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Church-Wellesley Village

it would be interesting to see that broken down who say their religion is Judaism vs. those people - like me - who write Jewish as an ethnicity but are of no religion

That's like me too. I think that religion is evil, but I still light my menora during Chanukah. You'll very often find bacon and Perl's hot dogs in my shopping cart at the same time. Well, 2 years ago at least.

The best part of being Jewish is that you are encouraged to drink on most of our holidays!
 
I just had a look at census tract data for 2006. I'll have more details later, but I can say the downtown Jewish community has grown quite significantly.
 
The problem with estimating the Jewish population is it a combination of both ethnicity and religion. Not all ethnic Jews are Jewish by religion and there are also some people who write down Jewish as their religion and write another ethnicity (Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Israeli, Moroccan, Canadian or whatever). And since this is a mini-census, only ethnicity is tabulated.

The problem is complicated further by the fact that people who declare their ethnicity as Jewish *fell* by more than 10% in the GTA and across Canada. So the census counts only 140,000 ethnic Jews in the GTA this time (I guess that explains the much larger number of "Polish origin" in areas where Catholic Poles were never thought to live in large numbers like Forest Hill, etc.), down from 160,000 of Jewish origin in '01 and 179,000 according to the study you cite which combines ethnicity and religion. I have my doubts of a mass exodus of Jews from Canada, so I'm going to assume the numbers have stayed flat (after all immigration from the FSU has dried up by now and it has been well known by social scientists for a long time that Jewish women have lower birth rates than the general population).

So what happened downtown? Without taking into account the drop in self-identified ethnic Jews in the census, it generally held steady or grew, in some tracts by quite a lot, and if you factor in the changing identity, it's even more pronounced.

Technically I'm not allowed to "share" data, but here's something interesting. Let's take the Bloor JCC's own neighborhood, Sussex-Ulster. Despite a drop of over 10% between '01 and '06, the number of people declaring a Jewish ethnicity increased by over 50% in those two census tracts. That's an interesting turn of events - indeed, it was once a Jewish neighborhood until the 1950s exodus to suburbia, though at that time it was more "North Kensington" than "South Annex." Certainly I remember being saying "that's it?" when looking at '01 data there, as it didn't speak to my experience of that neighborhood in the past couple of years. Looks like the Bloor-Spadina location of the Downtown JCC seems very appropriate. :) The Jewish population of the Annex and Seaton Village continues to grow significantly as well.

Anyway, for those who are still actually reading this thread, here's a little piece that anyone with the slightest familiarity with the Jewish population in Trinity-Spadina will find amusing (I can't make this up!):

Faith-based funding could turn out to be an issue in this particular riding, since the Jewish population, many of whom already send their children to private faith-based schools, makes up 4 per cent of the population (compared to the provincial average of 1.5 per cent).

http://www.insidetoronto.ca/news/annex/article/31614?thePub=annex
 
A dozen of us met at Wellesley subway station on Saturday and went for a walk around the Village. First though, a detour to Yonge Street to seek out the sites of an earlier gay bar and club culture that existed there in the late '60s and through the '70s ... but has now entirely disappeared. The St. Charles, the Parkside, and up laneways on the west side of Yonge that were once home to bars with names that I could no longer recall, and past the site of the former ( and glorious! ) Club Manatee, and across Yonge to where the Quest once was, and on to Isabella we made our pilgrimage. Being entirely worn out by dredging my memory bank, I passed the baton to interchange whe regaled us with the story of his first visit to a gay bar there, and then we made our way over to Church Street, and a quick detour to where the piano bar Les Caveliers ( downstairs from Boots ) once was, and a block south of there to where Buddies once was, downstairs. The door remains the same.

Then on for a few drinks and something to eat, and a great afternoon of chatter and making new friends. And we raised our glasses in honour of RJR123 who joined our group but who we never had the chance to meet.

This forum brought our little group together. Hooray for the forum!
 
Here is the article from Xtra:

Booking out
LOCAL NEWS / This Ain't pulls up roots

Cate Simpson / Xtra / Thursday, April 10, 2008

Owners of iconic Church St bookstore This Ain't the Rosedale Library announced this month that the store is moving to Kensington Market. The move signals a change of direction for the store, to a smaller size with shorter business hours. Coowner Dan Bazuin, who first opened the store with Charlie Huisken on Queen St E nearly 30 years ago, talks about how it feels to be moving after two decades in Toronto's gay village.

"What you ended up with was the ACT UP sort of things going on, the politically charged days of AIDS activism," Bazuin says of the area soon after they arrived. "We're very political activist people so we just fit that like hand in glove." In fact, when the first queer Pride parade took place on Church, Bazuin says the store provided the power for the stage.

Now Bazuin is retiring from the day-to-day running of the store to pursue his art career full-time, with Huisken's son Jesse stepping in to fill his shoes. The pair had been considering a change of location for three years before the spot in Kensington opened up. "We were so undercapitalized we couldn't make ends meet," says Bazuin, citing the decline of the US dollar among the contributing factors. Several parties expressed interest in buying the store but none of those offers panned out. "All of a sudden, various things came together and fell apart at the same time... this place in Kensington opened up and Jesse said, 'If it's in Kensington, I'd like to be part of it.' And it was a whole new picture that worked for everybody."

