Eating at the community centre usually involves casseroles, dartboards and stacking wooden chairs.
Such is delightedly not the case at the Columbus Centre, where Toronto’s Italian community gathers for fitness and culture.
Here, you will find white tablecloths and truffle oil at Ristorante Boccaccio, a fine-dining restaurant like many others — except with a pool in the building.
The restaurant is open to the public. Tall ceilings save the basement space from feeling squat. A recent facelift of the 30-year-old room brought oversize black-and-white photos of Italy and modern tableware. It looks like a model home, no surprise given how many of the centre’s founders are construction magnates.
“I want to keep it simple and traditional,” says chef de cuisine Nicholas Huey, a 27-year-old who learned to cook in Venice.
Where I live at Dufferin and Davenport, the modest dwellings of Corso Italia meet the larger houses of Regal Heights.
More young people are moving into this neighbourhood north of the Dupont tracks in search of reasonable rent while staying close to the cultural institutions of the west end. Unsurprisingly, some see the influx of new residents as gentrification. But the numbers don’t quite add up in that regard.
According to the 2006 census, the most recent city data, these neighbourhoods had average individual incomes of $29,000 and $31,362, respectively. Compared to the 2006 citywide average income of $29,068, areas like Dufferin and Davenport are decidedly average: not too wealthy, but by no means poverty-stricken.
Young people aren’t moving to this area seeking dirt cheap cost of living. Rather, they’re looking for something more affordable than the prohibitively expensive rents colonizing the more southerly parts of the west end.
Maybe it’s the cafes, venues and art spaces that have begun to emerge, especially along Geary Avenue. As the US-based gentrification watcher Curbed points out, brunch spots, craft beer bars, and “inexplicable” general stores all score high points when determining if a neighbourhood is gentrified.
However, the kind of culture that young people are establishing in this area, the kind of culture pointed at by Curbed and described as “new” and “radical,” looks remarkably like the lifestyles that have already been forged by the Italian and Portuguese populations over the last 50 years: lively street culture, gardening, people watching from porches, DIY wine and beer making, hanging out in cafes. These are all activities that could be equally called “hipster” and “Italian.”
With Italian-sounding names recently having been featured in newspaper articles describing less than exemplary conduct, I asked an old Italian man if he felt integrated into Quebec society. He answered: “I have my integrity — that should be enough.” Though a handful of Quebecers of Italian origin have been publicly implicated in activities outlawed by the established rules, the overwhelming majority are perfectly commendable citizens who work in all sectors of society. Yet it is not always flattering to be identified as Italian. So much so that an Italian who has improved his lot or, even worse, managed to become wealthy (especially in the construction business), is often suspected of maintaining ties with the Mafia. This sad combination, which has lasted too long, reflects the misunderstandings, conflicts and inevitable prejudices that have marked the long journey of Italians in Quebec.
The first Italians arrived in Montreal at the end of the 19th century. There were some 5,000 by 1905, most working in the mines, logging camps and on the railroad. Many were men who had no intention of settling here. They had hoped to go back as soon as they had saved enough money to buy a plot of land, or provide their daughters with a dowry. A good number of them were illiterate. Poorly paid and badly housed, they lived in “dangerous insalubrious conditions and promiscuity,” according to the newspapers of the times. Looked down on and without resources, they (including my grandfather) became easy prey for powerful employment agents: a mafia that demanded a tax for jobs and whose role was to deliver docile, cheap labour to employers. A form of near-slavery.
More than 10 million Italians immigrated during that period (1890 to 1914) to the two Americas. Many of these immigrants came from southern regions of the country where, several years before, landowners had organized a militia whose goal was to repress peasant revolts and spread terror through the countryside. That’s how the Mafia came to be. Among the indigent peasant class, these Mafiosi inspired both fear and admiration to the point that the expression “fare la mafia,” today, means “strutting.” This Mafia culture and the lack of civic spirit (or amoral familism that puts family interests over social responsibility), common in regions where the state is as corrupt as it is reviled, have long since crossed the Atlantic.
Italian immigration practically stopped during the fascist regime (1922-1943). Nevertheless, Montreal’s small Italian community was subjected to its propaganda even within the churches, and except for a small minority, they adhered to the fascist ideology — less out of political conviction, and more to enjoy the psychological benefits of belonging to a nation whose Duce was adulated not only by the Vatican (after the Concordat), but also by the heads of foreign governments, including Mackenzie King. The party quickly ended when fascist Italy declared war on France. Hundreds of Italians, residents of Montreal, would be arrested and imprisoned in Petawawa.
