ACCOZZAGLIA

You’ll have to cut me some slack me as I dust off the summer pollen and return to writing for both the LIMIT and Kodachrome Toronto project blogs. In lieu of these, I’ve tweeted observations probably far more than I should have. Between this and writing an eight-month-late term paper without requesting an extension, my substantive writing sort of fell to the wayside (the paper, I’m humbled but happy to report, was marked an A and recommended for publication).

As I rode my bike through Toronto under a persistent raincloud of the Brothers Ford, I found no shortage of topics to revisit on some future day. When I actually find time (ha), some of these should find some life on LIMIT.

I used this summer wisely to heal from my 19 months in Montréal. What wasn’t expected was just how long it took for me to return to an equilibrium of calm, sanity, and self-confidence — all lost when I was living across from Parc la Fontaine. I’m sorry, Montréal, but you can’t call that a “fountain park” when what you do is shut off and drain the fake pond on which the fountain is located, leaving it bone-dry for almost five months. What an ice rink opportunity needlessly lost. In short, it’s a fitting metaphor for Montréal.

So between reading dry theory, raising my first-ever garden (which has gone far better than I could have imagined! and it’s still going), writing a very dense paper, and cycling everywhere once again (just as I had before the Montréal accident), I am just now, here in September, feeling as if I’m able to pick up where I’d left off the day I moved — incidentally the day before Al Sheppard was killed by Michael Bryant.

I returned to a changed city, a hardened city, a noticeably more cynical city.

Toronto remains the same city with which I fell head over heels in love in May 1996 (I’d so marry it if only it were possible). That said, to witness its maturation is to affirm that in these short fifteen years — short at my advanced age, at least — the city finally found itself and its voice. And yet, it emerged more sceptical by consequence of this process.

The notorious trifecta of the G20, the 2010 municipal election, and the 2011 federal election took from Toronto the Municipality quite a bit of the agency it had managed to scrape together between amalgamation and the 2006 City of Toronto Act. Call it a kind of cultural adolescence from which we’re just beginning to emerge. We barely recognize this face in the mirror, but we know it must be ours. And in late 2010, we got the cystic acne. Gross, and ouch. Let’s hope we can keep our scarring to a minimum for when we get past these petulant and rash growing pains.

This was also the first summer in several years in which I didn’t keep a film camera by my side — not very often, at least. The post-dénouement of dedicating three years to documenting life and the city with the now-extinct Kodachrome film left me with this surprising sense of loss, emptiness, and even confusion. Where next? To what end, if any? How? What’s it going to look like? I guess it’d help to have my final 38 rolls scanned and posted to Flickr (once I can afford to have them scanned, that is).

I’d unwisely begun to rely on Kodachrome’s emulsion as my solitary creative palette, training my brain to see the world around me as it would render in Kodachrome’s punchy blues, reds, golds, browns, blacks and whites. It’s probably a bit like how Ansel Adams would picture the world in vibrant shades of grey. It became automatic.

I still unconsciously do this. Each time I start to reflexively think how great a subject before me would look in Kodachrome, my heart drops a little. This happens every time. Yesterday afternoon on Queen West and Duncan, some twenty-something, twee hipster boy in red-black flannel and black jeans was perched on one of the city’s older yellow standpipes. With a warming filter, I thought, hey this would look awes . . . DAMMIT! Okay.

So without a camera in tow, I started paying greater notice to more of the circulatory features of the city and in the way people engage with (and at) one another.

Very nearby my place is a “farmers’” market. Despite the scare quotes (uh, no one grows limes and bitter melons in Ontario), the quality and variety of produce outside the Weston Flea Market is ineffably astounding (as are the prices). Its function as a transitional market in a corner of the old City of Toronto (as in, within the east-west limits of the original 32 park lots drawn by John Graves Simcoe in the 1793, and south of Eglinton) remains largely unaffected by this continuing cycle of gentrification begun in Yorkville during the late 1970s. That is about to change.

[How to use the TTC to get to the Old Weston Flea Market and Farmers’ Market]

There is a Metro supermarket just west of Keele on St. Clair West, but there remains a functional barrier in the Weston-Mactier rail underpass (formerly known as a “subway” before we actually got, well, an actual subway). One can walk underneath, but as a woman walking alone after dark, it isn’t for the faint of heart unless you’re properly prepared for it. It is safer than it looks, but perception is 80 per cent of making a final assessment, fair or not. Yes, I made that up. The mega bingo hall on its south flank doesn’t really help with the optics of safety.

The fairly substantial intersection of St. Clair West and Old Weston Road is unquestionably on the verge of a major upheaval as mid-rise condos and compact-box retailing is slated for groundbreaking around 2013 around adjacent major intersections like Keele-St. Clair and Dupont-Lansdowne. There are two reasons for this.

The first is the completion of the streetcar line in 2009 along St. Clair West. Fixed rail has long wooed developers — even LRT and streetcar rails. These can serve as an baseline for predicting the expected capacity of daily transit user traffic — at least that which it is designed to carry. Developers want numbers, of course. They principally see the world in numbers. The infrastructure upgrades, built with longevity in mind, now poises this corner of the city as one of the next “it”-spots for development as freshly-installed rails are set in place for the next several decades.

