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Conrad Black

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Our lost Greenwich Village

http://www.thestar.com/article/558280

Little remains of the colourful, artistic neighbourhood known simply as 'the Village'
Dec 26, 2008 04:30 AM

NICOLE BAUTE
STAFF REPORTER
This is the story of a village lost. A village that, as Pierre Berton wrote in this newspaper in 1962, refused to die for the better part of a century. It now lives on in the fading memories of few.

In the '20s, Berton wrote, it was "our ghetto, our Bowery, our Chinatown, our East Side." In the '30s, "our Soho, our Montparnasse."

By the '50s and '60s it was just "the Village," a bohemian enclave often compared to New York's Greenwich Village. Berton called it an "intriguing island in the heart of downtown Toronto, whose doom has been predicted (wrongly) for so many years."

You would never know it today, but this village was located on and around Gerrard St. W., between Elizabeth and Bay Sts., later stretching toward Yonge St.

Aside from five painted brick houses, nothing is left. The area, next door to the Toronto General Hospital, is now home to parking lots, apartment buildings and the Delta Chelsea hotel.

"It's just another part of town," says Martin Ahvenus, who ran the Village Bookstore on Gerrard St. W. between Bay and Yonge Sts. "Nothing there that I know or am familiar with."

But, oh, what it was.

The first crop of artists and bohemians moved into the late 19th-century row houses in the 1920s. For a time, Ernest Hemingway called the Village home, and the Group of Seven's Lawren Harris did some of his early sketches there. Albert Franck, loved for his paintings and his homemade Christmas cards, began renting a shop in the village after the Second World War.

By the '60s the Village was full of artists, intellectuals, designers, booksellers and poets, and the stuccoed houses – now candy-coloured – remained so cut off from the high-powered bustle of downtown Toronto that inhabitants were known to drop in on a neighbour and say, "I'm going into town, do you want anything?"

The Village Bookstore was a three-floor tangerine wonder, filled, in the early '60s, with poetry and beat poets who were known to scribble a poem or two on the walls.

Regulars, Ahvenus recalls, included Al Purdy, tall, clumsy and loud, and bp Nichol, who used the store as his mailing address. Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Milton Acorn, Joe Rosenblatt and Gwendolyn MacEwen were known to drop in; John Robert Columbo was there "jotting it all down."

"I like to think of it as a magical time," says Ahvenus, now 80. "It was fantastic. I never had a happier time in my life."

Ahvenus opened his store in 1961. His landlords told him he would have to do all the repairs himself, but rent was only $120 a month.

"They didn't care what you did with it, what colour you painted it, they were just buying it because they were buying up the block in order to develop what eventually became the hotel," he says.

Ahvenus wanted his bookstore to be in the village so badly that he figured it was worth a gamble. It was. Even though most of the row houses west of Bay St. were torn down in the mid-60s, the village east of Bay St. sputtered on until the early '70s, when the Village Bookstore became one of the last landmarks standing.

Each May, the villagers would paint large daisies on the sidewalks to welcome "Maytime in the Village," a festival that in 1962 promised strolling minstrels, outdoor art lessons and a street dance.

At the heart of it all was Mary John's restaurant, which dated back to the Dirty '30s and was famous for its lacquered posters, 75-cent meals and waitresses who never seemed to change despite the passing of years.

Avrom Isaacs ran a framing shop that became the Isaacs Gallery in 1959. Jack Pollock opened his gallery on Elizabeth St. in 1960, where he sold the work of then-unknown artists like Ken Danby and Robert Bateman.

Marilyn and John Brooks ran the Unicorn, one of the city's first boutiques. The bright yellow store was filled with eccentric items such as decorated tissue boxes, big crepe flowers from Mexico, coffee mugs and muumuus. They would inscribe their customers' names on colourful shopping bags before sending them on their way. "You'd leave and it was like going to Rodeo Drive," says Marilyn Brooks, now a well-known fashion designer.

