KGB
January 22nd, 2005, 08:26 PM
From today's Star......
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Buzzing about the `G'
Gentrification is bringing fresh vibes — and fresh concerns — to the village in the heart of Toronto
It's a blessing for some, writes Christian Cotroneo. But for others — there goes the neighbourhood
CHRISTIAN COTRONEO
STAFF REPORTER
Kensington Market awakens to the same jangling soundtrack.
Delivery vans wheeze along narrow streets, the African café cranks up reggae music and shop owners exchange hoots and whistles across teeming streets.
From rags to reggae to raisin bread, every corner of the Market rings with the clamour of life.
But as night falls, the parlours, delis and bargain shops lock their doors, the daily horde disappears and a uniquely Kensington silence falls on these few quirky blocks in the elbow of Spadina Ave. and College St.
Until lately, that is. With an in-house DJ and a splash of soda, new arrivals are claiming that silence — and a neighbourhood stridently opposed to hipster vibes and wholesale change suddenly finds itself knee-deep in it.
The biggest new club by far — Supermarket at the top of Augusta Ave. — brings doormen, DJs, dancing — and sometimes a Mercedes parked out front.
Supermarket, along with the much smaller Embassy at the bottom end of the street, is luring a loud new crowd to the Market at night — the martini-swizzling, club-crawling young hipsters more typically spotted in College and Queen West quarters.
On a Wednesday night, you can spy them standing in front of Supermarket clutching cigarettes and cowering from the cold, some even seeking shelter in front of the neighbouring community centre. Inside, co-owner Greg Bottrell surveys his 350-person capacity lounge with more than a splash of pride.
"It's something that really fits into the Market," says Bottrell, former owner of Lava Lounge on College St. "I think we'll help the business community in the area."
As he's speaking, as if on cue, Bottrell's cross-town counterpart strides into the bar wearing an orange leather jacket and dark sunglasses, a blonde on his arm.
"How are the locals treating you?" asks Jeff Stober, whose own business, the Drake Hotel on Queen St. W., has transformed its scruffy Parkdale environs into something of a martini-and-mukluk mecca.
"We're getting way more positive feedback than negative," Bottrell says.
He may not have met Philip Offman yet.
"I don't agree with it," Offman says, standing inside Augusta Egg Market, the shop his grandfather founded 45 years ago just down the street from Supermarket.
"The neighbourhood started off being family owned, family-run, small personable businesses. The clubs and brand-name grocery stores go against what this whole market was born with."
Supermarket Lounge couldn't be more different from the business that called 268 Augusta home before it.
As the Tivoli Sports Bar and Grill, the space was something of a community centre for the neighbourhood's Portuguese residents, where seniors sat scowling at tables flicking their cards, while others groaned and cursed and cheered soccer games on TV.
But nightlife isn't the only harbinger of new in the neighbourhood. Condo developments, upscale restaurants and even, God forbid, a brand-name grocery store herald big changes for this pocket from the past.
Locals are even starting to mutter the dreaded G-word. The question is whether it's the kind of gentrification people want.
"You might want to see it as small `g' gentrification," says local restaurateur Shamez Amlani. "Where there are new ma and pa shops opening up to replace old ma and pa shops is not quite the same as the whole place going down the tubes.
"Gentrification, I think, means change. Things are constantly changing."
Danny Zimmerman's discount shop, a 53-year old family tradition on Augusta, is something of a metaphor for the Kensington diaspora — a no-frills maze of low-ticket items, from bedspreads to baggage to blue jeans.
But in recent years, he's seen older ethnic communities yield to a more "white-collar, younger singles crowd."
"So your shopping patterns are different," he says. "Restaurants started opening up more and more in this area."
Part of that new culinary crop, Frank Hsu's Back Alley Woodfire Barbecue and Grill opened on Baldwin St. two weeks ago, offering everything from South American-style quails to Portuguese sardines to Chinese ribs.
