Fifteen years ago, reading in my back garden just off Greenwood and Gerrard, I heard a sound so strange, so out of place amid the usual chorus of rumbling streetcars and rustling leaves I was used to hearing in my Leslieville neighbourhood, it took me days to identify it: clucking chickens. When I first heard the gentle “bruck bruck bruck” from somewhere close by, I was completely stumped.
It was only several days later, in the middle of the night, when I was woken by piercing shrieks and death wails that I twigged it: cock fighting. In Leslieville. I never found the exact source of the noise, but all summer my weekend nights were plagued by unholy screeching, always preceded by several days of contented, unwitting clucking.
Leslieville was a very different place then. I spent the first 20 years of my life there (I now call London, England my home), and I return to it every four months or so for a stay at my brother’s house, just off Pape. (I can’t stay in England for more than four months at a time—otherwise I start to lose my mind a bit. All ex-pats agree.) Every time I return to Leslieville, there is a new bistro, another up-market recycled furniture store. It’s one of the city’s trendiest places to live, especially for young families—and for good reason. Stocked with gorgeous homes, many of them shaded by row after row of soaring maples, it’s picturesque, well-serviced by streetcars, and within walking distance of the lake.
But when I was growing up there, it definitely wasn’t chic. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
The cock fighting incident was, though a bit alarming, mostly just amusing. There were other things I saw and heard things daily that were far from funny. Like the crack house bordering our backyard. I found pipes in the alleyway all the time. We could always tell what they were up to by the music they played. Rolling Stones? Smoking crack. Country music? Drinking.
They didn’t scare me, but it did freak me out a bit when the cops raided this old furniture store at the corner of Jones and Gerrard (across the street from my high school, Riverdale Collegiate) and found a pile of guns.
I often find it overwhelming to see the scale of change happening in Leslieville today. Walking down Queen East I barely feel at home.
Gone is the crumbling Bollywood theatre Gerrard Cinema—in its place stands the trendy, alt-cinema outfit the Projection Booth. Several doors down, where Gerrard meets Marjory, the crumbling Riverdale Cyber Café (an internet cafe without the coffee or working computers) has been replaced by the rustic Grinder Coffee, with mismatched wooden furniture and faux typewriter font emblazoned on the cups. Just south, Queen East now boasts an array of artisanal latté joints—Mercury Coffee, Te Aro (next to our Baby on the Hip), Dark Horse Coffee and Merchants of Green—all within blocks of each other.
Peckish? Get out early—Lady Marmalade, Bonjour Brioche, Hello Toast, Edward Levesque’s Kitchen all have mammoth lineups every weekend morning. Or a nighttime tipple? Queen between Broadview and Greenwood is thick with groovy cantinas, a vast departure from the days when the neighbourhood had little to wet your whistle save for or Jilly’s strip club. The Avro and Table 17 will have the ale for the discerning palate, while Rasputin and The Comrade can satisfy one’s cravings for Soviet chic.
Vestiges of the area’s working class roots remain. Across the street from Te Aro and the hip baby boutique, one can still divest oneself of unnecessary belongings at the Queen & Jones Pawn Brokers, and then pop next door with the newly acquired coin for a Molson’s at Queens Bar & Grill. Tasty Chicken House still reliably stands several storefronts down. Dangerous Dan’s—a cornerstone of east end coronary abuse—will hopefully never fall. No amount of retail face-lifts will ever render Gerrard Square anything less than the eye sore that it is.
Gentrification happens everywhere, all the time. But what’s happened to Leslieville makes me wonder if there is more to it. Is the shifting scene in this little corner of the city emblematic of the city’s increasing sophistication as a whole? It’s undeniable that Toronto’s roots can seem razor-sharp square—it was dubbed “The Good” for good reason. Only recently, really, could we rightfully claim to be considered a “world class city,” whatever that means. Before the Montreal exodus and the immigrant influx, Toronto was largely beholden to Presbyterian insipidness. But things are different now. We have Nuit Blanche and LED tennis. I’m oversimplifying, but you get my drift. And it’s not only cultural: When I was a child, I couldn’t even dip a toe in the polluted lake (my dog came out in blisters after every swim). Now I can enjoy a beer after a swim on the island’s nudist beach.
