[URBAN NOTE] "The gay village as ethnic enclave"

[rfmcdonald]

JP Laroque's latest article in his series at Xtra! on the Church and Wellesley village makes the point that cities and their neighbourhoods are dynamic. Populations consistently shift around as soon as they can. By certain standards, Church and Wellesley has done well to keep its GLBT identity from the 1970s on. The key, as Laroque makes the point later in the argument, is to find ways to keep the neighbourhood relevant to its inhabitants.

“Cities are dynamic. They’re always changing, and they can’t stay static or they die,” says Michael E Levine, professor of urban planning at Pace University in New York City. “We’d rather be in our own gay villages, but they can’t last, and there’s nothing that can be done to Toronto to stop it. It’s much too vibrant and international a city.”

When Levine’s grandparents first arrived in the Lower East Side of Manhattan at the turn of the last century, the island had almost twice the number of inhabitants that it does today — 2.8 million to the current 1.8, according to his estimates — with immigrant families packed four to a unit inside squalid housing tenements. The city acted as a gateway for various ethnic groups looking for opportunities in America, and the newly established communities — Little Italy, Chinatown and Harlem, among others — helped to shape the city into the distinct neighbourhoods that exist today.

Now many of those old Jewish tenements in the Lower East Side have been transformed into high-priced loft apartments occupied by young urban professionals, while the community itself has evolved and moved to other areas of the city. New immigrant populations have moved in, and the neighbourhood has become a diverse melting pot. Levine notes that the synagogues his grandfather would visit in those early years are now churches. “Sometimes you’ll go by and you’ll see it’s a church, and then you’ll look up and you’ll see the Star of David on top.”

“You can’t keep them — the Jewish population is now gone — and you shouldn’t.”

The dispersal of the city’s gay community has been no different. “Greenwich Village was the gay place in New York City,” Levine says. “That’s why I moved here in 1967 when I graduated from college... There were gay bars everywhere. It was a whole different kind of thing. Today, that’s simply not true.”

Instead, various ethnic restaurants have replaced many of the gay businesses on the strip; much of the queer community moved to the comparatively affordable Chelsea area and later to Hell’s Kitchen and other pockets of the city. With a growing awareness and acceptance of queer rights, there has been less of a need to stay in unified cultural ghettos, or as Levine puts it, “Do we really need to have neighbours that are gay when gay people can live in every neighbourhood?”