The Toronto ‘Hood Guide

Toronto has some really distinct neighborhoods. For the next six months at least. After that the game is up. All bets are off. You read the intro, any asshole with enough money is becoming a developer and building crap. So before they all disappear you should take some time this summer to check out some of the different neighborhoods the city has to offer. Here’s a quick rundown of some of them:

CHINATOWN
Chinatown occupies prime downtown real estate on the Spadina Highway between College and Queen. You can’t miss it. There’s a big Chinese mall on the corner of Dundas and Spadina and a lot of grocery stores hence lots of fermenting garbage every night. It’s what a Chinatown should be: smelly. There used to be some illegal gambling dens but the cops have pretty much shut them all down now. Not that we used to go.

KENSINGTON MARKET
Inside of Chinatown is Kensington Market. Do you remember that 70s TV show The King of Kensington? It wasn’t any good but it had a nice opening jingle and credit sequence where the King goes around buying fruit and patting people on the back. It’s still kind of like that. Like a stubborn old Jewish man it refuses to change. There are a few new things like a great skate shop called Adrift, and a few good bars (see the bar guide) but you’ll still find places that haven’t changed since the 20s.

LITTLE ITALY
Little Italy is a paradox. It’s gone, but it’s still there. It stopped being a functioning Little Italy about 30 or 40 years ago when most of the Italians began their trek west and north, but even in spirit Little Italy officially ended when the old Il Gatto Nero was closed to make way for the new Il Gatto Nero (which is a good “bistro” but not an old school espresso bar). It still has a few things like, Café Diplomatico, M.V.P. (an old video store where you can get a Mussolini box-set), and the CHIN offices, but now it’s an “entertainment district” with way too much traffic and very little original charm. Go a little farther down and have an ice cream at the Sicilian Café, and if you want to see what an old Italian café used to look like on the strip you have to go to St. Clair and see La Paloma or Tre Colori. While you’re up there have a pizza at Marcello’s.

GREEKTOWN (AKA “THE DANFORTH”)
Once you pass the Bloor Street Viaduct—the bridge of death, fenced in because of a few recent suicides—Bloor becomes something called “the Danforth.” The Danforth is Greektown and it’s where you go on weekends for saganaki at Christina’s. This is a good place to hang in the summer because there are a lot of patios, although they would be wise to start building them in back: “The Danforth” sounds exotic but it’s not a Greek plaka, it’s just a regular old street.

BLOOR WEST VILLAGE & HIGH PARK
This is a kind of urban utopia for the middle-upper class. You are basically living downtown but you have a mini-Muskoka in High Park. The houses are old and have style and it’s really safe and community-oriented. It’s also expensive. If you hate the leisure classes and their children, stay away. If you hate trees and fresh air, you are not logical.

LITTLE PORTUGAL
The Portuguese rule Dundas St. West. They are an extremely proud people and if you ever go to Spain you’ll realize why… unlike the Catalonians or the Basques (or others) they managed to fight the Madrid-based Spaniards for centuries in order to keep their geographically indistinct province culturally unique. They also know how to roast chicken and sardines. When Brazil wins at soccer this neighborhood goes bananas because of an obvious identity crisis but also because the Brazilians are better at soccer than anyone else.

THE BEACHES
The east end of Toronto is not really in this guide much but you can’t ignore the Beaches because it’s a bona-fide neighborhood with a really weird history. In the 30s the mangiacakes tried to keep it totally WASP. They creates Jewish picnic tables and then they tried to ban Jews altogether. It erupted when the “Nazi Clubs” encouraged girls to pin swastikas to their bathing suits. Jewish boys would show up and rip the suits off, which led to a lot of fights. It ended in a huge brawl on the other side of town, at Christie Pits. The Beaches isn’t that racially tense anymore. It’s mostly just a nice neighborhood a lot like High Park. You need a car to get there, though, because it’s a bit out of the way and the Queen streetcar is fucking slow.

THE ANNEX
The University of Toronto is at the center of the Annex and it still has beautiful old gothic buildings but tearing down Varsity Arena was idiotic. Palmerston Ave. is a wide old street with big trees and huge old homes with little turrets and dark brick facades. Do you like walking? Walk here. Bloor St. has some staple attractions like Lee’s Palace and Suspect video, one of the truly great Toronto indie video stores, but it’s gross. Honest Ed’s is a famous dollar store and a famous eyesore.

LITTLE INDIA
Little India is on Gerrard St. East., near Coxwell Ave. Toronto has a lot of Indians (and Pakistanis, though they’re farther west, out in the ‘burbs in a place called Brampton). It’s like India minus the guilt of seeing billions of people living in oppressive third-world conditions. Motimahal is the eye of this neighborhood’s Shiva, but every restaurant in the hood is great. Go on hot summer nights when they turn on all of the Christmas lights. It’s like 6th St. in the East Village times a million more bulbs if that’s possible. A night there is a good cheap buzz.

PARKDALE
Parkdale is Queen way West, past Dufferin all the way to Roncesvalles. Once upon a time it was a beautiful community with a clear shot at the lake but then they built the Gardiner and invented cheap apartment buildings and it became a shit hole. Parkdale is now experiencing a renaissance. Little galleries and coffee shops are opening up and the developers there seem to have retained some sanity, meaning it’s plausible that it could develop in a rational way. We’re betting on it since we moved our offices there in the hopes that it’ll still be a real neighborhood for years to come (see “Queen West Sucks”).

CABBAGETOWN
It was originally an Irish ghetto where the residents used to turn their front yards into vegetable patches. Now there are a lot more cocks than cabbages. We could go into it and break it down for you, but gay neighborhoods are just neighborhoods where everything is gay: gay bookstores, gay video stores, gay coffee shops, gay restaurants… 

RICHMOND STREET (CLUBLAND)
This ‘hood is to be avoided at all costs: mega-clubs with names like Privilege, laser beams in the street and 905ers looking to get laid… truly odious.