In an effort to identify the "it" factor that makes the west Toronto Junction area a happening locale for arts and culture, the current Eye Weekly lists some of the neighbourhood's attractions. In a review, ostensibly of the Hole in the Wall (a narrow, brick-lined bar on the south side of Dundas just west of Keele), reviewer Edward Keenan's gaze seems captured more completely by the streetscape stretching beyond the confines of the eatery he's reviewing.

And that's hardly a wonder, given some of the more prominent Junction-area attractions Keenan points out: the Rue Morgue House of Horror, the home of Rue Morgue, a "horror in culture and entertainment" magazine (and yes, it really is located in a former funeral home), Pandemonium Books (a great source for local poetry and classic records), Big Daddy's DVD shop on the north side of Dundas near Clendenan, not to mention (although Keenan does) the Dundas strip's collection of dollar stores and cheque-cashing outlets and the occasional daytime street-walker.

Clearly the Junction is a neighbourhood in transition. And yet, Keenan finds himself reaching to define the qualities that make the Junction interesting. It's not prohibition, the Junction's dubious claim to fame, ending only in 1998. It's not the eclectic collection of pubs and restaurants serving a surprisingly easy mix of middle class and derelict patrons. It's not even the (very short) list of "indie arts notables" Kennan cobbles together.

Keenan describes the Junction as combining a mix of "pre-" and "post-gentrification" qualities. And perhaps this mixture is what makes the Junction unique. Because, unlike the Queen West triangle, say, where the local arts community is engaged in a violent struggle over development planning, the neighbourhood transitions here have, for the most part, been far more gradual and lower key. That may change as pressure for higher density growth in the city core reaches the Junction, but as Keenan observes, it's a big of a slog from the Junction to downtown. Rail lines press in on the community from several directions. Apart from the annual Junction Arts Festival, the most exciting event here in the past year was the suspicious fire in a local slaughterhouse. Our most identifiable community centre is the No Frills on Pacific.

And, perhaps above all, the residential mix here is what distinguishes the Junction from Parkdale, the Annex, Kensington Market, or other Toronto neighbourhoods where gentrification has become a hot-button issue. According to the City of Toronto's current Social Profile (.pdf file; further summary information is available here) of the Junction area, the population is divided equally between renters and homeowners, an especially significant figure in an area comprised mostly of houses and low-rise apartments rather than high-rise apartment towers. Twenty percent of the local population is classified as "low income". What this means, in practice, is that any Junction street is likely to consist of a variety of single-family and tenant-occupied homes. We have few large rooming houses, and most of those are fairly discreet. The architecture here isn't interesting enough to attract the most stereotypical gentrifiers: most of the people buying homes here (and, yes, pushing up the real estate values) seem to be young families starting out. It's a standard pattern here for new homeowners to rent out part of the house while paying down the mortgage in the first years, prior to beginning the long process of renovating one story at a time. What this means, in the end, is that the kinds of rapid, vast transformation occurring in Parkdale seem less likely here because the Junction, as a neighbourhood, does not exhibit the same kinds of radical polarities between rooming house renters and developers with dollar signs in their eyes. Many Junction residents are a little of both. In many ways, perhaps, like Leslieville in the east end, we're a small town in the middle of the city, a balanced neighbourhood whose form and fortunes shift gradually from decade to decade. As a Junction resident and one-time urban planner, I hope I'm right on this.

What does this all mean in terms of arts and culture in the Junction? Well, while Keenan is kind of enough to mention me in his short list of the Junction's "indie arts notables", he might well have added many more. Liz Forsberg, lyricist and guitar-player with The Phonemes (and contributor to the new edited anthology, The State of the Arts: Living with Culture in Toronto; Coach House, 2006), rocks out here. I'm told that Basil Papadimos, author of The Hook of it is (Emergency Press, 1989) lives in the neighbourhood. And the Junction's been home to arts notables for many decades. In Toronto: A Literary Guide (McArthur, 1999), Greg Gatenby lists "High Park North" as having been home to Toronto poets Gwendolyn MacEwen and Raymond Souster. Souster has written extensively about this part of the city, as does author Terence Green in his Junction-focused novel A Witness to Life (Forge, 1999).

If you want to see the Junction in its purest form, I suggest you pay a visit to the visibly unassuming Baker's Dozen donut shop, located where Dundas West meets St. Johns Road at an angle. If you buy coffee and a pastry and sit out on the umbrella-dotted patio on any mild morning, you'll encounter a vivid mixture of southern Europeans (Malta Village hasn't given up the ghost entirely, not yet), representatives of the local constabulary, parents with strollers, artists, writers, BIA representatives, and a couple of guys from the Salvation Army hostel, all holding forth on the weather, the community, and life in Toronto. That's the Junction on a Saturday morning.

