COLUMN ONE : Baseball’s Gift to Toronto : The World Series draws eyes to a city that often says it gets no respect. Stodgy to some, a global example to others, it is cosmopolitan and offers amenities nearly forgotten in the United States.

“As a . . . transplant from New York, I am frequently asked whether I find Toronto sufficiently exciting. I find it almost too exciting. . . . Here is the most hopeful and healthy city in North America, still unmangled, still with options.”

--Jane Jacobs, urbanist

“Oh, for a half-hour of Europe after this sanctimonious icebox.”

--Wyndham Lewis, artist, writer and onetime Toronto resident

In a year marked by a racial mini-riot, a grueling recession and a national-unity crisis threatening to pull Canada apart, doleful Toronto has suddenly fallen back in love with itself.

The city that bills itself as “the most livable in North America”--and yet whose residents have raised self-deprecation to an art form--will today become the first foreign venue to co-host major-league baseball’s ultimate production, and thus lend a little factual integrity to the term “World Series.”

“People will now get to see what a first-class city Toronto is,” beamed a triumphant Blue Jays outfielder Joe Carter in the happy hours after last Thursday’s win over Oakland, which gave Toronto the American League pennant and its World Series berth.

Until Thursday, the Blue Jays had contributed handily to Toronto’s Rodney Dangerfield complex by playing brilliantly during the regular season, making it to the American League playoffs four times and then three times losing when it really counted. Crestfallen Torontonians had come to call the team the Blow Jays.

Now, Toronto hoteliers, restaurateurs and taxi drivers look forward to a rain of tourist dollars that some estimate will total $8 million over the course of the Series. It is widely believed here that Americans would do anything to keep the Series from going to Canada--conspiracy theorists even speculated that the umpires would see to it that Toronto lost--but now that Toronto has triumphed, self-conscious residents are expecting to see their city, at 2.2 million the largest in Canada, showcased on TV broadcasts that last year attracted more than 22 million households per game.

This year, those millions will see a city that may often be derided as stodgy, reserved and, yes, even sanctimonious--yet a city that visitors from the Great Neighbor to the south find stunning in its cleanliness, distinctive neighborhoods and relative racial harmony.

Even as Canadians scorn Toronto (someone here once produced a radio play called “We All Hate Toronto”), foreigners dream of copying the place.

Peter Ustinov once likened the city to “New York as if run by the Swiss.” An American economic-development commission has urged U.S. cities to follow “the Toronto experience.” And nearly a quarter-century after moving here, Jane Jacobs still calls this city “about the best” in North America.

Toronto is livable in the way many American city dwellers can remember only from a generation or two ago. Women can walk the streets downtown after dark without terror--which is convenient, since it gets dark at 4:30 here during the long, dreary winters. (When it’s really cold, they can walk underground, through the downtown’s sensible, if confusing, six-mile rabbit warren of tunnels, restaurants, movie theaters and shops.)

Arts patrons enjoy clean theaters where the brass is polished and the seats don’t have chewing gum stuck to the bottoms. Commuters aren’t affronted by graffiti-coated subway cars every morning, nor do they have to avoid all eye contact with fellow passengers. Nature-lovers don’t have to drive out beyond the suburbs to enjoy free-flowing streams and unmown grass; Toronto is veined with densely wooded ravines, many of them with long, rambling foot paths.

So clean is Toronto that an American film company shooting here in 1987 had to strew garbage up and down a local street to make the location look like a credible New York. During lunch break, alas, a city garbage truck moved in unannounced and picked up all the rubbish; the movie-makers had to call City Hall and beg to get their trash back.

Toronto boasted a successful anti-freeway movement in the early 1970s, which means there are few highways crossing the downtown, and consequently few obliterated neighborhoods, dank underpasses or noisy roadside slums. Downtown streets, while congested, are slow-moving enough to permit the safe passage of hand-drawn rickshaws in the summer. (These old symbols of British colonial rule are not pulled by the poor, frail and elderly, as in Calcutta, but by burly young men who insist that they enjoy working out in the streets while earning money.)

Perhaps most telling of all, a visitor can walk, ride or drive all over Toronto, from the waters of Lake Ontario in the south to the sprawling light-industrial parks of the north end, and never see anything that would compare to a South Bronx or a South Central Los Angeles.