These changes to Leslieville were bound to happen. Stroll down Pape and you’ll see homes equal in beauty to anything you might find in the Annex. In retrospect, the neighbourhood was destined to turn into a modish enclave. Maybe the seeds were sown two decades ago with the arrival of Tango Palace (forever my chosen caffeine purveyor—I went on a date with my first boyfriend there when I was 15), Joy Bistro, Altitude Baking and a heady brew of antique shops, which all began to sprout in the early 1990s.
Gentrification has its annoying aspects, but it’s infinitely preferable to the crumbling deterioration the area suffered during my childhood. Or what I see happening in some parts of England now, where gorgeous Georgian terraced homes are left crumbling and squatted, and the unemployed, bored youth obliterate themselves with riots and horse tranquilizer, seemingly for lack of anything else to do.
The area is far more enjoyable now. There was something profoundly depressing about the east end 20 years ago. Riven by unemployment, it possessed the inescapable despair of a neighbourhood on the decline. Nothing looked on the up, everything seemed to have seen better days. The area couldn’t even support a Dairy Queen, formerly at Gerrard and Glenside (now it’s a Coffee Time).
Peaceful, leafy, turn-of-the-century neighbourhoods began to decay. Near my home was Blake Street, with one of the highest crime rates in the country. When I was 19, the only bars within walking distance were dimly lit, odd-smelling pits, like the Maple Leaf Tavern. Or the Ulster Arms Tavern.
“Leslieville” felt like a nowhere area, going nowhere. To the north was the Danforth—solidly middle class. To the south and the east, the Beaches—wealthy and perhaps a little too serene and relaxed. In between was our neighbourhood, branded “Leslieville” in what seemed like an attempt by city planners to lend character to what was only an interstitial filling, bisected by the unflinchingly gritty Coxwell.
My clearest memory illustrating the area’s deterioration is of a disused theatre. When my Dad, a rock promoter, walked me to school we’d pass by the unassuming building at 1298 Gerrard St. The storefront looked like any other, but empty.
“It’s a real shame,” he would say. “Inside there is a fantastic theatre. It hasn’t been used for years. Nobody seems to even remember it.”
Today, it’s the Centre of Gravity Vaudeville Circus, where children and adults can learn to juggle, fence and soar. And regularly home to adult circus content.
And that, unambiguously, is an improvement.
So, for that matter, is the transformation of a cinema into a haven for foreign films and documentaries. In fact it’s the oldest movie theatre in the city. Its conversion to a space devoted to classic films seems apt.
It’s far too easy to poke fun at cilantro garnished brekkies. But while gentrification may be irksome, it also represents an improvement in living standards. Is there actually anything objectionable about the sustainably sourced meat available at Rowe Farms or thoughtfully crafted furniture?
Still, concerns remain. I think, for example, of all the times my mother, an avid gardener, exchanged homegrown fruit and vegetables with an elderly Chinese woman from a few doors down who spoke no English. They kept up this wordless, friendly trading for years. My English teacher asked that I write a story about this, and I did. “That there is the very picture of what Toronto is supposed to be about,” he said.
So what will happen to the working class families, or the Chinese, Vietnamese and Indian communities, as property values are driven up? Is the neighborhood simply going to be homogenized?
On my most recent visit home, I saw a Starbucks on the corner across the street from my high school, Riverdale Collegiate, and I nearly lost my breath. It stood exactly where the sketchy burger shop Duk Shing once was, where you could get a chicken sandwich smothered in Kraft Italian dressing for $2, while downstairs piles of guns and cocaine were traded between the local mafia. That place was a part of my childhood.
I accept that nothing stays the same forever. And I like good coffee. But I will always miss something about Duk Shing.