[URBAN NOTE] "The changing face of Bloordale"

[rfmcdonald]

Iain Marlow's article in The Globe and Mail takes a look at Bloordale, a neighbourhood just a subway stop to the rest of mine that, like mine, is also on the upswing.

[N]ext door to the Coffee Time nearby, there is a trendy restaurant called the Whippoorwill, with a line-up-worthy brunch and cocktails named after local businesses (such as “the Caribbean Queen”). There is a Nordic smokehouse café and a store called Zeebu that sells blankets made by former Brazilian prisoners. There is also a retro vintage store selling used clothing and other items quite ironically: One item for sale is a small piece of old looking wood that has two hand written labels on it; one, which reads “Early telephone ?!?”, offers a vague sense of a narrative, while the other simply says “Sexy block of wood. $15.”

“In this neighbourhood, people like stuff with a story behind it,” said Craig Williamson, co-owner of Zebuu.

Mr. Williamson, whose store also sells Gandhian blankets from India made from home-spun cotton, is referring to the new people coming by, the people who stroll by after brunch at the Whippoorwill, or after dinner or lunch at the Emerson or Keralia or Brock Sandwich. He is not referring to the people who gave the neighbourhood its previous reputation for addiction and crime, or the folks who swing by the House of Lancaster strip club.

The 2011 census lists the area’s main non-English, non-French mother tongues as Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Cantonese. The census of 2006 lists the area’s median income at just $22,582, but even though there is no comparable data for 2011, anecdotally, people who work in the area say that the makeup of the neighbourhood has changed markedly.

“You see more family people around,” says Georgia Hamilton, the chef, owner and “everything else” of a Bloordale roti shop, as she serves up some cashew brittle. “No hustling. No hustlers. No drug dealers. No more hustlers coming in. More shops. More bakeries.”

But not more factories. Todd Gariepy has worked for 25 years in a plant just north of Bloor Street near Lansdowne Avenue. He has watched the neighbourhood change: the women working the corner slowly move on, the syringes on the ground and the drug dealers disappear. But even though he can still eat at Pepper’s, a restaurant nearby that has survived all the changes, he has also watched as multiple factories close up and then be transformed into lofts or replaced by townhouses. Mr. Gariepy was almost forced out of the neighbourhood himself, when the Canada Packers factory he worked in shut down in 1990. His job was saved when the factory was quickly bought up by a Japanese firm, Nitta Gelatin NA Inc.