[In conjunction with the Imagining Toronto project, Amy Lavender Harris contributes commentary about Toronto literature and city culture on an ongoing basis.]

[Junction image by Lone Primate and used here under the aegis of a Creative Commons license.]

1. Nice piece Amy. I never really travel thru the Junction anymore (I used to when I played summer hockey hockey at York and I had a car—going thru the Junction from Little Italy was the quickest way to Black Creek Drive).
   I mean to get up there but I never have a specific reason. Hopefully, I will wander up one of these days as soon as it gets nice.

   Posted by Matt Blackett  on  03/11  at  02:24 PM

2. Hey Matt;

   I’d be happy to give you an unofficial Junction tour anytime. There are three good used bookstores on Dundas West between Keele and Runnymede, and lots of nice little restaurants. A visit to the Rue Morgue House of Horror alone (Dundas just west of Keele) is probably worth the trip. There’s a new candy shop (“ACME Candy Shop”) at the NW corner of Dundas and Pacific, and a Hairy Tarantula comic/toy shop, and Cornerstone Antiques, and Post and Beam Reclamation (architectural salvage, including some gorgeous finds).

   And then there are the alleys, rail junctions, the walking bridge over the tracks near Dupont, great opportunities for dumpster diving, a few interesting abandoned houses, a little-known synagogue, and our little colony of stray and visiting cats.

   Posted by Amy Lavender Harris  on  03/11  at  04:29 PM

3. Those are good thoughts, Amy, though I’m skeptical that the gentrification won’t proceed as it did in Parkdale. Since I moved in in July, what seemed to be a brothel was evicted from across the street from me, some kind of rowdy party hangout next door was shut down and a rooming-house/crack den was evicted from two doors down. Seems like when I arrived, they started throwing all the neighbourhood undesireables off the block. Not sure how I feel about that (in theory, bad, in practice, happy).

   My piece really was supposed to be a review of The Hole in the Wall, though I purposely meandered into it after a walk-through the neighbourhood. As a recent immigrant to the Junction from the Annex, I’ve been falling in like with the neighbourhood a little at a time.

   Perhaps we could invite Matt Blackett up for a visit—to give him that excuse to come up he’s been looking for—and I could join that tour after breakfast at my place?

   Posted by Edward Keenan  on  03/11  at  09:45 PM

4. Welcome to the neighbourhood, Edward. I can guess which street you live on (and would probably be wrong!). Like Kensington, the fortunates of the Junction seem to ebb and flow from season to season. Our neighbour (who works in social services and hears this stuff from clients) tells us about the places to score … almost anything. And Dundas West has its share of, um, nightlife.

   But in the four plus years I’ve lived in the Junction I’ve roamed almost all over this part of town, including the back alleys, on foot and bike, at all hours of the day and night, and have never been afraid or bothered by anybody. I can’t say that of other parts of the city I’ve frequented.

   As for gentrification, I’m not sure the word has much meaning anymore, despite the perpetual debate. I don’t think the real issue is with upwardly mobile people buying up rooming houses and converting them into single-family homes. I don’t even think the problem is with developers eager to renovate artist-occupied warehouses into pricey lofts. Even if we had it, an abundant supply of run-down rental rooms and half-plumbed studios is hardly something to be lauded as a long-term solution to poverty and homelessness.

   Some solutions I might support?

   • Planning guidelines that seek to maintain the balance of rental and owner-occupied dwelling units through the development approvals process. (a developer seeking to convert rental property might be obliged to provide an equivalent amount of new affordable housing in replacement, for example)
   • Municipal support to owners of rooming houses and other kinds of affordable housing for necessary repairs (not to mention the creation of such spaces, where appropriate).
   • Improvements to the ‘streets to homes’ program(s), such as follow-up support to people even after housing has been secured for them.

     There’s much more to add to this subject; perhaps for later. But thanks for stimulating the conversation!

     Posted by Amy Lavender Harris  on  03/11  at  10:26 PM

   • Though a real “there goes the neighbourhood” sign is the demolition hoarding around McBride Cycle (couldn’t they have adapted it instead?)

     Posted by Adam Sobolak  on  03/11  at  10:37 PM

   • Maybe; but we’re still a ‘Coffee Time’ neighbourhood. Starbucks, well-known for predicting upward change (and then bringing it on), doesn’t seem to have much interest in the Junction. Looks like we’re safe for a while yet.

