[PHOTO] Doucet House, Rustico

South Rustico's Doucet House is of note in Island history, as noted at HistoricPlaces.ca.

The Doucet House is rare example of Acadian vernacular construction in PEI. A dendrochronological study has dated the surviving original wood frame of the building to 1768, making it possibly the oldest dwelling in PEI. The Doucet House is significant to the history of the Acadian population of the province. It was built by local Acadians after the 1763 Treaty of Paris which ended hostility between Britain and France following the Seven Year's War. It originally also served as a focal point for the religious life of the Rustico Acadians. Mass was held in the house by travelling missionary, Father James MacDonald. Its first occupant, Jean Doucet, had even been appointed by the Bishop of Quebec to perform various religious ceremonies due to the shortage of priests in the late 18th Century.

Doucet House was relocated from its original position at Cymbria in the 1980s, and relocated onto the territory of the Farmer's Bank of Rustico, just east of the St. Augustine's Roman Catholic Church

The Virtual Museum of Canada has a substantial site examining the history of Doucet House, its restoration, and the smaller artifacts on site. The P.E.I. Heritage Buildings blog also has a post on Doucet House.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO shares pictures from Toronto in the 1970s and 1980s.


• Crooked Timber reacts, perhaps not wisely, to the recent British government state that an independent Scotland would not automatically have a currency union with the United Kingdom.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes that tidal heating of Mars-mass planets in the circumstellar habitable zones of red dwarf stars could keep them habitable.


• The Dragon's Tales observes arguments that Vesta may have had a magma ocean for a long time period.


• Far Outliers observes the impuissance of the last Ottoman ruler of Syria faced with the Armenian genocide and comments upon how the response of the American government after the First World War to abandon the Middle East did not help things.


• The Frailest Thing's Michael Sacasas responds to Nick Kristof's wondering where all the public intellectuals are by arguing that whole concept may just be an effect of a centralized mass culture.


• At Halfway Down the Danube, Douglas Muir notes that Kosovo hasn't had much of a winter.


• Language Hat has two posts on language standardization, one on Aramaic in the ancient Middle East an the other on Hazaragi, a Persian dialect spoken by--here--Shi'ite Afghanistan refugees in Australia.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the dire situation of tea plantation workers.


• The Map Room's Jonathan Crowe links to recent maps of Ganymede and Mercury.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer comments on the tumult in Venezuela by wondering why that country's government has been so incompetent.


• Thought Catalog features a first-person essay by Iranian gay refugee in Canada Shawn Kermanipour.


• Towleroad remarks on the gay icon status of Blondie's Debbie Harry.


• Transit Toronto's Robert McKenzie observes that the TTC is offering transit users the chance to "Meet the Manager" of different stations.


• Window on Eurasia notes that migration from Belarus to Russia is becoming a serious issue for both countries, whether because of labour shortages in Belarus or Russian immigrant politics.

[URBAN NOTE] Two Toronto Star articles on the Loblaws in Kensington Market

Following up on my post of last month defending the opening of a Loblaw's grocery store on the periphery of Kensington Market, I thought I'd share two Toronto Star articles dealing with the issue. One is more relevant than the other.

The first, John Semley's article of the 2nd of this month, "Kensington Market Loblaws: beyond a debate over gentrification", I don't quite understand. How does the provenance of mangos relate to a neighbourhood where people are always going to care about the provenance of mangos?

Over the past year, Kensington has become a battleground, a site of contestation. As Loblawsian corporate interests further come to define Toronto, many have taken up the cause of protecting heritage communities against the corporatized steamrolling that defines, oh, pretty much everything.

[. . .]

In a way this battle has already been lost. Friends of Kensington Market are determined to preserve a spirit that’s already receded.

Kensington’s uniqueness has already been co-opted in less obvious ways. It was 2009 when Max and Son Meat Market, a tiny family-owned butcher on Baldwin St., was bought out by Peter Sanagan, laying the tracks for a much bigger, 5,000 square foot space hawking organic heirloom pheasants and artisanal pepperettes.

[. . .]

The places seemingly threatened by the new Loblaws are Nü Kensington, belonging to a second (or third) generation. It’s not Max and Sons. It’s Sanagan’s. It’s not Augusta Egg Market (RIP). It’s Blue Banana. That dude who used to sell records on the street on Pedestrian Sundays now has his own store on Dundas West. It’s a subtler form of gentrification — well, subtler than a 20,000 square foot chain supermarket being airdropped into the market’s perimeter — which may make it harder to mobilize against. Anyway, Kensington’s friends seem concerned less about the neighbourhood gentrifying than about it gentrifying in the wrong way.