"I think this is going to be the food street of downtown Toronto," says Hsu, who was among the early wave of Chinese restaurant owners on Spadina Ave. in the 1970s.
Restaurants, says urban planning consultant and University of Toronto professor Erika Engel, are a "passive" form of gentrification, often the subtle signs of a neighbourhood in flux.
Nightclubs can herald even more dramatic change.
"It is a good element towards gentrification in that it brings people into the community at night, which always tends to have an effect on revitalization," Engel says.
Even the regulars at Planet Kensington, a scruffy bastion of booze and old-school sensibility, sniff change in the air. It all began, says patron Ian McCulloch, when the George Brown College buildings on Baldwin and Nassau Sts. were converted to condos in 1999.
"It started to change the kind of people who were coming here," says McCulloch, who owns a nearby recording studio and regularly warms a stool at Planet Kensington.
"The guys who would have come in after work for a few beers have been replaced with the kind of guy who buys a $250,000 condo."
Although change has been trickling in since Col. George T. Denison built his estate here in 1815, residents have a proud history of uniting in the face of anything they deem un-Kensington. And they reserve a special kind of wrath for anything too corporate or suburban.
In the summer of 2002, a new art gallery called Presto was poised to open its doors at 303 Augusta St. across the street from St. Christopher's Community House. Promoters hired young people to skateboard through the neighbourhood. Spray-painted ads sprang up in public spaces.
"At first, no one knew what Presto was," says Rafi Ghanaghounian, a local artist and curator.
Then someone did an Internet search.
"We found out it's a division of Nike — part of this youth image they were marketing."
A day of protest followed, as local throngs descended on Presto, chanting, "Nike Go Home!" Even trash cans bore witness to the resistance with the spray-painted words: "Nike: sweatshops = get lost!"
"The building was being vandalized every night," Ghanaghounian recalls. "The company had to hire 24-hour security."
Seeing the writing on the wall, Nike announced it was pulling out of the project on July 18, 2002. The company, which says it planned only for a temporary exhibit, used Presto as a display room before pulling a disappearing act the following month.
Before the Presto fiasco, Second Cup tried its hand in the neighbourhood, opening its 100th store at the corner of Kensington and Baldwin in the 1980s.
"They went under in very little time," says Amlani. "I don't think anyone organized a protest. I think they didn't make any business. It was kind of like a collective will to not go to Second Cup when you've got other cafés to support that make way better coffee."
But Amlani knows what it's like to be the new shop on the block.
When he and his partner opened La Palette on Augusta in November 2000, some wondered if bacon-wrapped wild boar and duck confit belonged here.
"Some people, when we arrived in the neighbourhood, were like, `Oh, they're gentrifying the neighbourhood. Nothing in the Market should cost more than $20.'"
Four years later, La Palette is thriving.
That's not to say that the neighbourhood, so long seen as fiercely independent, has gone soft over the years. Last May, Martin Zimmerman, a long-time property owner in the area and a cousin of (Discount) Danny, found himself on the receiving end of the Kensington snarl.
A crowd of angry locals gathered outside his 273 Augusta Ave. property, led by a kneeling, shaking performance actor from New York City who dubbed himself Reverend Billy. He was performing an exorcism on Zimmerman's yet-to-be opened business.
Martin Zimmerman's sin? He's opening a 5,000-square-foot Freshmart at the end of this month. The first grocery store of its size and scope in the Market, Zimmerman will sell President's Choice and No Name products, distributed by supermarket titan, Loblaws. It's a recipe for resistance.
When he opened his door to address the crowd, he says 300 people swarmed inside. Police were called. And moments later, Zimmerman stood outside, with police officers at his back, reassuring neighbours the business would still be entirely family run.
"It was a healthy debate," says filmmaker and neighbourhood resident Minsook Lee. "It was sort of like civil society taking care of its own and having its discussion."
Martin Zimmerman says he ended up thanking Reverend Billy "for bringing 300 new customers."