To be sure, poverty, crime and traffic jams can all be found here. The number of homeless has swelled in recent years, although Torontonian homelessness still ranks well below that of American cities of similar size. The unemployment rate is at a frightening 11.5% this year, and the number of people using the Daily Bread Food Bank has tripled since 1985. Yet despair and utter hopelessness have not claimed whole neighborhoods, as they have in America.

As for crime, Torontonians think they are in the grips of a wave of lawlessness, what with several teen-age “swarmings” this year and an upswing in bank robberies during the recession, and because handguns--which are restricted in Canada almost to the point of an outright ban--have been used in a growing number of crimes.

Yet the statistics that so shock Torontonians pale when compared to those for American cities. Last year, when the murder rate hit 80.6 per 100,000 people in Washington, D.C., it was a paltry 3 per 100,000 in Toronto.

Perhaps more than anything else, what makes Toronto such a desirable place to live is the flood of immigrants arriving here from all over the world. Canada, like the United States, is a nation of immigrants, and more than a million Italians, Greeks, Portuguese, Hungarians, Chinese, Somalis, Indians and others have settled in Toronto since World War II.

Canada selects its immigrants largely on the basis of their education, wealth and potential contribution to the economy, so those who get in are often highly motivated, talented professionals.

However much Torontonians may fret about their city’s perceived failings, these foreigners clearly see it as a mecca. In 1987, when a rusty old freighter carrying 174 illegal immigrants from India made landfall in a Nova Scotia cove, one of the first Sikhs to splash ashore--carrying his attache case as he made his way through the surf--flagged down a local resident and asked how he could get a taxi to Toronto, more than 1,000 miles away.

As in the United States, Toronto’s newcomers have filled jobs at every level of the economy, from taxi drivers and cleaning women to fancy medical specialists. (The Toronto researcher who--with a team from Michigan--recently identified the defective gene that causes cystic fibrosis was a Chinese immigrant.)

But unlike the United States, where immigrants are expected to assimilate into the national melting pot, Canada makes special efforts to promote official “multiculturalism” and help its immigrants stay in touch with their separate traditions.

Multiculturalism, while annoying to fiscal conservatives who believe that Ottawa is lavishing hard-earned tax dollars on samba parades and other frivolities, has in fact transformed Toronto from a dour bastion of Anglo-Saxon uptightness to a lively center of festivals, interesting restaurants and multilingual radio stations and newspapers.

No longer must Torontonians drive two hours to Buffalo if they want to drink and have a good time. Today, they can gossip in a Greek coffeehouse, buy their glass noodles from a Chinatown shopkeeper, take in a little Ukrainian dancing at a lakefront folk festival and, when the fall grape harvest is in, perhaps sample their Italian neighbors’ homemade jug wine.

That latter possibility helps Toronto’s fanciers of strong waters bear one of the little crosses of life in this city: There are few neighborhood bars, liquor is heavily taxed and bars close at 1 a.m. Post-game revelers during the World Series will be set back a minimum of $5.75 per six-pack of the cheapest domestic beer, and if they make the mistake of swilling it in the great outdoors, the police will take it from them.

Which gets to the big gripe about Toronto: its moralistic, prissy side.

“This is a city where everyone looks as though they’re on their way to band practice,” grumbled Warren Burnett, the noted Texas trial lawyer and poor people’s champion, recently in Toronto on a visit.

An example: The hot Canadian pop group Barenaked Ladies was barred from performing at civic events in Toronto because officials were offended by its name.

Another example: Only this year did Toronto and the surrounding province of Ontario finally decide that it would be all right to let stores open on Sundays--and then only after fighting for years over the issue with area merchants.

The great Sunday-shopping debate was argued in its final years along lines of wealth and social class (would the greedy merchants and strip-mall developers be allowed to exploit the impoverished workers?), but history suggests that the ban had more to do with Toronto Puritanism than with social justice.

Amateur sports teams weren’t allowed to play here on Sundays until 1949. Playgrounds were closed on the Sabbath until the 1950s, and the Lord’s Day Alliance tried to prevent motorists from using their cars. Older residents say they can remember the days when not only were the shops closed on Sundays, but curtains were drawn across the display windows, lest any sinners take a peek at the merchandise.

