Bathurst And Queen: Reclaiming The Space
At the corner of Crack and Pizza
ADAM RADWANSKI
January 26, 2008
Globe & Mail
On a mid-January night, it's standing room only at Queen West's ground zero. The Meeting Place - a drop-in centre for the displaced that is run by St. Christopher House - is a popular target for those fed up with watching the corner of Queen and Bathurst decline.
They pass by the old bank building on the northwest corner, and they see the addicts hovering by its entrance. They see the dealers drawn to its clientele and hear the fights late at night. They may have little idea what goes on inside its walls, but many of them wish it weren't there.
Tonight, only a few of the 40-strong overflowing from folding chairs in the Meeting Place's main hall are its regular visitors. They're here, along with the rest, for a presentation by the 14th Division's finest on why the corner has been selected for a pilot project testing closed-circuit security cameras. For those who live or work in the vicinity, the explanation - it's one of downtown's most crime-ridden corners - comes as little shock.
But if the audience is united in acknowledging the problem, it's anything but when it comes to addressing it. A few days later, over the phone, a veteran officer will describe the difficulties in policing a trendy, liberal-minded downtown area that just happens to contain an intersection responsible for more distress calls than all but one other in the entire city. And tonight, after listening to a dry recitation of statistics and privacy assurances, a restless audience proves his point.
Middle-class residents complain of open drug dealing and wonder if the cameras won't just push it further onto their side streets. A young woman who works at the nearby community health centre worries that the cameras will deter drug users from taking advantage of her facility's harm-reduction programs. A member of the older, Eastern European crowd slowly being pushed out of the neighbourhood by the yuppie set complains that the police aren't doing enough to stop the area's slide. Younger activist types, a couple of them self-identifying as academics, question whether cops are really to be trusted. An employee of Rotate This, the popular local record store, bemoans a lack of compassion for addicts in the enforcement strategy. And a middle-aged man with an unkempt beard and frayed clothes makes the case that the streets are getting rougher because all the affluent newcomers have eroded their sense of community - and they are easy marks to boot.
By the end of it all, Inspector Paul Vorvis - the 14th Division second-in-command who has been chairing the meeting - looks a little shell-shocked. And yet, for all the acrimony, he's seeing signs of hope. Over the years, he says, the neighbourhood has grown "almost fatalistic" about the woes emanating from this troubled corner. But now, its members are taking ownership. Residents are talking to merchants. Merchants are talking to social workers. Social workers are talking to the police. The lines of communication are finally open.
At a corner most people walk by with their heads down, it's at least a start. But nobody is pretending it won't take a good while to dig Queen and Bathurst out of its hole.
DOWN IN THE HOLE
As the rest of once-grubby Queen West gentrifies at a feverish pace, its intersection with Bathurst stands out more by the day.
A block or two to the east are cafés and organic meat shops, leading into the SoHo Lite strip of upscale retail stores east of Spadina. A block to the west begins a dizzying array of galleries, boutiques, restaurants and bars that run past the bohemian paradise of Trinity Bellwoods Park and, with the odd break, into one of the trendiest nightlife strips in the city. There are condos to the south and townhouses to the north. But smack in the middle remains the domain of those unlikely to be welcomed in McDonald's at Queen and Spadina, let alone the Red Tea Box or the Drake Hotel.
Storefronts sit empty. The panhandlers are persistent year-round; in the summer, the squeegee kids join them. Dealers peddle their wares on the corner and in the back lanes. Home and car break-ins are rampant. After dark, there are fights, some that get out of hand. At all times of day, a vague sense of menace lingers.
