The City Has Another Life After Midnight. I Spent Nine Years in It.

There is a particular stretch of rail corridor in Toronto that most people have passed a hundred times without ever stopping.

From a train window it is a blur — concrete and rust and the backs of buildings, the kind of visual noise the eye learns to ignore because there is too much of it and none of it seems to ask for attention. I know what is on those walls. I know who put it there, and roughly when, and what they were trying to say. I know this because I went and stood in front of it, sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes in the kind of cold that makes the air feel solid, and I looked.

Nine years of that. Before a single interview. Before the book had a shape. Before anyone else believed it would amount to anything, including, on certain nights, me.

The city has a completely different life after midnight. Most people never meet it.

What the city smells like at 2am

Diesel exhaust. The residue of a day's worth of buses and trucks, settled into the air and the surfaces of things. Then concrete — not a smell most people consciously register, but it's there, specific to certain structures, certain overpasses, the particular underside of bridges where the air doesn't move and the stone holds whatever it has absorbed across decades.

In winter there is cold underneath all of it — the smell of absence, the smell of warmth having left. In spring there is something green and wet from the ravines and the lake, carried inland on whatever wind is moving, arriving in industrial spaces where green things have no business being and announcing themselves anyway.

People in Toronto frequently complained that you couldn't see the stars at night due to the pollution and city lights. I had to smile a little at that, because I often saw the stars on my solo strolls. Really, all you had to do was be willing to look up once in a while in the quiet of the darkness.

In one of my conversations with a graffiti writer, he described the incredible peacefulness of painting in the city while everyone slept, then stopping to look up at the stars, and feeling incredible, and how so few people took notice of the everyday things that were beautiful all around them. They were always too busy rushing around to notice the important things. In many instances, I'd have to agree with him.

I learned to read a space before I could see it. By the time my eyes adjusted to whatever light was available — a streetlamp two blocks away, the ambient glow of a city that never goes fully dark — I already had a sense of the place from what it smelled like and what it sounded like and what the ground felt like under my feet. Gravel versus concrete versus the particular give of dirt over train ballast.

The walls came after.

What the walls actually are

Most people, encountering graffiti from a distance or through a car window, see surface. Color and form and letters they may or may not be able to read, which they either find appealing or don't, and then they keep moving.

What I learned, slowly, is that a graffiti wall is a palimpsest. Layers of work, some painted over others, some protected from rain by the overhang of a structure above, some faded by years of sun and weather into a ghost of what they were, visible as an undertone, a color shift, a shape in the paint that wasn't there in the top layer.

To read a wall properly is to read time. The newest work is brightest. Underneath it, if the artist didn't bother to completely paint over the old work, you can catch glimpses of the pieces that came before — the artists who worked this surface months or years earlier, whose work became the ground for someone else's. A conversation between people who may never have met, conducted across time, on a surface no one officially sanctioned.

I found this extraordinary every single time.

What it cost to be there

I was often alone and frequently in places that were not designed for easy entry or exit, at hours when the population of those places was not reliably benign.

I say this not because I want to appear courageous — I felt nervous plenty of times — I say it because it is a part of what the research actually required. The graffiti that told the most interesting stories was not the graffiti in sanctioned spaces or on legal walls or in the parts of the city that had been cleaned up and made presentable. It was in the corridors and underpasses and rail cuts and industrial margins where the city's actual creative underground had been operating for decades, out of sight and out of legal jurisdiction and doing extraordinary work regardless.

You could not study that work from the outside. You had to go in.

I went in.

What I brought back

Twenty artists' voices. Their actual words, their actual stories, their reasons and their histories and their understanding of what they were doing in the city and why.

The story of a culture that had been talked about almost entirely by people who had never participated in it — journalists, politicians, city officials, concerned homeowners — and almost never by the people who had built it from the ground up.

A 500-page book that began on those cold night walks. In the specific quality of attention you develop when you are standing in front of a wall that someone made in the dark, with their own money and their own materials, for no guaranteed audience, because something in them demanded to be expressed.

That quality of attention — the willingness to stop, to look properly, to listen deeply, to understand what you're looking at before you decide what to think about it — is what the book asks of its readers.

It is also, I think, what good books always ask.