He still has issues to work out with his cousin across the street, however.
Danny Zimmerman doesn't so much mind the grocery store as the fact Martin is using the family name on the sign. Zimmerman's Freshmart, he says, is piggybacking on the goodwill built up by his side of the family to slip a full-fledged grocery store into the community.
"He is a Zimmerman, unfortunately," Danny admits.
But a grocery store has one practical advantage. Residents currently haul their staples — toilet paper, diapers and yogurt — home from the Dominion store several big blocks north at Bloor St. W and Spadina Ave.
Still, convenience doesn't always trump conviction in these parts.
"It's disgusting," says a resident who calls himself Mike on a Bike, the Earl of Sandwich.
Mike came by the nickname honestly. He volunteers to pick up bread from Kensington bakeries on his bicycle, delivering it to community agencies and hostels. Often those agencies will load him up again with sandwiches to deliver to people living on Toronto streets. Mike would like to give Martin Zimmerman another kind of sandwich.
Lucy Brandon, co-owner of The Embassy, at 223 Augusta Ave., on the other hand, says the Market has embraced her business — although she acknowledges that change in these parts can court controversy.
"Stagnation isn't good," says Brandon, a British expatriate who compares the local scene to classic neighbourhoods in London like Brixton and Soho.
"It all coexists," she says. "There will be the nitty-gritty. There will be proper markets that sell foods. And there will also be really happening bars. It doesn't mean that it's going to turn into Yorkville just because the nightlife starts happening."
And if that's gentrification, it's certainly not by design. Brandon's business partner, she says, only bought the Market building because it became available.
"The location chose me rather than the other way around."
That's pretty much how people have been arriving in the Market since Jewish merchants wheeled their wares here in carts in the early 20th century. By the end of World War II, they made room for Ukrainians, Hungarians and Italians. Portuguese immigrants came in droves throughout the 1960s. Then Chinatown began spilling over to Spadina, bringing yet another ethnic thread to the urban quilt.
The one constant? A blue collar, mom-and-pop sensibility. Even as the local scene gets younger and immigrants, the elder statesmen of Kensington, move out, residents still resist the onslaught of big-chain bookstores and coffee shops.
"The hardcore locals will look to any form of change with hesitation, with skepticism," says Drake owner Stober. "They have to start looking beyond their neighbourhood."
Maybe so, but many are still content to get their fix of the world without leaving the four main streets comprising Kensington — Augusta, Baldwin, Nassau and Kensington.
And still feel right at home in a place like i deal coffee.
On a Tuesday afternoon, regulars are plunged into books, newspapers and conversation. A bulletin board touts cheap apartments, film screenings and rock concerts. The air is thick with the scent of fresh-ground beans, and even the clock face seems coffee-stained.
Here, customers are in no hurry to get anywhere. As far as gentrification goes, patron Lauren Satok doesn't think the neighbourhood will change in a hurry either.
"People have been alarmed about it for a really long time," she says. "It's never come to fruition."
The Market has a way of balancing Old World charms with fresh realities, says long-time resident Yvonne Bambrick.
"It needs new life to sustain it," she says. "When you look at the businesses moving in here, they're set to a certain audience. They're younger, funkier."
Which explains the bevy of vintage clothing stores, yoga studios and skateboard shops studding the Market.
And, of course, the biggest nightclub yet, Supermarket Lounge.
"They've brought their College St. crowd to the Market," Bambrick says. "There's a lot more smokers, there's a lot more capacity to the place as well. More folks standing outside. You get the lineups of a club where there were none before."
The Market is still "home to the anarchists," says Ghanaghounian, but it can probably find room for a high-capacity club on Augusta near College St. and the fresh spirits it brings.
Besides, Supermarket is still closer to the edge of College St. than to Kensington's heart.
The martini mob is only at the gates.