     Posted by Amy Lavender Harris  on  03/11  at  10:42 PM

   • My wife tells me the rumours around the Early Years Centre are that the old Shoppers is going to become a Starbucks. But I imagine that could just be people’s imaginations.

     Not that I’d really mind all that much, there are things (like the block-killer Wal-Mart up at St. Clair) that I find much more ojectionable than Starucks, much as I personally prefer Coffee Time. (Actually, I prefer Country Style, but I don’t like the walk way up Keele. So I go to Phil’s. I digress.)

     I agree that gentrification may be ready for retirement as a piece of useful terminology. It isn’t rich people moving in that bugs me, and it’s certainly not having great shops where there were once dollar stores. Revitalization is of course very desirable, but the key point is that the revitalizing tide needs to raise (or at least spruce up) the boats of the existing residents, not force them to set sail for a new ghetto. That’s really the tragedy of the Queen/Beac situation, is the total invading army element.

     I think your ideas there would be worth considering as tools—I’ll defer to your far greater authority on planning matters—and hope, too, that the Leslieville paralell is sound.

     And if you guessed a big, obvious street that has its share of nightlife, you were right. I can see that new candy shop from where I’m typing right now.

     One other thing: I, too, have never really felt unsafe (except the first week I was here when guys were fighting in front of my house at 2am with baseball bats and I, holding my months-old son, wondered if I’d made a big mistake.) Since then I’ve spent a good deal of time talking to the people I might otherwise be expected to be afraid of, giving them smokes and catching up with their take on what’s happening on the street. Far as they can tell, all of them are being pushed east of Keele on Dundas to make way for people like me renting renovated versions of their old apartments for three times what they were paying. But I like it here, and I kind of like them too.

     I’ll be following the discussion.

     Posted by Edward Keenan  on  03/12  at  12:05 AM

   • Heh. I’m writing a story (it’s not yet long enough to be a novel) about the Junction, in which a particular rooming house on Pacific features as a contrast class to the protagonist, who has elected instead to live in an abandoned garage.

     I like the Junction, too (love might be revealing too much). I feel more at home here than anywhere else in Toronto except for the several years I spent (as a child) living near Gerrard and Greenwood / Leslieville. There’s a similar middle- and working-class quality. A limit to pretension. If Peter and I haul a neighbour’s discarded bookcase out of her garbage, she won’t complain when she sees it in our living room a couple of months later. That kind of thing.

     I agree that Wal-Mart is the single worst thing that’s happened to the neighbourhood. Fortunately it’s on the other side of the tracks, but it’s probably what’s killing the dollar stores (of which I have an inordinate fondness).

     Anyone else want to weigh in (and wade in) on the Junction, too? Best neighbourhood in town, in my view.

     Posted by Amy Lavender Harris  on  03/12  at  08:24 AM

   • Great post Amy!

     A couple of us Toronto-based photographers recently did a photowalk through the Junction, so I was particularly interested in what you had to say. Here are the results:

     Madhava Enros

     Rannie “Photojunkie” Turingan

     Will Pate

     and me, Jay Goldman.

     Posted by Jay Goldman  on  03/12  at  05:10 PM

   • First of all thanks to both of you for mentioning my little video store. Amy I looked you up in my customer archives and could not find you listed.Please come in and sign up, I’ll throw in a free rental. Edward you used film geeking and Big Daddy’s side by side and you called my friend Alice Hoochie, so no free rentals for you.(I will pay your late fee though).It’s not easy being a small business owner in this market, so any exposure is appreciated.
     Thank you.
     J.R. Grassby.

     J.R.

     Posted by  on  03/12  at  06:48 PM
   • "Not that I’d really mind all that much, there are things (like the block-killer Wal-Mart up at St. Clair) that I find much more ojectionable than Starucks, much as I personally prefer Coffee Time. (Actually, I prefer Country Style, but I don’t like the walk way up Keele. So I go to Phil’s. I digress.)" =================== Actually, if I'm not mistaken, isn't there a suburbanish Starbucks in the middle of that stockyards-site swath of big boxes N of the RR tracks? It somehow figures--in a "good riddance" way--that it'd be up *there*, instead. Indeed, all that big-boxdom has that weirdly separate and poetically literalized wrong-side-of-the-tracks/go-at-your-own-risk quality relative to the Junction. It just doesn't seem "of" the Junction; it's more like part of a vast former-city-of-York trashy forbidden zone (even if, paradoxically, this was still within pre-amalgamation Toronto boundaries). And all the more so the Wal-Mart, which is in a whole separate and more remote (and actually York) location entirely. For that matter, it always struck me as a weirdly forlorn Wal-Mart; like, if Junctionians were in a decadent, Wal-Mart state of mind, they'd still rather head down to Dufferin Mall. It's more about "buzz" than proximity. (Likewise re the Dundas-Bloor Price Chopper vs the Dundas-Runnymede one.)
     