When Italian immigration picked up again after the Second World War, 90 per cent of Italians who settled in Quebec between 1947 and 1970 were sponsored by a family member. Entire villages emptied out, creating such demographic imbalances and economic difficulties that emigration became a self-generating process. Sponsorship explains why nearly a third of all Quebecers of Italian background came from Molise. Others came from various regions, but many were from Calabria and Sicily where the ‘Ndrangheta and the Mafia flourished, and spread from there across the world. Most of them chose to settle in Montreal alongside tens of thousands of rural Quebecers. This was a time of intense urbanization and a building boom (the Metropolitan Expressway, the métro system, new suburbs, schools, roads, etc.) whose apotheosis would come with Expo 67. Among the Italians who found work as labourers or skilled tradesmen, some became contractors, often ending up quite prosperous. They derived their wealth from within: at their disposal they had thousands of former peasants ready to accept the hardest working conditions. (My father, like so many others, had to work an hour or two every day without salary for the right to return to the site the next day.) It is, however, untrue to think, despite the great attention given in the media to a few individuals, that the construction industry is their exclusive domain. The 2001 census showed that there were only 6,595 Italians (including 860 women) in this sector, corresponding to some 5 per cent of the total.
A veteran Ontario detective has testified in a public inquiry that the Italian Mafia’s reach in that province extends to all kinds of legitimate businesses that mask criminal proceeds.
Mike Amato, a detective with the York Regional police, testified Thursday before the Quebec inquiry looking into allegations of corruption in the province’s construction industry.
Called to provide a portrait of the reach and scope of the Italian Mafia in Ontario, Amato described a group that, over the years, has managed to root itself deeply into everyday society.
[. . .]
Amato said Mafia-controlled legitimate businesses in his region include everything from garden centres to financial institutions to banquet halls.
“They need these businesses to launder criminal proceeds,” Amato said. “It also allows them to explain their wealth … you can mask it in a business where you can hide your illegitimate wealth.”
[. . .]
Ontario boasts many of the hallmark Mob industries — smuggling, drug trafficking and bookmaking. Then there are more modern ones such as stock manipulation.
“As we evolve as a society, so too does organized crime,” Amato said.
“They are just sometimes a little bit quicker, better and faster at it than we are.”
What’s noticeable about Ontario, Amato says, is a lack of the same level of visible violence as has been seen in recent years in Quebec and witnesses who are willing to testify about it.
“If there is numerous murders, a lot of violence, if there are a lot of bombings, it attracts attention from politicians, from the community, from police,” Amato said.
“You cannot build a successful criminal enterprise if you’re continually being investigated by the police.”
Any tensions in that province have been mostly resolved quietly or away from the reach of law enforcement.
And in Ontario, that has meant it’s difficult to justify digging deeper, Amato says. Whereas a few dozen police officers may have investigated the Mob in the past, now there might be a handful.
[. . .]
A former RCMP chief superintendent, Ben Soave, told both media organizations that organized crime has infiltrated Ontario’s economy at least as much as it has in Quebec.
Part of the fun of this photo comes from the sandwiching of layers of neighbourhood and pop-cultural identities.
sevres-babylone's photograph--taken by "the traffic lights at Borden; right near the Bellevue Ave fire station, a couple of blocks east of Bathurst", right about here--was taken in Little Italy, the erstwhile heart and historic nucleus of Toronto's Italian Canadian community. The Madonna? An iconic element of the Roman Catholicism of the southern Italians who settled in this neighbourhood after the Second World War, a badge of identity. Back in the 1950s, one only would have hoped that College Street would have found a Madonna.
Now? College Street, no longer much of a Little Italy, is increasingly becoming another club district. Madonna? She's a pop star of the past, this image on a torn placard taken from the cover of her 1986 album True Blue.
College Street still has its Madonna; but what a College Street, and what a Madonna.
Italian-Canadians lashed out Monday at Rocco Rossi’s new mafia-themed ad campaign, which labels the mayoral candidate a “wise guy” and tells voters to “fuggetaboutit.”
“It sounded like an East Side Mario’s ad, quite honestly,” said Valentino Assenza, whose parents immigrated from Sicily. “I think the Italian-Canadian community was misrepresented . . . I was undecided, but him putting that ad out definitely confirmed that I’m not going to be giving my vote to him.”
The new campaign includes print ads featuring the words “wise guy,” “goodfella” and “bocce balls,” as well as TV and radio spots. The ads were launched as a new poll shows Rossi’s support stagnating at 9.7 per cent, a distant fourth place.
“There have been a lot of Hail Marys tossed into the air by the various candidates hoping to get more attention, to get a breakthrough, to somehow puncture the lead that Rob Ford has,” said Myer Siemiatycki, a politics professor at Ryerson University. “It does smack of desperation, it does smack of attention-seeking overdrive, and I don’t think it’ll be successful.”
Rossi, whose parents immigrated to Canada from Italy in the 1950s, said he used the stereotypes in his campaign to flip them around and give them new meaning. “Wise guy” is about being wise, Rossi said. “Bocce balls” is about being courageous and “goodfella” is about doing charity work.
