Eli Comay and Toronto Planning

UBC Press and I recently held a launch party for Planning Toronto, my book on Toronto’s planning history, and a stimulating evening it was for me, interacting with so many of the people who had helped in the book’s birth and development. One person I could not talk to, but whose name came up in several conversations, was Eli Comay, a planner at the heart of Toronto planning affairs in the 1950s and 60s who had been central to the book’s genesis some ten years ago but who had died in 2010. The launch brought him vividly to mind.

I first approached Eli in 2002, when starting what would turn out to be years of research into Toronto planning history. He was quite willing to meet and talk, so we did, then and later – maybe once or twice a year for the next four years. At first he served mostly as a source of information, but as my knowledge grew he became more of a sounding board for my developing ideas. In both capacities he was invaluable.

He was a truly unique man, possessor of an extraordinary combination of opposites: folksy but erudite, candid but private, a teller of both stark truths and tall tales, to name only the first few incongruities that come to mind. I was not always sure what to make of what he said, especially at the start of my research when my ignorance left me so vulnerable – those English planners in Toronto, he said, always had three initials – but from every meeting with him I came away having learned something.

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