"These people aren't going to venture into the heart of Kensington," Ghanaghounian says.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
KGB
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Buzzing about the `G'
Gentrification is bringing fresh vibes — and fresh concerns — to the village in the heart of Toronto
It's a blessing for some, writes Christian Cotroneo. But for others — there goes the neighbourhood
CHRISTIAN COTRONEO
STAFF REPORTER
Kensington Market awakens to the same jangling soundtrack.
Delivery vans wheeze along narrow streets, the African café cranks up reggae music and shop owners exchange hoots and whistles across teeming streets.
From rags to reggae to raisin bread, every corner of the Market rings with the clamour of life.
But as night falls, the parlours, delis and bargain shops lock their doors, the daily horde disappears and a uniquely Kensington silence falls on these few quirky blocks in the elbow of Spadina Ave. and College St.
Until lately, that is. With an in-house DJ and a splash of soda, new arrivals are claiming that silence — and a neighbourhood stridently opposed to hipster vibes and wholesale change suddenly finds itself knee-deep in it.
The biggest new club by far — Supermarket at the top of Augusta Ave. — brings doormen, DJs, dancing — and sometimes a Mercedes parked out front.
Supermarket, along with the much smaller Embassy at the bottom end of the street, is luring a loud new crowd to the Market at night — the martini-swizzling, club-crawling young hipsters more typically spotted in College and Queen West quarters.
On a Wednesday night, you can spy them standing in front of Supermarket clutching cigarettes and cowering from the cold, some even seeking shelter in front of the neighbouring community centre. Inside, co-owner Greg Bottrell surveys his 350-person capacity lounge with more than a splash of pride.
"It's something that really fits into the Market," says Bottrell, former owner of Lava Lounge on College St. "I think we'll help the business community in the area."
As he's speaking, as if on cue, Bottrell's cross-town counterpart strides into the bar wearing an orange leather jacket and dark sunglasses, a blonde on his arm.
"How are the locals treating you?" asks Jeff Stober, whose own business, the Drake Hotel on Queen St. W., has transformed its scruffy Parkdale environs into something of a martini-and-mukluk mecca.
"We're getting way more positive feedback than negative," Bottrell says.
He may not have met Philip Offman yet.
"I don't agree with it," Offman says, standing inside Augusta Egg Market, the shop his grandfather founded 45 years ago just down the street from Supermarket.
"The neighbourhood started off being family owned, family-run, small personable businesses. The clubs and brand-name grocery stores go against what this whole market was born with."
Supermarket Lounge couldn't be more different from the business that called 268 Augusta home before it.
As the Tivoli Sports Bar and Grill, the space was something of a community centre for the neighbourhood's Portuguese residents, where seniors sat scowling at tables flicking their cards, while others groaned and cursed and cheered soccer games on TV.
But nightlife isn't the only harbinger of new in the neighbourhood. Condo developments, upscale restaurants and even, God forbid, a brand-name grocery store herald big changes for this pocket from the past.
Locals are even starting to mutter the dreaded G-word. The question is whether it's the kind of gentrification people want.
"You might want to see it as small `g' gentrification," says local restaurateur Shamez Amlani. "Where there are new ma and pa shops opening up to replace old ma and pa shops is not quite the same as the whole place going down the tubes.
"Gentrification, I think, means change. Things are constantly changing."
Danny Zimmerman's discount shop, a 53-year old family tradition on Augusta, is something of a metaphor for the Kensington diaspora — a no-frills maze of low-ticket items, from bedspreads to baggage to blue jeans.
But in recent years, he's seen older ethnic communities yield to a more "white-collar, younger singles crowd."
"So your shopping patterns are different," he says. "Restaurants started opening up more and more in this area."
Part of that new culinary crop, Frank Hsu's Back Alley Woodfire Barbecue and Grill opened on Baldwin St. two weeks ago, offering everything from South American-style quails to Portuguese sardines to Chinese ribs.