It's the geographic equivalent of a perfect storm. On the northwest corner sits the Meeting Place, the granddaddy of a cluster of social services - among them a women's shelter, a youth drop-in centre and a health clinic specializing in needle exchange and other harm-reduction programs - in close proximity to each other. The southeast corner, outside the Big Bop nightclub, has long been a haven for a younger, more aggressive group of transients who turn up each summer armed with squeegees and sizable chips on their shoulders. With the sub shop on the northeast corner long vacated, the intersection's only active business is a Pizza Pizza on the southwest. Dark laneways to the north offer shelter for those who don't like doing business in public. And several long-standing bars to both the east and the west offer the promise of cheap drinks, no judgment and a lot of fights that need breaking up.
Nobody seems quite sure if the corner has got worse, or if it's just stubbornly resisted the evolution around it. "I can't honestly say whether it's escalated or is just more visible," says Arlyn Levy, a 45-year-old communications professional who has lived on a nearby street for the past eight years. "It feels like it's escalated. Five years ago or six years ago, I think we were all handing change to people on the street. And now it feels like a lot of the panhandling is more aggressive."
Robert Tajti, a 19-year veteran of the police force, seems to speak to both perspectives. As the 14th Division's crime analyst, he says that, "insofar as its crime rate is concerned," Queen and Bathurst has "stayed fairly static" - while the surrounding areas have shown a decrease in crime. But having worked the streets until last August, he doesn't quarrel with the perception that some things are getting worse. "My opinion as a street copper," he says, "is that there is an increase in the drug trade in the Queen-Bathurst area."
"I think what's happening there is the issues are probably much the same, but it's becoming gentrified," Insp. Vorvis says. "And the people that are coming in have young families and want to be part of the city scene, but they're less tolerant of issues and problems. I have no expectations that they should be tolerant. If I were living in the same area, I'd be concerned as well."
RESIDENTS RISE UP
The tipping point for that concern came last year, in the midst of the second consecutive summer in which the antisocial behaviour - linked by most locals to a growing crack trade - seemed more out of control than ever.
For some, the response was to lash out. Katie Matthews, owner of the upscale sex shop MissBehav'N at the corner of Queen and Tecumseth, made headlines by telling reporters that the area was "rapidly declining." Having been violently attacked by squeegee kids, Ms. Matthews (who could not be reached for this story) quit the local business association to protest against its perceived inaction.
Others, though, channelled their anger. Kathi Prosser was a crime victim twice over, her family's home broken into on two separate occasions within a month. After the high-profile nearby murder of Ross Hammond, a 32-year-old visitor from St. Catharines, she too turned up in a newspaper article lamenting the neighbourhood's slide. But rather than turning inward, Ms. Prosser - who has lived in the same house on nearby Robinson Street since her teenage years two decades ago - took it upon herself to rally her neighbours.
Knocking on doors to recruit a new residents association, she met with a receptive audience. "The people who started talking are all within two or three blocks of Queen and Bathurst and we just see the spider veins spill over from what happens at Queen and Bathurst," says Ms. Levy, who has taken a leading role alongside Ms. Prosser. "When people started talking ... they felt that there were more break-ins; some petty things like more bike theft, more vandalism. And certainly the crack use, the crack deals - that was a change too, seeing things by day that maybe you saw in alleys at night."
The residents association doesn't yet have a name or a formal structure. But it does have the attention of the local councillor, Deputy Mayor Joe Pantalone (Ward 19, Trinity-Spadina). "I think there's no doubt you have people that are more aware in the neighbourhood," he says. "People were calling more, and that's what made me aware that I had to shift resources to this particular neighbourhood."
More importantly, from the residents' perspective, they caught the attention of the police. "We used to go to meetings 10 years ago and if there was a troubled community, they'd point the finger at us and say, 'There's issues here, it's a police issue, you fix it,' " Insp. Vorvis says. "What's happening more now, particularly with this community, is they'll come to meetings and they'll say, 'There's problems here, we know the police are doing something on it, maybe you could do more, but what we're interested in knowing is what we could do as a community to help solve the problem.' And I think that's paying huge dividends."
TAKING OWNERSHIP
If there's a cause for optimism, it surely comes in the form of Joe Verlezza - the unassuming 56-year-old owner of Portobello Market Café, which sits a block to the west of Bathurst straddling the trendy Queen West and the decidedly less trendy one.
