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12/09/2005: "Stroll: Parliament"
I'm in Malta right now and walking and walking - hope to post something soon (have been posting over at the Spacing Wire). However, here's this week's Stroll.
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Stroll
By SHAWN MICALLEF
Cabbagetown's balancing act
Parliament Street, at the moment, seems to have achieved the perfect balance between gentrification and the urban hodgepodge that makes cities exciting. We struggle with these forces in many neighbourhoods across Toronto, but Parliament can handle places like the grand Laurentian Room and crummy Coffee Time next to each other and million-dollar homes a stone's throw from St. Jamestown high-rises.
Hardware stores, antique stores, nice pubs like the House of Parliament, the Halifax Fish Market and the venerable Ben Wicks co-exist just fine with a beastly Esso Station, the No Frills and some rather sketchy bars towards Gerrard, where some dude recently told me he would break my bike if I didn't give him some change (I didn't and he was bluffing). In the summer, the lovely old lady who works nights at the Coffee Time says things like "Hi dear" as she sits outside, watching the Laurentian's high-heeled smokers smoke.
It's remarkable that these places exist and don't seem to be under pressure to move. Old-timers argue that the real Cabbagetown was south of Gerrard, destroyed when Regent Park was created. But the idea of a neighbourhood is what's important; the borders that define a place often shift.
Old Cabbagetown was an Orange bastion of mostly working-class Irish Protestants, a Little Belfast devoted to crown and empire. Cabbagetown was political currency, as Morley Callaghan explained in 1987: "If you were from Cabbagetown, it meant you really belonged to Toronto. It was the working man's area, where there was a neighbourhood feeling, where people were sort of proud to be living and they produced politician after politician. To be a member of the Orange Lodge and born in Cabbagetown had all kinds of splendid possibilities. A man like Tommy Church could become mayor six times, always proudly announcing that he was a Cabbagetown boy." I don't recall Barbara Hall ever mentioning she lived in Cabbagetown.
The only workers in Cabbagetown now are there for the eternal upkeep of those old homes (the sound of hammering will never cease), many with genuine McCausland stained glass windows (a very special thing, Cabbagetowners will tell you). At Halloween, a candied version of noblesse oblige plays out, as the neighbourhood welcomes a flood of children from St. Jamestown -- one home spent $175 on candy and was out by 7:30pm. None of this will solve class divides, but the mix that plays out on Parliament between very different neighbourhoods is Toronto at its best.
SHAWN MICALLEF BLOGS AT WWW.PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY.CA AND WWW.SPACING.CA/WIRE.