"I think this is going to be the food street of downtown Toronto," says Hsu, who was among the early wave of Chinese restaurant owners on Spadina Ave. in the 1970s.
Restaurants, says urban planning consultant and University of Toronto professor Erika Engel, are a "passive" form of gentrification, often the subtle signs of a neighbourhood in flux.
Nightclubs can herald even more dramatic change.
"It is a good element towards gentrification in that it brings people into the community at night, which always tends to have an effect on revitalization," Engel says.
Even the regulars at Planet Kensington, a scruffy bastion of booze and old-school sensibility, sniff change in the air. It all began, says patron Ian McCulloch, when the George Brown College buildings on Baldwin and Nassau Sts. were converted to condos in 1999.
"It started to change the kind of people who were coming here," says McCulloch, who owns a nearby recording studio and regularly warms a stool at Planet Kensington.
"The guys who would have come in after work for a few beers have been replaced with the kind of guy who buys a $250,000 condo."
Although change has been trickling in since Col. George T. Denison built his estate here in 1815, residents have a proud history of uniting in the face of anything they deem un-Kensington. And they reserve a special kind of wrath for anything too corporate or suburban.
In the summer of 2002, a new art gallery called Presto was poised to open its doors at 303 Augusta St. across the street from St. Christopher's Community House. Promoters hired young people to skateboard through the neighbourhood. Spray-painted ads sprang up in public spaces.
"At first, no one knew what Presto was," says Rafi Ghanaghounian, a local artist and curator.
Then someone did an Internet search.
"We found out it's a division of Nike — part of this youth image they were marketing."
A day of protest followed, as local throngs descended on Presto, chanting, "Nike Go Home!" Even trash cans bore witness to the resistance with the spray-painted words: "Nike: sweatshops = get lost!"
"The building was being vandalized every night," Ghanaghounian recalls. "The company had to hire 24-hour security."
Seeing the writing on the wall, Nike announced it was pulling out of the project on July 18, 2002. The company, which says it planned only for a temporary exhibit, used Presto as a display room before pulling a disappearing act the following month.
Before the Presto fiasco, Second Cup tried its hand in the neighbourhood, opening its 100th store at the corner of Kensington and Baldwin in the 1980s.
"They went under in very little time," says Amlani. "I don't think anyone organized a protest. I think they didn't make any business. It was kind of like a collective will to not go to Second Cup when you've got other cafés to support that make way better coffee."
But Amlani knows what it's like to be the new shop on the block.
When he and his partner opened La Palette on Augusta in November 2000, some wondered if bacon-wrapped wild boar and duck confit belonged here.
"Some people, when we arrived in the neighbourhood, were like, `Oh, they're gentrifying the neighbourhood. Nothing in the Market should cost more than $20.'"
Four years later, La Palette is thriving.
That's not to say that the neighbourhood, so long seen as fiercely independent, has gone soft over the years. Last May, Martin Zimmerman, a long-time property owner in the area and a cousin of (Discount) Danny, found himself on the receiving end of the Kensington snarl.
A crowd of angry locals gathered outside his 273 Augusta Ave. property, led by a kneeling, shaking performance actor from New York City who dubbed himself Reverend Billy. He was performing an exorcism on Zimmerman's yet-to-be opened business.
Martin Zimmerman's sin? He's opening a 5,000-square-foot Freshmart at the end of this month. The first grocery store of its size and scope in the Market, Zimmerman will sell President's Choice and No Name products, distributed by supermarket titan, Loblaws. It's a recipe for resistance.
When he opened his door to address the crowd, he says 300 people swarmed inside. Police were called. And moments later, Zimmerman stood outside, with police officers at his back, reassuring neighbours the business would still be entirely family run.
"It was a healthy debate," says filmmaker and neighbourhood resident Minsook Lee. "It was sort of like civil society taking care of its own and having its discussion."
Martin Zimmerman says he ended up thanking Reverend Billy "for bringing 300 new customers."