Other shops were named The Artisans and The Fiddlers Three; a restaurant was called the Limelight.

David Mason, of David Mason Books, rented an office above the Village Bookstore for a few years in the late '60s and early '70s. "Everybody knew we were on our way out," he says. "Progress in those days was ripping everything down."

Some tenants moved up to Yorkville, the bigger, louder Bohemia that became known as the centre of the Canadian hippie movement. Others went further afield.

Architect Joan Burt, who got her start in the Village, says the land became so valuable that it just couldn't support two-storey houses. The few old houses that are still standing, she says, have been "totally emasculated."

"They've just taken the character right out of it."
 
Not mentioned is how Mary John's transitioned into LuCliff place and stayed there for another good quarter century or so. Not quite the Coffee Mill of Gerrard Village, but...
 
I'm so glad old Joan Burt was quoted - on the subject of emasculation, too. Her renovations, still to be seen here, there, and everywhere around town, were always sensitively done and have stood the test of time. When she graduated, there were very few women architects working locally.

She was one of my OCA(D) teachers in the early '70s.

http://www.magazine.utoronto.ca/08summer/joan burt.asp
 
23323.jpg


Lawren Harris painted a prewar scene from Gerrard Street that nearly made my heart break. There were these really badass three story apartment and walkup blocks that seemed to come right up to the street, like in a big Northeastern city like New York or Boston. This is made worse by the fact that the Bay and Gerrard intersection might be the most soulless and ugliest today - one can only wonder how many sidewalk cafes and artists studios once fit within the footprint of LuCliff place.

And, yet, Toronto is resilient. The artists neighbourhood mentioned seems woefully small - only two blocks - and with every successive gentrification wave, it has not only seemed to move to a more appropriate spot, but also to grow in size.
 
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We still have our Mirvish Villages and Baldwin Villages today. I think I'll go re-appreciate them this weekend.
 
That's a fascinating article. Thanks for posting it.

We were talking about heritage districts in another thread, and this is a perfect demonstration of why they are needed. It's a tragedy we lost this neighbourhood, especially since it became such a notably soulless part of downtown.
 
Oh those charming artists and bohemians!

I vaguely remember this phase in the neighbourhood's evolution from the early '70s - when A Space gallery opened and a few similarly long-gone gay places ( the Manatee in particular ) enlivened the side streets west of Yonge, somewhat to the north. There was a place we used to shop for army surplus, recycled denim, and plaid hoser workshirts in there somewhere too. I'm not sure that you can bottle this sort of thing, or freeze dry it, or preserve it in aspic as a delicacy for future generations, without turning it into something twee and precious. Every generation has their own version of bohemia - I don't think they're generally hand-me-down locations from their boho parents' or grandparents' eras. As the city evolves, bohemia crops up anew, here and there ...
 
I certainly agree that the neighbourhood would have evolved beyond recognition by now, but it would likely have remained an interesting and relatively vibrant neighbourhood. While you certainly cannot completely preserve a neighbourhood permanently, it was far too easy to completely destroy neighbourhoods for a handful of developments.
 
I suppose the unfortunate thing here is that by the time Crombie became mayor and the planning/activist mood changed, Gerrard was already largely gone or earmarked to go--there was scarcely anyone left to sentimentalize it into permanence. Pretty much all that was left, physically speaking, was that N side row W of Bay. (And at least they did invest in keeping that row, even if the tradeoff was overgentrification.)
 
Toronto's lost Greenwich Village...

Everyone: Interesting information on literally a neighborhood lost as some describe here. I remember that Yorkville was considered to be on par with Manhattan's Greenwich Village but I never knew that a small area like that Gerrard area had become an enclave for the progressives of the 50s. Another thing I recall now about Central Toronto was how close to Yonge Street some quiet residential streets were compared to that same thing in NYC.
LI MIKE
 

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