It’s easy to dismiss this concern as just so much trumped-up, pearl-clutching NIMBYism. Some even suggest that having (or taking) a stake in these things is just resistance to change, as if seeing the city homogenize into a uniform Joe Fresh/Loblaws/Hero Burger/LCBO complex meaningfully amounts to some value-neutral form of “change.”

But there’s something despairing at the heart of that view. Ultimately, the Kensington kerfuffle goes beyond a debate over gentrification to a larger, ideological schism. You either care about the ventures of independent retailers or you don’t. You’re either invested in the provenance of your organic mangoes or you’re not. In between caring and not is a divide much deeper than the one that separates Big Corporations from Small Independents.

Laura Kane's article from the 10th of February, in contrast, I do get. Kane went to an area on Queen Street West that recently saw a Loblaw's opening and saw what happened. Some stores did better than others, the ones catering to more specific markets doing best.

Inside the Healthy Butcher on Queen St. W., hungry shoppers quiz staff on bison steaks and warm chickpea stews, while the steady chime of the cash register rings in the background.

Business is booming in the small meat shop and deli, even though it’s barely a stone’s throw from a massive Loblaws complex.

“We gained customers because we just kind of work off each other,” says Healthy Butcher owner Mario Fiorucci, who estimates his sales have grown at least 25 per cent since the grocery giant moved next door in 2011.

“People still want to get their meat or prepared foods here because it’s all made in-house, and it’s just a different level of food and service,” he says. “But at the same time Loblaws offers a lot of things that we don’t, so it’s complementary.”

It’s a glimmer of hope for small food vendors in Kensington Market, who fear a planned Loblaws on College St. will run them out of business. Meanwhile, other shops on this Queen West strip tell a very different story, with some saying their sales have been cut in half.

Asked whether he has any advice for Kensington retailers, Fiorucci says it’s important to remember specialty stores offer superior food and service. He imagines he’s lost some convenience shoppers, but says his store has become a “destination” for true foodies.

“People can come in here, ask where a specific steak is from and get an answer. We can tell them which farm it’s from, if it’s grass fed, even the name of the animal before it was killed,” he says with a laugh.

[FORUM] How should we deal with elements of our history we've chosen to forget?

Writer and activist Tim Groves's Missing Plaque Project is a decade-old project I've seen ongoing for a while. Andrew Francis Wallace's August article in the Toronto Star, "Missing Plaque Project unveils Toronto's untold history", goes into detail.

With a stack of homemade posters, a sponge and a tub of wheat paste, Tim Groves is revising the story of Toronto.

His aim: To ensure that the less celebrated, even shameful, incidents in our collective pasts are remembered. Affixed to telephone poles and other surfaces at the sites where these events occurred, his posters commemorate the notorious Cherry Beach Express, the 1992 Yonge Street Riot and other chapters in the city’s past that mainstream accounts are liable to gloss over.

“Those bits of history are being forgotten, and other bits are being played up,” said Groves, 31. “It’s easy that these (events) could slip from history if there aren’t people that are finding ways to commemorate them.”

The imperative to remember has been a powerful motivator for Groves. A freelance investigative researcher and journalist, he started the initiative, dubbed The Missing Plaque Project, more than 10 years ago.

After spending his teenage years exploring Toronto by bike, Groves was making a ’zine about a city he thought he knew so well. But while researching the 1933 Christie Pits Riot, he was shocked by the scale of the violence that boiled over at the height of anti-Semitic, anti-foreigner tensions.

“I was like, ‘How did I grow up right by there, and not hear about this?’” he recalls.

He abandoned the ’zine idea, and spent the next few months researching the event and consolidating his newfound knowledge into a poster to hang around Christie Pits Park. In the age of the Internet, he borrowed from a tried-and-true approach to connecting with a very specific audience.

“I really wanted to put it up on the street. Just the idea to use a poster to communicate locally, I was really excited about that,” he said.

At present, Groves has more than a dozen different posters on a variety of different subjects, generally covering incidents in Toronto history that may have been neglected: GLBT oppression, police brutality and riots of various kinds, and so on.

(For more background to his project, see also this 2007 Spacing post, a brief 2008 post at the Justseeds Art Collective, a Torontowiki page, Reddit discussion thread.)

I like this sort of thing, though I share Emily Keyes' concern that some of the posters might be too stridently ideological to be readily digested. Then again, might they have to be strident to get through Torontonians' ignorance?

What say you all? Is Groves' strategy a good one, one that should be adapted on a larger scale? Is it flawed? What is to be done?