He still has issues to work out with his cousin across the street, however.
Danny Zimmerman doesn't so much mind the grocery store as the fact Martin is using the family name on the sign. Zimmerman's Freshmart, he says, is piggybacking on the goodwill built up by his side of the family to slip a full-fledged grocery store into the community.
"He is a Zimmerman, unfortunately," Danny admits.
But a grocery store has one practical advantage. Residents currently haul their staples — toilet paper, diapers and yogurt — home from the Dominion store several big blocks north at Bloor St. W and Spadina Ave.
Still, convenience doesn't always trump conviction in these parts.
"It's disgusting," says a resident who calls himself Mike on a Bike, the Earl of Sandwich.
Mike came by the nickname honestly. He volunteers to pick up bread from Kensington bakeries on his bicycle, delivering it to community agencies and hostels. Often those agencies will load him up again with sandwiches to deliver to people living on Toronto streets. Mike would like to give Martin Zimmerman another kind of sandwich.
Lucy Brandon, co-owner of The Embassy, at 223 Augusta Ave., on the other hand, says the Market has embraced her business — although she acknowledges that change in these parts can court controversy.
"Stagnation isn't good," says Brandon, a British expatriate who compares the local scene to classic neighbourhoods in London like Brixton and Soho.
"It all coexists," she says. "There will be the nitty-gritty. There will be proper markets that sell foods. And there will also be really happening bars. It doesn't mean that it's going to turn into Yorkville just because the nightlife starts happening."
And if that's gentrification, it's certainly not by design. Brandon's business partner, she says, only bought the Market building because it became available.
"The location chose me rather than the other way around."
That's pretty much how people have been arriving in the Market since Jewish merchants wheeled their wares here in carts in the early 20th century. By the end of World War II, they made room for Ukrainians, Hungarians and Italians. Portuguese immigrants came in droves throughout the 1960s. Then Chinatown began spilling over to Spadina, bringing yet another ethnic thread to the urban quilt.
The one constant? A blue collar, mom-and-pop sensibility. Even as the local scene gets younger and immigrants, the elder statesmen of Kensington, move out, residents still resist the onslaught of big-chain bookstores and coffee shops.
"The hardcore locals will look to any form of change with hesitation, with skepticism," says Drake owner Stober. "They have to start looking beyond their neighbourhood."
Maybe so, but many are still content to get their fix of the world without leaving the four main streets comprising Kensington — Augusta, Baldwin, Nassau and Kensington.
And still feel right at home in a place like i deal coffee.
On a Tuesday afternoon, regulars are plunged into books, newspapers and conversation. A bulletin board touts cheap apartments, film screenings and rock concerts. The air is thick with the scent of fresh-ground beans, and even the clock face seems coffee-stained.
Here, customers are in no hurry to get anywhere. As far as gentrification goes, patron Lauren Satok doesn't think the neighbourhood will change in a hurry either.
"People have been alarmed about it for a really long time," she says. "It's never come to fruition."
The Market has a way of balancing Old World charms with fresh realities, says long-time resident Yvonne Bambrick.
"It needs new life to sustain it," she says. "When you look at the businesses moving in here, they're set to a certain audience. They're younger, funkier."
Which explains the bevy of vintage clothing stores, yoga studios and skateboard shops studding the Market.
And, of course, the biggest nightclub yet, Supermarket Lounge.
"They've brought their College St. crowd to the Market," Bambrick says. "There's a lot more smokers, there's a lot more capacity to the place as well. More folks standing outside. You get the lineups of a club where there were none before."
The Market is still "home to the anarchists," says Ghanaghounian, but it can probably find room for a high-capacity club on Augusta near College St. and the fresh spirits it brings.
Besides, Supermarket is still closer to the edge of College St. than to Kensington's heart.
The martini mob is only at the gates.
"These people aren't going to venture into the heart of Kensington," Ghanaghounian says.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
KGB