[URBAN NOTE] "The two worlds of my Etobicoke"

[rfmcdonald]

Spacing Toronto features an excellent autobiographical essay by Prajakta Dhopade looking at the remarkable internal divisions within Etobicoke, the former west-end Toronto municipality internationally famous as home of Rob Ford.

My childhood was spent surrounded by the Humber River and grocery stores.

I live in Rexdale, where there’s not much to do and every reason to leave. For the first decade of my life, north Etobicoke was my world. My family were immigrants who arrived in Toronto in 1997. We settled in west Rexdale, in an apartment complex nestled beside the Humber River Valley, which was a five-minute bus ride away from a nearby school that my sister and I attended. Years later, we moved further east, still in Rexdale, but closer to older developments near Kipling Avenue. The only way to get around was by car.

When I entered high school is when my world expanded. I had two public transportation options — either a 30-minute TTC bus ride east to the Yonge-University line or a 25-minute bus ride south to the Bloor-Danforth line. The 45 Kipling bus that runs north and south on the busy west-end avenue became my way out of the barren, plaza- and parking lot-laden landscape I had grown up in.

Many of the friends I made in Etobicoke exclaimed “Me too!” when I told them I live in the borough but I would quickly have to clarify with a “but way up north…in Rexdale,” to which I’d receive a confused “oh…” I might as well have said I live in Narnia. The result of this disconnect was a jarring feeling of misplaced identity within this city. I envied friends who lived in the south and could walk to Tom’s Dairy Freeze — a community staple on the Queensway — or could access streetcars and subway stations a relatively short distance away from their homes. It wasn’t downtown, by any means, but it was more of a bustling and central area than I had ever previously experienced.

The reason for this is because south Etobicoke’s lakefront was home to several communities, supported by industrial enterprises. The townships of Mimico, Long Branch, and New Toronto are the oldest parts of Etobicoke, formed around 1890. The neighbourhoods were created on a rigid street grid, where everything was plotted close together, serving the working class residents. The industrial boom is now over, and the area’s number-named streets offer residents walkability in an era where it is now desirable.