You know the story, that neighbourhood you would never move to but usually has that one shop/café/book store that you always keep going back to for that particular something you cannot do without or cannot find anywhere else –for that cheap. You always go with friends and always during daylight hours…and every time you go back you see another brave business going in amongst the crack-house donut shops, Money Marts and day and night ‘working girl’ strip of sidewalk, hoping their pioneering spirit will inspire other homesteaders. Slowly but surely, a friend of a friend rents a warehouse space near there to which you are invited to a gallery opening and/or theatrical happening at…then an actual cute dress shop opens up or a brunch place with retro fitted chairs; killer eggs and wine served in tumblers that remind you of that trip to Europe…and then it’s all over.
Before you can blink and realize that this hood is ‘the new black’ you can’t afford rent never mind actually buying property in your old ‘crackwhore hood’ and you’re waiting at the bar for a table on the patio with people who wouldn’t have been seen dead anywhere near the place 2 years ago. It’s the Meat Packing District syndrome – ghetto chic…it’s chic all right, but the ghetto has a gotten a diehard glaze job. Our latest Meat Packing district incarnations: Main Street here (SOMA) between 30th all the way to the Skytrain station; West Queen West in T.O. –west of Bathurst and on past Dufferin. Both areas your suburban and/or elite-locale city friends would not think to ‘hang’ in until that restaurant write up gets into not only the Straight / Westender / Now and Eye but the pages of the Globe and Mail as well as The National Post – “it” places have no real political boundaries.
How does all this happen seemingly overnight? Well, it doesn’t happen as fast as you think it does – the transformation usually starts out real slow at first over a period of 2-3 years even and then one day the “gentrification alteration” explodes with the backing of designer interiors; well known investors and grandma’s best linens/shoes/recipes. So where there was once a no-mans land of dodgy businesses there is now door upon door of window-shopping and bar hopping. Let us take our Vancouver Main Street strip – condensed between Broadway and King Edward/25th Avenue where the main attractions used to be the 7-Eleven, Mount Pleasant Library and good old Helen’s Grill, there is now a plethora of cool consignment stores, little bar/bistros and galleries/artist run centres. From the fabulous vintage finds available at Front & Company and Burcus’ Angels, to the cool cocktails served at Public lounge and Monsoon, you can actually spend an evening out in the Mount Pleasant area complete with a gallery opening at Western Front or grunt gallery.
Conversely, when I moved to Toronto’s Queen and Ossington area in 2001, I was way too west! Not cool – in fact when people weren’t sure where that was I’d say “near the mental health centre” and they’d screw up their faces into a kind of sympathy/horror expression that came from knowing I cycled by the mentally unwell and past-their-prime working girls every evening before arriving at my doorstep. Between the shooting and stabbing incidents at the various “karaoke” bars along Ossington and the fabulous offers I got from the day patients, I was really thinking that the Portuguese fish shops and bakeries up on Dundas Street were not compensating.
And then came Studio Gang – a brave lady and her scissors, the first real sign that the chic were indeed coming – eventually. The designer owned and operated clothing store braved it out until first the galleries, and then the neighbourhood pubs like the Crooked Star and Sweaty Betty’s took hold of Ossington – still leaving it ghetto-ish but with small businesses that actually provided what they advertised in their windows and didn’t operate as fronts for more colourful endeavours. This effect soon spilled out onto Queen Street making the area in and around the mental health centre the current place to see and be seen replete with bar after gallery after retro clothing store.
Just as I had a feeling my beloved Historic Mount Pleasant of my youth would grow into something grand once again, I knew there was a greater power that had pulled me west of retro cool Queen Street – the new cool – the Art + Design District. Yeah, they owe me one.
© culturalcruise, 2005
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