Editors Note: Spacing is pleased to be participating in the Toronto Public Library’s One Book program again this year. This month the library hopes the whole city will start reading Loyalty Management, a poetry book by Glenn Downie, set in part in the Junction neighbourhood. Throughout the month Spacing Toronto will present a series of posts exploring the book.
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There’s an art
to cutting up carcasses
If I do good floors he’ll teach me Nothing
more beautiful
than red meat
– Butcher’s boy
In this charming two minute video, Glen Downie discusses how the Junction (and how charming it looks!) worked its way into his poetry. The Junction has gained a foothold in the neighbourhboods-in-which-people-want-to-live, and a large part of this must be attributed to the elimination of the massive slaughterhouse at Keele and St. Claire. The Junction was, for a long time, ugly because the power lines ran every which way, and boring because it didn’t serve booze. But it was also incredibly…smelly. In the summer, when you caught the wind the wrong way, you could smell blood on the air. The railway lines were put down here in the 1880s, and thus the Big Smoke became Hogtown.
The tracks don’t see much action anymore, although there’s a Go station in progress justnorth of Dundas on Keele. The slaughterhouses are now a Home Depot/Sobey’s/Drive-thru ATM/Blockbuster megaplaza surrounded by bland row houses, but people still say they’re going to “the stockyards” for a wrench or a rental.
Once upon a time The Purple Onion, now on Dundas, was directly across from what were Ontario’s largest meat-packing plants. I wonder if they could just…wander over and pick up their orders?
This post is part of Spacing’s One Book series throughout the month of April. Photo by Sifu Renka