Spacing’s associate editor Shawn Micallef wrote the lead City article in this week’s Eye Weekly about the life and times of Bathurst Street. Shawn’s bi-weekly Stroll column has now morphed into a once-a-month feature in a similar style as his previous columns, but longer now. As usual, he paints a colourful picture of Toronto’s intriguing history.
At first glance, Bathurst is not a pretty street. They don’t sell postcards featuring it, but it’s a street that means a great deal to Toronto. Particularly so for the Jewish community, which has roughly followed it while migrating around the city over the years. Its delights are often subtle and best experienced on foot, but Bathurst’s extreme length should be explored in manageable chunks, getting to know a bit at a time.
Read the full article and check out the photo slideshow.
5 comments
I live on Bathurst during that forlorn stretch between Dundas and Davenport. I’ve always found the street very interesting as it passes through North Toronto. Shawn is very right to the St. Clair and Bathurst intersection is ripe with lost opportunities architecturally.
I loved this article when I picked it up yesterday 🙂
> From the market up to Dupont, Bathurst is remarkably uneventful.
I must say I disagreed with the assessment of the area from College to Bloor, though. It is notable, at the very least, for being probably the largest student ghetto in Canada, although I have no numbers to back this up.
The Bathurst + Harbord student ghetto, or the “South Annex”, is the default location of nearly every student who has decided to live off campus. If these people can be said to contribute anything of cultural relevance, which I would certainly say they do (how about the members of scores of prolific local bands, such as Ninja High School), it is worth noting the ‘hood or origin.
I agree that this may be hard to gather by walking through the area, but a mention of Sneaky Dee’s would have been appropriate here, too.
Otherwise, I definitely enjoyed the article about the street formerly known as “muddy trail”, and have always wondered about the origin of the name “Bathurst”.
I must say I disagreed with the assessment of the area from College to Bloor, though. It is notable, at the very least, for being probably the largest student ghetto in Canada, although I have no numbers to back this up.
That’s the neighbourhood, though – the street itself is kind of grim, which I guess is inevitable if it can’t support retail and it’s too busy to be nice as a residential street. Spadina between Bloor and Dupont is the same sort of deal, as is a lot of Carlaw south of Langley.
All north-south streets west of Spadina really don’t have much in the way of retail until you hit Roncesvalles. My guess is that the east-west streets, particularly Queen, Dundas, College and Bloor are close and dominant. Busy streets like Dufferin, Lansdowne, Dovercourt and Ossington share the same general residental characteristics as Bathurst south of St. Clair.
This is exactly the same on the east end, where Carlaw/Pape, Coxwell and Woodbine, even Broadview, are the same way. Queen, Gerrard and Danforth is where the retail stores established.
My best guess as to why? The main streetcar routes were east-west, right up to the horsecar era. Queen, Dundas, College, Gerrard and Bloor/Danforth were where the streetcar routes were. The Bathurst Car was once an east-west route, turning at Adelaide or Front to go downtown from St. Clair. Dufferin never had streetcars, routes on Lansdowne, Ossington and Coxwell were once minor feeders. Roncesvalles always had a busy streetcar route, in comparison.
Kevin> Student ghetto or not, it exists behind closed doors along Bathurst. So it, like lots of other life, is hidden. I would also caution against putting too much weight into thinking about where local bands live. You can’t apply celebrity-media-think that low on the pole. It might be of interest to the faithful followers of stillpost, but for the larger city, this level of indie-navel-gazing is either irrelevant or just another variable, along side hundreds of others. Like where the owner of some restaurant or store lives, or a church that lets various New Canadian ethnic groups meet in the basement.
TO’s music scene is fabulous, but when thinking about the wider city, it can’t be the default fulcrum, because it doesn’t matter to a lot of people, it has little to do with their lives. I get the same feeling when people use the Opera House as THE example of how the city has arrived. Wagner doesn’t matter to a big chunk of people — and when I heard too much talk about the transformative power of the Ring Cycle, that’s when I like to bring up indie rock, and say “hey, there’s this other stuff too.” Etc ad infinitum.