[PHOTO] "Alley near Wychwood Barns"

The area around the Wychwood Barns--briefly, warehouses converted to art space--has a lot of cool Torontoniana, like these two almost prototypical alleys.

[FORUM] What are some enduring ethnic neighbourhoods in your community?

blogTo's Agatha Barc posted today about Toronto's several Chinatowns. They're dynamic places, unlike the Little India on Gerrard I blogged about recently, growing and evolving over time.

I think of the biggest one, centred around Spadina Avenue, as one of the liveliest neighbourhoods in the city. It seems always to be busy and loud, with a constant outpouring of customers from the restaurants, markets, and discount stores of all types that proliferate in the area. It is one of those places where you realize how multicultural the city really is at its core

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According to Marjorie Harris's Toronto: The City of Neighbourhoods, the city's first Chinatown was located in the Ward, an impoverished, rundown district bounded by College Street, Yonge Street, University Avenue, and Queen Street.

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Sometime in the 1970s, the city erected street signs in both English and Chinese. In 1977, it struck down the so-called "Blue Laws," which prohibited stores from operating on Sundays, except if they were located in tourist areas. This was not to encourage tourism in Chinatown, but rather to accommodate a cultural custom of a community, where weekends are devoted to "get togethers" and other forms of socializing.

East Chinatown is located in Riverdale, at the intersection of Broadview and Gerrard Streets. It is the newest and the second largest Chinese enclave within the former city of Toronto. Many newcomers started settling there, as the population and property prices in Chinatown on Spadina started to increase.

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Outside of the core, there are also Chinese commercial hubs - one thinks of Markham and the Pacific Mall in particular - that have taken shape in more recent years. As has been the case for the Jewish and Italian communities, there's been a steady migration northward, but given how established and bustling the downtown Chinatowns are, they're unlikely to be threatened by this trend.

As a point of fact, the migration of Jews up the "Bathurst Corridor" (along the street of the same name) began just west of the Spadina Chinatown, in the Kensington Market neighbourhood. There's still some vestigial Jewish presence in the neighbourhood, with a couple of synagogues.

Toronto's Chinatowns are fairly dynamic yet enduring ethnic neighbourhoods which continue to do well in downtown Toronto, real estate prices and the like aside. What are some similarly enduring ethnic neighbourhoods in your community?

Discuss.