In the spring of 2023, a friend who was familiar with my earlier documentary photography of the city’s main streets suggested that I consider doing a project on the highly varied streetscape of Gerrard Street East beyond the Don River. I knew that both East Chinatown and Little India were to be found there, so I decided to act on my friend’s suggestion.
I chose to approach Gerrard East partly in the manner of a photojournalist, but mostly in my habitual role as a documentary photographer of architecture. I suspect that some viewers might appreciate the photojournalistic aspect of the project, while questioning the need for architectural photos of the street’s mostly ageing, undistinguished and rundown stock of buildings.
My interests are similar to those of the late John Humble, a noted Los Angeles architectural photographer. He was unapologetic about ignoring the better-known, affluent neighbourhoods of his city, while giving attention to areas where less wealthy residents were likely to live. He claimed that most of Los Angeles looked like what he aimed to show in his photos. In that limited sense, he admitted, his work could be called political.
I often look for my subject matter in urban areas that are less affluent, underdeveloped, and generally ignored. In this case I wanted to show how an ageing commercial and residential streetscape could represent a wide range of social interactions, both historical and immediate. Whether that makes my work political is up to the viewer to decide.
The age and condition of many of the buildings on Gerrard East can in fact be viewed in a positive light. Built to vernacular designs, housing and commercial blocks from the last century are shown in my photos to have absorbed a substantial amount of esthetic abuse while maintaining a dignified appearance.
Gerrard East is similar in several respects to Weston Road, another inner-suburban main street, which I photographed in 2020. During the last century, both streets accommodated large industrial plants that provided local employment. Both are valued today more for their role as traffic arteries than for the neighbourhoods they serve, and both stand to benefit from public transit improvements currently underway.
After an exploratory visit in June 2023, during which I began photographing under skies softened by wildfire smoke, I envisioned an initial project covering the three-kilometre section of Gerrard East between the dogleg intersection at Broadview Avenue and the much larger dogleg at Coxwell Avenue, where Lower Gerrard ends and Upper Gerrard begins a block north.
The photo sequence below covers the single kilometre from Broadview Avenue to the complicated zone between Carlaw and Pape Avenues. It shows individual buildings that are remarkable in different respects. The fully restored 160-year-old gatekeeper’s house at the Don Jail appears appropriately as a pale spectre from the city’s distant past. By contrast, the handsome lowrise Lofthouse condominium at Gerrard East and Logan, built in 2023, is a forerunner in the inevitable residential densification of the area.
On a world-historical level, few buildings in Toronto can rival the significance of the two-storey Second Empire storefront at 716 Gerrard East, which dates from before 1910. The Romanov dynasty, which had ruled the Russian empire from 1613 until 1917, was extinguished when its last member, Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, died in the apartment above a friend’s hair salon at that address on November 24, 1960.
Olga Alexandrovna was a sister of the last Russian Emperor, Nicholas II. She had known Rasputin as a child and was a distant cousin of Elizabeth II. Read more about full her extraordinary life here.
At Gerrard and Carlaw, the elevated rail corridor passes over the intersection at a 45 degree angle, leaving a trapezoidal site at the northeast corner. This alignment was determined when the Grand Trunk Railway’s Montreal line was driven through the city’s east end in the 1850s, predating the street grid. The irregular site was initially occupied by heavy industries, including the International Varnish Company and John Banfield & Sons, makers of lighting fixtures and an innovative portable wind-up phonograph.
In the mid-1960s, the factory buildings were replaced by the suburban-style Riverside Shopping Centre. The shopping centre has now been demolished and the Government of Ontario is planning to replace it with a Transit Oriented Community of 1,080 housing units. A new overpass will be added to accommodate the elevated Ontario Line station, adding to the length of the pedestrian passage beneath the tracks.
While my composite portrait of the street is far from definitive, I hope it will be of use to the planners and politicians who will be largely responsible for its future development, as well as to the community of residents and workers who know it intimately. It’s a curious street, and I hope it will remain so.
All photos © P. MacCallum (petermaccallum.com) unless otherwise indicated
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