And speaking of curtains, in the 1930s Toronto had a police chief who used to send stopwatch-wielding constables out to the theaters, with orders to send the curtains crashing down if an on-stage kiss lasted longer than 20 seconds.

When Emma Goldman, the turn-of-the-century anarchist, traveled to Toronto, she so impressed the local comrades that they asked her to stay permanently, offering to foot all her bills. But Goldman said she didn’t want to live out her life in Toronto (“I would risk it for a year,” she ventured), complaining that “the libraries in Toronto were lacking in modern works on the social, education and psychologic problems occupying the best minds.” She went on to quote a local librarian as reportedly saying, “We do not buy books we consider immoral.”

So much for books. As for liquor, a typical verse from an old poem entitled “Toronto the Good” says it all:

O beautiful city, Toronto the Good,

Awake to thy danger, and do as you should.

If thou wouldst no longer be misunderstood,

Then close up thy bar-rooms, Toronto the Good.

Somehow, even locked as it was in its rigid Victorianism, Toronto still managed to give rise to a number of breakthroughs and world firsts. The paint-roller was invented here. So, in 1930, was Pablum, that now-commonplace mixture of wheat meal, oatmeal, cornmeal, wheat germ, bone meal, yeast, alfalfa and minerals that is credited with an immediate drop in infant mortality rates. Ginger ale was the brainchild of a Toronto chemist--hence the name Canada Dry.

And North America’s first discount store, Honest Ed’s, was opened in Toronto in 1948; it remains to this day a garish beacon unto bargain-hunters.

This year, baseball-mad Torontonians are fond of pointing out that George Herman (Babe) Ruth hit his first professional home run here, during a 1914 exhibition game at Toronto Island Stadium.

And then there is the SkyDome itself, the 3 1/2-year-old stadium where Toronto’s share of the World Series games will be played. A hulking white igloo not far from the shore of Lake Ontario, it is a favorite of many American League players and fans, in spite of its artificial turf. Its fully retractable roof was an engineering first--no moving parts extend beyond the edge of the building. Players say they can actually see high flies against the gray, well-lighted ceiling. Fans say there are almost no bad seats.

The SkyDome is remarkably well-equipped. Besides the playing field, it also has a health club, seven restaurants and bars (including a Hard Rock Cafe and the continent’s largest McDonald’s), the world’s biggest television screen (three stories high by nine stories wide) plastered across one side and a 348-room hotel, 70 of whose rooms have panoramic windows overlooking the ball field.

Financing all this was not easy, of course. Construction was supposed to incur a total debt of $22 million; the debt is now more than 10 times that. Even though the Blue Jays are breaking all gate records for major-league baseball--just over 4 million fans attended this year--the stadium hasn’t even been able to service its interest. The restructuring of its finances has led to numerous scandals over cost overruns, sweetheart deals to concessionaires and the question of who will ultimately foot the bill for it all.

One memorable May evening in 1990, a SkyDome-related scandal of a more prurient sort erupted during a Blue Jays-Seattle Mariners game. In the seventh inning, a couple in one of those panoramic hotel rooms evidently assumed they were behind one-way glass and did something that men and women often do in hotel rooms, but usually with the curtains closed.

Encouraging cheers went up from the crowd as more and more spectators tuned in to the fun. Binoculars swiveled away from the base paths and upward to the action above. Wags joked that the SkyDome should be renamed Exhibition Stadium. Both Blue Jays and SkyDome management were enraged and urged the city police to press charges.

But the police wouldn’t comply (it would be impossible to prove criminal intent, they said), and however frustrated that may have left the SkyDome brass, Toronto’s chronic detractors might take it as a cheering sign that the city is taking yet another step away from its traditional moralism.

“World class? World shmass,” said Toronto Life magazine in an article recalling that incident, among others, under the headline “Great Moments in Toronto Sex.” The article admonished Toronto’s chronic fault-finders, urging them to dwell instead on all that is good here:

“The truth is, Toronto is one great city--period, full stop, end of discussion.”