told me, and another about how, though you won't catch anyone using it, Ataratiri might have been a fitting name for the neighbourhood after all. (Here, after all, was a neighbourhood—a city, even—supported in every sense of the word by clay.) There are only so many things you can fit on two tabloid-sized sheets of paper, though, and little historical asides, neat as they may be, don't always make it. In the course of editing, out both sentences came. It happens, but I can't help but feel a little bad for a name that was understood little and respected less, a better name than anyone at the time even realized. I know that when Barbara Hall, soon to be elected mayor but then a councillor, was interviewed after Ataratiri was cancelled and told the Star, crestfallen, that "those people who came up with the idea had a dream, and it was a good one then and a good one today," she meant Ataratiri, the plan. But I feel the same way now about Ataratiri, the name.