Then. 1979. Elizabeth Street at Foster Place. Kung Fu club. The club has a name but I can't read Chinese.
The Chinatown that thrived here from the 1920s until the early 80s wasn't much to look at but it had the familiar feel of a large village.
This picture is part of the Lawren Harris exhibit at the AGO. I took a picture of it. Harris painted scenes from Toronto's Ward district in addition to his Northern landscapes. Thus there are a number of Ward related photographs on exhibit; such that it is almost a Ward history exhibit. Very worthwhile.
In the left background we see a vacant lot. It's amazing that it was vacant for about 50 years until the present condo - 111 Elizabeth was built.
In the center distance we see the transformer station on Bay Street that is still there.
In the far distance the tall industrial building is one of the Eaton factories. Hard to believe that back in the day what you bought at Eatons may have been made on-site. A few years ago I bought an 'ARROW' shirt - perhaps it was made at their closed-now-a-condo factory (on Benson Street) in Kitchener?
The building on the right with orange trim was a badly run Chinese grocery in the 1960s. I used to sit in there when my paternal gramps and the owner shot the breeze. Owner was a friend of my gramps. Said grocer hit up my gramps for a sizeable for its day loan of $800 which was never repaid. Everyone has their pet thing - my gramps loaned money to hard ups - he was never repaid. Anyways, that's the story he told me. He was never even close to wealthy - a laundryman with no other income except a dying (dying not dyeing
) laundry business.
You can also make out a building behind [to the east of] our badly run grocery. The brick work is different. On the ground floor was China Lunch. A greasy spoon right out of a noir film. I wish I had a picture. China Lunch was superseded around 1970 by Hun Doa bakery, which lasted up until 1985. Word on the street was that the Hun Doa closure was the result of protection rackets run by various Chinese or Vietnamese gangs - which were sometimes the same thing. Same for the original Ho King restaurant on the SE corner of Dundas and Larch. That owner moved out to St. Catherines for a few years, doing business there. The current Ho King on Spadina south of College - scene of a recent shooting - maintains several of the menu items faithfully. Good if you like 'Chinese-Canadian' style food. The service is terrible; as in don't leave a tip terrible. I'm digressing.
New paragraph, more on that building. So China Lunch was on the ground floor. Upstairs were offices for a benevolent association - the Kwong Hoi society - a loan society or credit union. Also upstairs - a number of dank hot rooms. These were rented out to elderly Chinese men - they were all men. Kwong Hoi is a district in Toishan China that furnished most of the immigration to North America before the 1970s, and not surprisingly, is the origin point of my family. Their sing song dialect was considered unfathomable and a bit disgusting by the people in Hong Kong 150 kilometers away who spoke a variation of it as a 'prestige' dialect. Those of you with a linguistics bent can look up what a prestige dialect is.
Adrienne Clarkson would be a Toishanese. Then the 1970s saw waves of Chinese immigration from Hong Kong, who arrived better educated, better dressed and better off. Now there is a third wave, Mandarin speaking Chinese nationals.
And to come full circle: the Tim Horton's on Dundas just east of Spadina hosts a coffee klatch of Toishanese of all ages. It's like coming home again without ever having gone to Toishan.
Now. Evening twilight July 21, 2016.
