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rfmcdonaldblogTO's Chris Bateman writes about the history behind St. James Town, a high-rise complex of social housing that has acquired a negative reputation for crime and poverty. It turns out that St. James Town was, and apparently is, actually a decided improvement on what was there before.
When it was first proposed in the 1960s, St. James Town was the biggest urban renewal project ever conceived in Toronto. By clearing a vast swath of crumbling Victorian properties in one of the city's poorest neighbourhoods, urban planners aimed to engineer the densest concentration of people in the country. The only people standing in the way were the owners of a handful of holdout homes who refused to budge.
Lucio Casaccio, a taylor, and Francis Berghofer, and 68-year-old grandmother, both fought to keep their homes against the St. James Town developer with varying levels of success. The remnants of their battles are still visible today, if you know where to look.
In the 1950s, many of the Victorian homes of north Cabbagetown were seriously grim. Many of the rental properties were owned by unscrupulous landlords and lacked even the most basic utilities.
One St. James Avenue mother told the city how she was forced to keep a light on above her two-month-old baby's crib to ward off rats and mice. Five families - 11 children and 10 adults - shared her building and its single bathroom. In a letter, she complained of roaches, faulty wiring, broken plumbing, and a lack of heat in winter. And she wasn't alone.
Inspections by health and building inspectors uncovered horrific conditions. Ceilings were collapsing, rotten floor boards created pits into filthy basements, and light fixtures hung off walls. "People shouldn't be living here," alderman June Marks told a tenant during a visit that was covered by the Toronto Star. The woman's pet cat had a freshly killed rat in its mouth. It waited, she said, by a hole in the wall for a new rodent to emerge every day.
Landlords were often to blame for the gross unsanitary conditions. Joseph Shori, the owner of some 24 properties in the area, said he rented one his St. James Town homes for $89 a month to a total of 23 tenants. He blamed people who were behind on rent for leaving the buildings in a not "ideal condition." (He would later threaten to cut off the heat, light and power to his properties when his tenants complained to the city's Board of Control.)
