[BRIEF NOTE] "Parklife -- parklife!"
Jun. 5th, 2008 09:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldOn Prince Edward Island, the placename "Parkdale" refers to a former suburb and town of Charlottetown, a region that as the CBC says was transformed by strong urban growth after the Second World War from a suburban area to an urban one. The town's existence was extinguished in 1994 as part of a
controversial and thorough process of municipal amalgamation that created Charlottetown's two cities and two substantial towns, but there is still a reasonably strong community identity and the frontiers of the former town of Parkdale roughly corresponds to the frontiers of the modern Charlottetown-Parkdale electoral district. Parkdale, on Prince Edward Island, is boring.
Parkdale, in Toronto, is notorious as an area in downtown Toronto that is notably for high levels of poverty, social ills like drug addiction and street prosituttion, and negligent landlords. As one source puts it,
The Wikipedia article cited above goes into greater detail on Parkdale's history. On the plus side, low rents and Parkdale's relative proximity to both the downtown core and the in-street of Queen Street West promise to make the territory a net beneficiary of of gentrification. (The people living there, well.)
Since I came to Toronto, living for the first portion of my stay just outside of Parkdale's frontiers (but doing my laundry just inside Parkdale's frontiers), I've always been caught by the incongruity of the fact that the same name can apply to two such vastly different sorts of communities. The psychic resonances are odd.
controversial and thorough process of municipal amalgamation that created Charlottetown's two cities and two substantial towns, but there is still a reasonably strong community identity and the frontiers of the former town of Parkdale roughly corresponds to the frontiers of the modern Charlottetown-Parkdale electoral district. Parkdale, on Prince Edward Island, is boring.
Parkdale, in Toronto, is notorious as an area in downtown Toronto that is notably for high levels of poverty, social ills like drug addiction and street prosituttion, and negligent landlords. As one source puts it,
[a]t one time, Parkdale was a rather desirable neighborhood west of the city of Toronto. It was named Parkdale because of the park-like environment with lots of trees close to the lake. However, during the 20th century, the city encroached on, and eventually engulfed, the community. The building of the Gardiner Expressway cut off the community from the lake. The biggest blow came when deinstitutionalization of the psychiatric hospitals dumped hundreds of patients into the cheap rooming houses of Parkdale.
My sister and brother-in-law lived for several years in a cheap apartment overlooking a side street. They would occasionally see naïve suburban kids trying to score some drugs. More often than not, they would leave only with empty pockets, and perhaps, a little wiser.
The Wikipedia article cited above goes into greater detail on Parkdale's history. On the plus side, low rents and Parkdale's relative proximity to both the downtown core and the in-street of Queen Street West promise to make the territory a net beneficiary of of gentrification. (The people living there, well.)
Since I came to Toronto, living for the first portion of my stay just outside of Parkdale's frontiers (but doing my laundry just inside Parkdale's frontiers), I've always been caught by the incongruity of the fact that the same name can apply to two such vastly different sorts of communities. The psychic resonances are odd.