     Posted by Adam Sobolak  on  {comment_date format=’%m/%d’}  at  {comment_date format=’%h:%i %A’}
   Posted by Adam Sobolak  on  03/12  at  07:36 PM

   • JR: As soon as we get a DVD player I’ll head straight over! Sad but true … although there’s one on my computer. I’m just not sure how it works. Everyone else in the neighbourhood: Big Daddy’s is the place to go! (if you watch movies)

     Adam: I’ve had a very similar thought re: wrong side of the tracks. But what I like best about biking over to Home Depot (approaching it from Runnymede) is that you still have to travel along an unkempt series of winding roads running between the meat packing plants and the tracks that remind me of rural Ontario. There’s also a colony (of sorts) of stray or feral cats behind the Rona store—as of a year or so ago there were a bunch of little bowls that people kept filled with food.

     Posted by Amy Lavender Harris  on  03/12  at  10:21 PM

   • Jay: I’ve just clicked over to your photo sets—- great stuff; very evocative of the neighbourhood. Want to post some photo essays here at Reading Toronto? If you ever do a shoot around here again, let me know; I’d love to join in.

     Posted by Amy Lavender Harris  on  03/12  at  10:26 PM

   • Amy –
     Thanks! I’d love to post some photos at RT. Robert had invited me to write as well but I just never seem to get around to actually writing something.

     Did you have a specific locale in mind? We’re always interested in going out for photowalks, so if you wanted a photo essay about something specific, we could make it our next destination. You’re welcome to join us, although the last walk was what we called the inaugural Canon Club so if you’re not shooting with the big C, you might have to sneak in :)

     Posted by Jay Goldman  on  03/12  at  10:29 PM

   • Hmmm—no Canon, although I’ll be buying a new digital camera in a few weeks and would be happy to receive suggestions and advice at .

     As for location, I just want to get through the rest of the teaching term and some deadlines and then cruise, cruise, cruise through the city on my bike. But I think the Leslie Street Spit would be a great place once it’s green and growing again.

     Posted by Amy Lavender Harris  on  03/12  at  10:44 PM

   • ALH: Aside from those winding roads from the west, there’s also that primaevally industrial/residential-mix pocket E of Keele—less akin to rural Ontario, perhaps, than some godforsaken unzoned/ungentrified/ungentrifiable Brooklyn/Bronx/Queens interior. Perhaps the most “hardcore” (and maybe literally toxic, as in, the “Junction Triangle” mythology, cubed) place to live within all of the 416…

     Posted by Adam Sobolak  on  03/13  at  12:03 AM

   • In An Ecotour of Toronto (1986), the Ontario Public Interest Research Group describes the Junction Triangle as one of the most polluted areas in Toronto. Since then, though, many of the industries OPIRG mentions have closed or relocated, as have many of the meat packing plants. How’s the quality of the soil twenty years later? Might be worth a study. But at least this area’s more-or-less honest about its past.

     Still, the area you describe may be at a higher risk of gentrification than the rest of the Junction. Why? For the very reason that its mix of underused (or closed) factories and undervalued housing makes it attractive to land speculators. Factory-to-loft conversions have been going on in this area for some time; it’s only a matter of time until someone proposes another big condo. Then we’ll need a community group to protect the neighbourhood. My nomination for what we should call it: inJunction.

     Posted by Amy Lavender Harris  on  03/13  at  07:39 AM

   • J.R. – where I come from, being called a film geek is a compliment.

     Posted by  on  03/13  at  11:18 AM

   • ALH: As I think of it, you may have a point there re gentrification—esp. now that Benjamin Moore is biting the dust. (Ah, together with the stockyards across Keele, that embodied the hardcoreness of the place, from the paint odours to the blocky, skewed-corner, weirdly primitive 40s brick De Stijlness of the administration block.)

     Posted by Adam Sobolak  on  03/13  at  09:21 PM

   • Belatedly, hi from Mile End. I grew up in the Junction, and I can’t tell you how strange it is to read of its transformation.

     My family still lives there, and is among that 20% you write about. The number was once much higher, and I fear that it will continue to diminish with every breathless article that is published.

     Anyway, do me a favour, will you? Take care of the place while I’m gone. Protect what’s left of it. Tell everyone that poor people live there, that there are PCBs in the soil, that you can still smell meat on summer nights. That way, maybe it’ll still be there when I get back.

     Thanks,
     Vila

     Posted by Vila H.  on  04/15  at  09:37 PM

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