Mr. Verlezza set up shop four years ago, and by last summer he was getting fed up. "The complaint is that when kids come to the area they have to see people that are drunk, drug deals out in the open," he says, seated at his café on a quiet weekday morning. "Soon, those people don't come back again. Soon, those people find some other place to shop."
Often, the business owners will head elsewhere as well. But Mr. Verlezza went the other route, investing himself in taking ownership of the corner via a recently revitalized West Queen West Business Association, where he now chairs the community relations committee, convening local meetings, organizing events and working with the police. And it's meant finally including the Meeting Place in the process, which seems to be slowly easing some of the corner's tensions.
"I think before we had these meetings, there were misconceptions about what St. Christopher did, what kind of business they conducted," he says. "When no one lays claim to an area, other forces take possession of that area by default," he says.
"... All of a sudden, there's a root that's planted, and that root is very hard to extricate because of the apathy. It becomes a circle. So what this neighbourhood has done now, by getting together, is have a will. We're going to reclaim that area."
THE MEETING PLACE
That reclamation, most ambitiously, starts with what might at first seem a rather modest endeavour: a new fence.
The exact purpose of the 1½-metre-high structure to be built along the Meeting Place's Queen Street façade, including the front steps notoriously popular for loitering, depends on whom you're talking to. To Mr. Verlezza, it's about beautifying the corner - about "making it a shining example of one of the gateways coming into our community." Mr. Pantalone seems to agree, calling it a "decorative fence" and noting that it's being accompanied by tree-planting and new lighting. But for the Meeting Place, it's about protecting its members.
Of the nearly 200 people who use the facility each day to socialize, attend learning sessions, build crafts, or do their laundry, an estimated 95 per cent suffer from addiction and mental-health problems. It's a different crowd from the one that gathers in the summer on the Big Bop corner; older, more diverse, and more heavily aboriginal. And the Meeting Place is struggling valiantly to get out the message that its visitors are just as much victims of the local dealers as anyone else.
"We acknowledge that local residents and other people who use the street have been concerned for their safety," says Maureen Fair, St. Christopher House's executive director. But many of her clients, she says, feel the same way. "A good number of them felt that that space had been taken away from them by others coming into the community - in particular, dealers."
It remains to be seen whether the fence, targeted for completion this summer, will make the corner safer or more beautiful. But if nothing else, the project - with a design by Howard Gerry, a local resident who teaches at the Ontario College of Art and & Design, and joint funding by the city and Mr. Verlezza's business association - seems to have helped to bring the Meeting Place into the loop.
"I think we're very lucky here, because there's been other cities, even other neighbourhoods in Toronto, where it's been open, hostile conflict between local residents and agencies," Ms. Fair says.
LOCAL BAROMETERS
The real test will come in the summer, when antisocial activity tends to pick up. But there are other barometers too and one of them sits right next door to the Meeting Place.
Of all the questionable local establishments, the Q Bar was by far the most questionable. Once merely another rough-and-tumble watering hole, by last year it had spiralled into something else.
"They were really allowing major dealing going on," Ms. Fair says. "What started happening two summers ago was much bigger dealers - they were coming in fancy cars, it was a completely different level of drug trafficking."
Under pressure from the locals, the city and the police jointly went about a crackdown. How exactly they achieved it remains somewhat vague, but the end result was that last year the Q Bar shut its doors for good. Today, it sits empty, yet another vacant storefront. It would not, on the surface, seem an overly attractive property; even the relentlessly optimistic Mr. Verlezza suggests that it has been "very difficult to rent."
But Robert Escoe, the real-estate agent charged with leasing it, disagrees. It's just overpriced, he says; in the end, it'll make a perfectly good spot for a nice little bistro.
A new spot for Queen West foodies right next door to ground zero? If that can happen, gentrification may truly know no bounds.
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