“You want to have something catchy. You want to have something edgy. But there’s certainly no disrespect,” Rossi said. “I had my parents look at it. I had my family look at it. I had friends look at it. And they just love it.”
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demographer shows a map of the distribution of gulags in the Soviet era.
The various waves of residents in the neighbourhood, from a range of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds, have also left their traces on the neighbourhood. The presence of two synagogues, the Kiever (1926) and the Anshei Mink (1930), are reminders of the area’s early Jewish population. The bright and colourful building colours, however, have been attributed to the influence of the Portuguese community that arrived later in the early 1960s.
[. . . ]
During the first decade of the 20th century, Toronto became home to more than 15,000 displaced Jews from South and Central Europe. Between 1905 and 1910, many Jewish families moved out "the Ward" (an overcrowded immigrant reception area between Yonge and University) and settled in Kensington. Families purchased small row houses from the previous working-class British and Irish immigrant residents. Many opened small businesses in the area and the market was established.
Since Jews were restricted from many services and lacked social benefits, the Jewish community established their own societies, hospitals and other services through the synagogues in the area. The Jewish presence in Kensington Market declined in the 1950s and early 1960s when they moved up and out to other areas of the city.
Following the Second World War, between 1945 and the early 1960s, Canada became home to more than 2.7 million immigrants; of which one quarter settled in Toronto. Poles, Ukrainians, Italians and Hungarians moved into the Kensington Market area. The largest and most important ethnic group to establish itself here were the Portuguese.
Immigrants were attracted to the neighbourhood because of the availability of affordable housing for rent or sale, the proximity of the area to public transportation and work opportunities, and the presence of an ‘old world’ market.
In 1962, Canada amended its Immigration Act to allow a more egalitarian process based on economic and educational factors. As a result, many new groups of immigrants from poorer countries moved into Kensington and opened shops: Afro-Caribbeans (mostly Jamaican), Chinese and East Indian. Kensington Market became a true microcosm of Canada’s ethnic mosaic.
Pal Di Iulio, the head of Villa Charities, one of the Canada's largest Italian-Canadian foundations, spent Monday taking phone calls from people wanting to know what they can do to help.
"There's tremendous emotion and we're trying translate that emotion and passion into some sort of plan," Di Iulio said from Toronto.
Patrons at the cafes and bars that line Toronto's Little Italy were glued to televisions for updates. Antonio Lentini, a chef at an Italian restaurant, said many expatriates maintain close ties with Italy and they were anxious to find out what's happening and what aid they can provide.
"They have big hearts," said Lentini, 34, who was born in Sicily.
At the Ontario legislature, there were suggestions from a senior provincial politician that the federal and provincial governments will have a role to play in aid efforts.
"This is a shock to the system for the whole world, but certainly for Italian-Canadians," said Greg Sorbara, a Liberal who represents the riding of Vaughan, north of Toronto.
"It is very painful and it brings memories of the earthquake in the 1970s where Canadian efforts were very significant in rebuilding."
The news came surprisingly quickly from the Vatican, where ecclesiastic decisions usually unfold over years, not days or weeks.
Five months after asking, the Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto has permission from Rome to assemble a panel of theologians and historians to delve into the life of Sister Carmelina Tarantino, a plain-spoken nun who spent decades bedridden in hospital, to see if she has sufficient "heroic virtue" to be a candidate for sainthood.
The Archdiocese calls the inquiry "unprecedented and historic"--a first for Toronto. The Vatican has declared her case nihil obstat--there is nothing to hinder proceeding to study "her reputation as a woman known for her holiness," Archbishop Thomas Collins wrote in a letter to Toronto priests.
[. . .]
Sister Carmelina, who was 55 when she died in 1992, was a "pleasant woman with a pale and suffering face," according to her medical records. Unable to move from her bed at Riverdale Hospital (now called Bridgepoint Health), she began receiving visitors.
Her common-sense advice on spiritual and social matters, dispensed in Italian, drew people to her for counselling. There were often petitioners lined up in the hospital hall waiting to see her.
"The first visit to her was, for me, the beginning of an interior transformation," according to a testimonial by a witness identified as I.S.
All this, while enduring pain.
Sister Carmelina's left leg was amputated during treatment for bone and skin cancers. Her wounds were constantly bleeding, and dressings had to be changed several times a day. Later she underwent a mastectomy.
She was consumed by poor health: pneumonia, tuberculosis, various infections and cataracts, which led to loss of vision in one eye. She underwent 26 surgeries and let it be known that if she were to undergo a 27th, she wanted doctors to operate without anesthesia so she could offer up her pain as a sacrifice.
She came to Canada to join five of nine siblings already here and hopefully get treatment for her ailments. At the time, she was expected to live only months.
"That was the prognosis from every doctor who operated on her," says Joseph DiGrado, a former hospital chaplain who has been gathering evidence in support of Sister Carmelina's cause. "There really was no hope for her."
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