Stroll - Gerrard Street
Last week's Stroll was about Gerrard. We have since found out that the garden that was planted in the Carlaw parkette is supplied with water from the Fire Station across the street -- they pull up their truck in the alley and fill the cistern up. It's nice when the city seems to work like this.
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Stroll
The Wild Wild East
July 13/2006
To celebrate the end of the Canada Day weekend, we left a friend's house on Canada's most famous street, De Grassi, and headed east on Gerrard. Just around the corner is a storefront painted with slogans like "Drunk drivers are lousy lovers" and "Welcome to Metro, 156 languages spoken, including French" -- a 1990s axe still grinding publicly away and a rare example of curmudgeon-graffiti.
That Gerrard can still support this kind of weirdness makes it more interesting than some more celebrated, gentrified parts of the city. It's a mix of residential and commercial, where the lines between the two are often blurred. Storefront windows look into makeshift living rooms lit by harsh fluorescent tubes, while some front porches are computer and electronics stores. Maybe it was the heat, or the holiday, but we encountered a series of shirtless men standing on their front stoops, most with their hands on their hips, silently surveying the street.
There is a little forgotten-in-plain-view park at Carlaw that backs onto the railway tracks. A local woman named Shannon took it upon herself to dig up the lawn in one corner and plant a vegetable garden, complete with compost bins, little brick walkways and water barrels. My De Grassi friend says the Halal Meat store nearby has started planting here as well.
Beyond the Carlaw underpass is Gerrard Square, one of Toronto's less successful urban mall experiments, currently undergoing a complete renovation. The Square lost its anchors (Sears, BiWay) and then found new ones (Staples, Home Depot) and in the process has been turned into a stucco fortress. I've found myself on more than one occasion in that Home Depot, somewhat panicked and surrounded by burly contractors, trying to find the one item that will make some problem go away, making railing against big box stores more difficult.
Past Greenwood is the Ulster Arms, a dive tavern that is the last old Orange Toronto bastion before the street gives way to the much less dour India Bazaar, "the largest marketing place of South Asian goods and services in North America." It's dominated by the ever-expanding Lahore Tikka House. The restaurant always had a chaotic campsite look to it, but now they're building a two-storey restaurant that will dominate the street and be one of the first South Asian establishments to build its own new structure. Further west, some of the stores expand onto the narrow sidewalk selling cane juice (a year's worth of sugar intake in one cup) and roasted corn. It probably drives blind folks and bylaw offices alike crazy, but it makes this one of the city's more fun walks.
Posted by Shawn Micallef on 07.21.06 @ 10:29 AM EST [link]
