[URBAN NOTE] "The hidden pockets in Toronto where gentrification is really happening"

[rfmcdonald]

Robin Levinson King at the Toronto Star looks at where gentrification is, and is not, happening in Toronto. It's present in Toronto generally, but it's intense in only a few areas.

At the corner of Morse St. and Queen St. E. in Leslieville, the signifiers of gentrification are on full display at Mercury Espresso Bar — a man with an artfully trimmed beard reads the paper while Kate Bush music plays cloyingly in the background, drowned out by the hiss and whistle of the espresso machine.

“I am the eye of the storm, I am the gentrification,” jokes barista Tyler Semrick-Palmateer as he makes a perfectly crafted Americano.

Semrick-Palmateer, the barista, is himself a bit of a hybrid gentrifier — he works in Leslieville and lives at Clinton and Harbord Sts., another bastion of Toronto’s affluent hipsterism. But the 30-something musician also grew up not far from the café, on Broadview Ave., and remembers the neighbourhood’s less shiny past.

A block away from the café in Leslieville, Jim’s Restaurant, a classic family restaurant famous for its Western sandwiches, is boarded up to make room for a six-storey condominium.

“It’s a vastly different place,” Semrick-Palmateer said. “I don’t know what it will be replaced with, probably not some old-school … diner. Probably some sort of specialty vapour shop.”