EYE Magazine
The worry over the Church congregation
By Shawn Micallef
There are two Church Streets in Toronto — the one below Gerrard and the one above. Lately everybody’s been talking about the above part, worried that it is becoming ungay. That is, straighter. People have been worried about the state of “
The Village” for at least a decade now, and every time a bar or gay-owned shop closes, the fretting begins. Places like Church Street are always delicate matters, as both community and the free market have to be directed by synchronous alchemy to produce a beloved neighbourhood.
But well away from those queer concerns, Church Street has a rather unglamorous beginning in a parking garage just south of The Esplanade in what was once Lake Ontario. Though unsung, the city view from down here in the
St. Lawrence neighbourhood is Toronto’s urbanity at its zenith, as a bowl of buildings — some old, some new — rises in each direction. It feels safe and solid. The steep slope up to Front Street by The Keg and what was, until recently, the Jamie Kennedy Wine Bar, is the result of fill that softened a 20-foot cliff to the beach below where the Town of York’s first substantial wharf was built.
Though the lake view is gone at Front, the Gooderham flatiron building is likely photographed hundreds of times a day. This part of Toronto is our most Parisian quarter, in terms of scale, but also feels like a 1980 period piece. Maybe it’s the font of the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts logo or Derek Michael Besant’s “peeling façade” mural on the back of the Flatiron, but Front evokes the last days of Toronto’s 1970s “City That Works” era. The odd little cabana-like Pizza Pizza building on the northwest corner (it replaced a fine old bank) is from the 1980s “City That’s Broken” era.
North of here, Church Street quiets down, a state it remains in for quite a number of blocks. Just below King Street at Colborne is perhaps one of the few parking lots that may actually be all right, as it affords a view of the side of the King Edward Hotel from tiny Leader Lane — once the brokerage centre of Toronto — up to the still-mothballed penthouse ballroom. It’s another bored-out urban canyon view and, unlike from the west side of downtown, approaching the core from the east is not gradual, as buildings go from low-rise to high rather quickly, like a sheer electrical mountain range.
At King Street, St. James — the first of three churches that give the street its name — was, for a time (and still is for some), the centre of social life in old York and the source of all things Toronto the Good. A few blocks north, the Metropolitan United Church at Queen remains a hub of community meetings — it was home to the anti-amalgamation rallies of
John Sewell’s Citizens For Local Democracy in the 1990s, and its front lawn is now home to tables populated with chess hustlers, which were relocated from outside the Yonge and Gould Sam the Record Man in 2003.
A block north, St. Michael’s Cathedral is the Catholic counterpoint to St. James’ Anglican redoubt. All three churches form a kind of religious triumvirate that, like Toronto itself, seems to effortlessly contain a variety of divergent viewpoints. In the middle of this, the new Spire condo building rises above all their steeples, the triumph of civic secularism in a city that still seems to dig the church but whose steeple shadows no longer dominate the streets and the culture.
Opposite the Metropolitan United Church is Toronto’s pawnshop row. It looks like a 1960s or ’70s film scene from an ungentrified city (The French Connection or even Midnight Cowboy). McTamney’s is Toronto’s oldest and has been here since 1860, and though the pawn industry is on the up and up, this block is where underground and hidden desperation can manifest, as emotional bonds between people and objects are broken for quick cash.
At Dundas, Ryerson University and its giant “RU” signage dominates Church and, as all campuses do, makes the street less interesting because individual storefront variety becomes a mono-block. A recent block-long addition on the east side (filling in a parking lot between Church and the magnificent Merchandise Building, once a Simpsons-then-Sears warehouse and now a residential loft conversion) is the George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre, a four-storey glass fishbowl of student life designed by Moriyama & Teshima Architects (of Toronto Reference Library and Scarborough Civic Centre fame).
North of Gerrard, Church is busy and diverse again. This stretch, all the way up to Bloor, was once residential, but over time those big houses were either torn down or converted to stores and bars. The venerable Barn, carved out of a rambling Victorian, was closed for a few years after the owner’s murder, but is open again and functioning as the kind of gay bar every good city has: big, a little dirty but a social trawler where everybody from any scene can collect now and then. It, like those pawnshops, seems from another era and sensibility.
As Toronto’s gay scene moved from Yonge to Church Street in the 1980s, that old sensibility of queer bars behind darkened windows evolved into a much more conspicuous street presence. It was always a gay area, though, from the legendary days of possibly gay magistrate
Alexander Wood in the early 1800s (that’s his statue at Alexander and Church) to the 1950s and ’60s, when the City Park Co-Op and Village Green apartment complexes were built (the latter includes a round building endearingly nicknamed “Vaseline Tower”), residential structures where a single man or (less frequently) woman could live in relative privacy and alone.
The Church-Wellesley kind of urbanism is ideal. That’s why so many less-gay people are moving in, and why the neighbourhood pretended to be Pittsburgh when Queer as Folk was filmed here. At the same time, the security need for cultural ghettos in mostly tolerant Toronto has decreased as the rest of city has become kind of gay.
In the Diversity-Our-Strength-motto sense, it’s all good, but for those worried about the demise of Church, it’s useful to think of how other ethnic strips have evolved. The Greeks don’t live en masse on the Danforth anymore, nor do the Italians along St. Clair and so forth, but the ethnic strip remains, and people visit because it feels Italian or Greek. Bars may come and go, but Church is anchored by visible institutions and places like the 519 Community Centre; the AIDS Memorial and Cawthra Park; the AIDS Committee of Toronto or that Alexander Wood statue. Even the CBC’s Battle of the Blades that recently put life back into Maple Leaf Gardens is good for the community, because it was the gayest event the place has witnessed since Liberace performed there.
While Church Street isn’t cool with the hipster queer kids (all it takes is a few promoters to change that) The Village is still critical if only for this moment: imagine a gay kid coming from less tolerant places like Timmins, Jamaica or Afghanistan arriving at Church and Wellesley and, for the first time, seeing this vibrant, celebratory strip. No offense to those three places, but this is why cities are salvation: you can see, immediately, that you belong here, just as you are.