The second is the area’s proximity to adjacent zones of gentrification now considered relatively affordable — relative to other areas of the old city, that is. My neighbourhood, Earlscourt, abuts the Junction. The Junction is 2011′s West Queen West, ca. 2006. Starbucks, which merely responds to gentrification rhythms, opened its first location in West Queen West in 2005 and its first in the Junction in 2010. Unlike with the former, it’s tougher to say who’s the ho that’s all at fault for this.

A single rail line casually perforates the area, lending to this implication, however unfounded, that north of the tracks is on the “wrong” side. Indeed, when riding up Osler Street from Dupont, where cute little boutiques have begun to mushroom in the midst of old, inner-suburb-styled businesses, the demography and timbre of the housing stock and the people moving about abruptly switches at Cariboo Avenue, just 15m or so from the at-grade rail crossing. Logically, this social divide makes no sense. Psychologically, it does.

The once exclusive-then-seedy Parkdale has, in its present transition, absorbed some of the housing demand for people wanting to live next to (and who are willing to price out modest income residents near) the dramatically more costly West QueerQueen West (“Drake, you ho …”). The rail corridor west of the Gladstone on Queen West was once that psychological divider between the two neighbourhoods. These days, not so much.

I expect that this phase of gentrification will similarly push out modest income residents to the next-affordably viable geographies (including, yes, poorer hipsters — which evidently do exist, I am confidently told by moderately reliable sources). This gentrification is already endemic to “Blansdowne”, the newly-monikered Junction Triangle, and the old Junction neighbourhood (also the last “dry” district of the city before capitulating in 2000). So Junction’s Parkdale would be, uh, where I live — which means I suspect I’ll be priced out by about, oh, 2015 or so. Then I’ll probably have to move to the arse-end of Etobicoke (think of the IKEA shuttle route from Kipling station) or, worse, back to Montréal.

So as I look around, I sense that this farmers’ market emerged fairly recently as a vital low-order service for local residents. The flea market has enjoyed a much longer life. Whereas there were once small greengrocers in the immediate vicinity, what remains today are iron-grated convenience stores and a Cloney Time for grabbing smokes, pop, and coffee. Even during the very short time I’ve lived in this area, this market has expanded from two-and-a-half days (Friday afternoon to Sunday) to four (all of Friday to Monday). Whereas the market had been closing at 9p, it is now staying open as late as 11p. Eating well means being able to affordably buy greengroceries with relative ease, right?

This market serves several newer communities of Canadians. The variety of produce tends to reflect this: eggplant (seven varieties), breadfruit, spicy mango, bhindi (okra), and bok choy make regular appearances beside the garlic, lettuce and red disgusting delicious apples. At times, the selection can be fairly pedestrian and even conservative by Toronto’s standards (I’m still cross about there never being tomatillos, like, ever), but I know of no other place like this nearby which offers a semi-outdoor farmers’ market as an “essential” service — as opposed to the niche, one-day-a-week boutique farmers’ markets, a characteristic of post-gentrified hamlets-within-a-city. Annex “West”, I’m looking at you.

This phenomenon isn’t the fodder for nostalgia, either: this is how people get food when a centralized supermarket chain fails to serve a community by redlining any possibility for development — particularly in a community that is, well, “visible” and very working class.

As gentrification processes (agitated by — let’s own it — a lot of us reading this) alter this area, it will not only change the dimension of this farmers’ market and companion flea market, but it will also push out the locally established community into other more remote, poorly-served areas of this city, out into areas where old Toronto or its informal suburbs never set foot. (Yes, Toronto was built up by informal suburbs, lack of plumbing, and non-planning, especially after the 1913 public health by-laws came into effect). Couple this with the infrastructural termination of Transit City, and we will have created a perfect storm which University of Toronto professor David Hulchanski is going to smugly say, “See, I really told you so.” Actually, Hulchanski doesn’t strike me as the smug type, so don’t take me so literally here.

So I suppose my move to Earlscourt is to serve the urban studies observer in me and to allow in real-time a way to pay careful notice to the delicate, steady, and sometimes imperceptible shifts — very kaleidoscopic, really — of a gentrification process in motion. While it’ll be this very process that should probably make it too expensive for me to live here in just a handful of years, that’s really not what’s important here.

What is important is to remark on the ways in which those living here now (and who have been living here for a generation or more) will be unceremoniously and steadily given the boot and how that displacement will play out in this decade. The problem with this displacement is that it further polarizes Torontonians — both participatory citizens and hands-off taxpayers alike — who are egged on by the continuing disengagement of a social security and the lionization of a un(der)-regulated, private sector chessboard (and the anti-participatory municipal governance on which it is fuelled).

The vote-them-in-and-give-them-white-card tack is symptomatic. It’s hardly unique, but it is a model which seems to more closely ape the merciless, filthy close of Toronto’s 19th century — not the civil postwar model we and our elders experienced. The cruel picture comes from realizing that people in good faith are supporting an approach to governance which will never substantively go to bat for them. And because their engagement with that governance is next to nil (perhaps a vote at the ballot box, nothing more of substance), they only notice the shiny objects and smooth talkers being parroted before them — like football arenas, monorails, and internet-averse city councillors — not the harm being done to their neighbourhoods and to their community fabric.

Come get a look at Toronto’s quickly diminishing past while you still can.