This willingness to be swept along by chance has been part of This Ain't from the start, down to the store's distinctive name. "I was living in Chicago and Charlie said, 'I had a dream and in the dream I had a bookstore called This Ain't the Rosedale Library, and I think I'm gonna do it.' A year later it was done."

Some 25 years on the future of the space is uncertain, although longrunning gay bookstore Glad Day, currently situated nearby on Yonge St, is considering a move to Church. Manager Prodan Nedev says they are interested but that the move might not be financially viable. "It's lots to think about," he says. "We haven't ruled anything out at this point."

Despite the blow to Church St that the absence of an indie bookstore might bring, Bazuin suggests that recent shifts in the community are not necessarily for the worse.

"People say that people are nesting now and not coming out to Church St and I say, 'Good for them.' If people can find a little happiness after all the struggles, more power to them I think."

http://www.xtra.ca/public/viewstory.aspx?AFF_TYPE=3&STORY_ID=4599&PUB_TEMPLATE_ID=2

AoD
 
Back in the mid-'70s, Glad Day used to be on the second floor of the building immediately to the north of the Reference Library at Yonge and Bloor.
 
What happens when you put 12 gay Urban Toronto members in the Gay Village?

This happens...

9915.jpg
 
When is the new Priape opening?

It looks like soon. Yesterday someone was scraping the "no peeking" paint off the inside of the windows. The door was open and it looks like the drywalling is done and I could see a DVD display wall. Perhaps two weeks at most.
 
The Old Nabe

The street with soul

Yonge St. is flaming again, at least for a few days, but greed is encroaching on its gritty truth
Apr 26, 2008 04:30 AM
Brent Ledger

Next Saturday, journalists Jane Farrow and Gerald Hannon will lead a tour of historic gay Yonge St. It may not be a moment too soon.

Before Church St. "arrived" in the late 1980s, Yonge St. was the centre of gay Toronto and home to bars like the Quest, the St. Charles and the Parkside.

Those landmarks will live again, however briefly, during the "Yonge St. is Flaming" tour next weekend, one of 50-odd looks at Toronto's history scheduled to take place during an annual ode to urbanist Jane Jacobs. (See janeswalk.net for details).

But what about the future?

With massive condo towers announced for both Yonge and Bloor and Yonge and Gerrard, and Ryerson planning to put a library (a library!) on the pivotal site of Sam The Record Man, I wonder how much longer my favourite street has got.

It's not like I object to towers in general or the siting of these towers in particular. Allowing Ryerson, an institution with an alarming record for ugliness, to expand onto Yonge St. is depressing, but the condos will replace nothing more exciting than a parking lot and some forgettable small buildings, so no great loss there.

What worries me more is the signal these developments send, the message that the street is – oh hideous phrase – "open for business." Meaning available for demolition.

We've already lost University Ave. to oversized institutions, Bloor St. to homogenized high-end shopping, and Bay St. to condos (was there ever a deader strip of street?).

Can Yonge St. be far behind?

People who don't go downtown much probably think of Yonge St. as just the place where pervs seek porn and people get shot.

For me, it's the place where the city is most alive and where I grew up.

I spent Saturday afternoons in adolescence walking up and down the strip with a friend, gawking at records and munching on Harvey's hamburgers.

I got my second gay proposition there – in the old A&A Records, looking at Dvorak, if you must know – and I found my first gay bar there – the old Parkside Tavern, at Yonge and Breadalbane, now a Sobey's.

But more than any personal associations, I love the rough-and-tumble of the street, its mix of muddle and confused coherence. Different styles, eras and functions all mingle here, giving the place a complex, layered feel.

A Starbucks huddles in an old fraternal lodge (Odd Fellows Hall, at Yonge and College) and the ghost of a gay bar (the St. Charles) lurks beneath a 19th-century fire hall tower.

Farther north, a Thai restaurant and a sexy clothing outlet find shelter in a lovely Victorian commercial block designed by Old City Hall architect E.J. Lennox.

Anchored by Morningstar at the north and Monster Records at the south, the 10-unit block at 664-682 Yonge shows what the street does best. Detailed enough to interest the eye (check out those dapper dormers) but not so massive as to overwhelm the street, it's a comforting presence that's open to all comers, respectable or not. This – and not the bureaucratically imposed developments to the south – is the real Yonge St.

Unlike the windswept plain of Yonge-Dundas Square or the tank- like facade of neighbouring Toronto Life Square, old Yonge St. was built for people, not advertising.

This city is in love with the glitzy and the grandiose and leaps at the chance to erect anything that smells of money. But it's in places like seedy old Yonge St. that you'll find Toronto's soul. And in an era of reckless development, we need it more than ever.

Brent Ledger appears every second

Saturday. You can reach him at living@thestar.ca.
 

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