A Bit More Detail

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.)

Police have identified the man that died following an overnight shooting in downtown Toronto as the brother of the victim in last summer's Eaton Centre shooting.

Police say they received a call reporting gunfire just after 11:30 p.m. Thursday at a seniors apartment at 55 Bleecker St., in the area of Carlton and Jarvis streets.

When police arrived, they found Nisan Nirmalendran, 21, suffering from gunshot wounds.

He was taken to St. Michael's hospital and pronounced dead. Police have not yet made any arrests.

Police confirmed that Nirmalendran was the brother of Nixon Nirmalendran, the 22-year-old who died on June 11, 2012 after being shot in the food court of Toronto’s Eaton Centre on June 2, 2012.

Det. Sgt. Terry Brown spoke at a news conference Friday, saying that there was “nothing to suggest that the two instances are related at all.”

The fact that Irish vividly "remember" NINA signs is a curious historical puzzle. There are no contemporary or retrospective accounts of a specific sign at a specific location. No particular business enterprise is named as a culprit. No historian, archivist, or museum curator has ever located one; no photograph or drawing exists. No other ethnic group complained about being singled out by comparable signs. Only Irish Catholics have reported seeing the sign in America—no Protestant, no Jew, no non-Irish Catholic has reported seeing one. This is especially strange since signs were primarily directed toward these others: the signs said that employment was available here and invited Yankees, French-Canadians, Italians and any other non-Irish to come inside and apply. The business literature, both published and unpublished, never mentions NINA or any policy remotely like it. The newspapers and magazines are silent. The courts are silent. There is no record of an angry youth tossing a brick through the window that held such a sign. Have we not discovered all of the signs of an urban legend?

The NINA slogan seems to have originated in England, probably after the 1798 Irish rebellion. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries it was used by English to indicate their distrust of the Irish, both Catholic and Protestant. For example the Anglican bishop of London used the phrase to say he did not want any Irish Anglican ministers in his diocese. By the 1820s it was a cliché in upper and upper middle class London that some fussy housewives refused to hire Irish and had even posted NINA signs in their windows. It is possible that handwritten NINA signs regarding maids did appear in a few American windows, though no one ever reported one. We DO have actual newspaper want ads for women workers that specifies Irish are not wanted; they will be discussed below. In the entire file of the New York Times from 1851 to 1923, there are two NINA ads for men, one of which is for a teenager. Computer searches of classified help wanted ads in the daily editions of other online newspapers before 1923 such as the Booklyn Eagle, the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune show that NINA ads for men were extremely rare--fewer than two per decade. The complete absence of evidence suggests that probably zero such signs were seen at commercial establishments, shops, factories, stores, hotels, railroads, union halls, hiring halls, personnel offices, labor recruiters etc. anywhere in America, at any time. NINA signs and newspaper ads for apartments to let did exist in England and Northern Ireland, but historians have not discovered reports of any in the United States, Canada or Australia. The myth focuses on public NINA signs which deliberately marginalized and humiliated Irish male job applicants. The overwhelming evidence is that such signs never existed.

Irish Americans all have heard about them—and remember elderly relatives insisting they existed. The myth had "legs": people still believe it, even scholars. The late Tip O'Neill remembered the signs from his youth in Boston in 1920s; Senator Ted Kennedy reported the most recent sighting, telling the Senate during a civil rights debate that he saw them when growing up. Historically, physical NINA signs could have flourished only in intensely anti-Catholic or anti-Irish eras, especially the 1830—1870 period. Thus reports of sightings in the 1920s or 1930s suggest the myth had become so deeply rooted in Irish-American folk mythology that it was impervious to evidence. Perhaps the Irish had constructed an Evil Other out of stereotypes of outsiders—a demon that could frighten children like the young Ted Kennedy and adults as well. The challenge for the historian is to explain the origins and especially the durability of the myth. Did the demon exist outside the Irish imagination—and if not how did it get there? [T]he myth originated and will explore its long-lasting value to the Irish community as a protective device. It was an enhancement of political solidarity against a hostile Other; and a way to insulate a preindustrial non-individualistic group-oriented work culture from the individualism rampant in American culture.

In History and Memory, Geoffery Cubitt talks of “distorted memories,” memories that assimilate memory detail from one experience into the context of another, often imbued with additional meaning.[2] Such is the case with NINA signs. As Jensen notes, Irish-America harbors deep beliefs in their victimization in the United States, including job discrimination, stemming from the trials of the Irish Potato Famine. In the United States, the Irish needed to foster a new ethnic community and identity, one that did not place the villains of their story as the distant and overseas British. That villain became Americans holding access to jobs. The NINA sign embodies that transference, a distorted memory with deep symbolic meaning that overshadows the historical record.

Canadian cities and larger towns quickly developed Irish sections or wards. The Anglo-Protestant majority measured the Irish contribution economically and the Irish deficiencies socially, religiously and racially. On the one hand, many of the Irish created a labour force ready and able to fill the seasonal employment demands of a newly expanded canal system, lumber industry and burgeoning railway network; on the other hand, because of their low income, their Catholicism, the seasonal separation from their families and differences in their way of life, they were a conspicuous minority group. They filled working-class neighbourhoods and inflated majority fears of social evils previously dismissed as peculiar to the US.

For some years the Irish supplied the base of a working-class labour force necessary for the slow advance of communication, commerce and industry, but they remained an adjunct to, rather than a central component of, mainstream North American economic and social life - the basis of which was commerce and agricultural activity. Policy tied population increase to land settlement. Gradual commercial and industrial development usually serviced the agricultural sector, and, because many Irish were not farmers, Irish labourers were seen as rootless.