Someone who grew up on College Street can find a lot to recognize along St. Clair West: the same low-rise retail on the high street, the same stable, older, Portuguese community, with its old brick churches, bakeries and churrasqueiras.
But where College has four lanes, St. Clair has six. Where College’s sidewalks are broad, St. Clair’s are narrow. Walk west from Grace along College, and you’ll come across boutique after bar after vintage storefront. Walk west from Christie along St. Clair, and the street slowly gets more rundown. Past Alberta, and along Oakwood, it starts getting emptier, the storefronts starker, and, sometimes, boarded-up or vacant.
However, this is changing. In just the last year, empty storefronts have been renovated, restaurants have opened, and art galleries have opened their doors.
A neighbourhood in transition
To see how the old and the new are colliding, take the streetcar west of Casa Loma, and begin your tour at Alberta Avenue.
North and south, the street is lined with the amenities that make working-class life in many parts of Toronto possible--dollar stores, pawnshops and payday loan sharks.
But right next to these stores is the decidedly modern
Boom! Breakfast, a charming all-day breakfast joint that first opened its doors on College Street. Manager Jeff Cappellano credits the broad, pedestrian-friendly nature of modern St. Clair for their decision to expand there.
"St. Clair is also the last street going north that has the streetcars, and still kind of has 'old Toronto' feel," he says. And the hype around the streetcar’s opening didn’t hurt, either. Boom’s business is strong -– it’s hard to get a seat on a Sunday morning.
Not all retail development has been successful. Hardy’s Hogtown Brasserie, an interesting-looking restaurant with a wooden façade, closed half a year ago. The Independent, the coffee-shop-cum-pirate-radio-station that opened north of St. Clair along Oakwood, closed shortly after it was profiled in The Grid. But these closures aren't signs that the neighbourhood isn't ready for change. The most successful development has come from within the community.
Heather Mee runs
Emma's Country Kitchen, a small breakfast-and-lunch café at St. Clair and Northcliffe Boulevard. Emma's is a homey spot, with small wooden tables, centerpieces made from mason jars, and everything made in-house, from jams, to bread, to wonderful citrus butter. And they let you take many of their products home.
Mee and her business parner Rachel Pellett both love and live in the neighbourhood, within a ten minute walk from their cafe. Pellett has been working there for a number of years, having come to Emma's via
The Stockyards at Christie, where she ran the kitchen.
And although they credit the influx of new condos and young professionals and families for their success, they seem to have struck a chord with people nearby, as well. Most of their business, throughout the week, comes from people within walking distance.
"We are a unique business in that we offer something for everyone," says Mee. "Students and teachers from the four nearby schools, lots of parents (we're very family friendly) and their young children, young professionals...The typical brunch crowd is fairly eclectic."
The streetcar divide
Not all local businesses and residents have taken so well to the changes that new development brings. Continue further west on your tour, past Dufferin, and you'll be in Corso Italia, an old and established Italian community.
In 2003, the City--led by David Miller and local councillor Joe Mihevc--began implementing the hotly debated dedicated right-of-way for streetcars along St. Clair. The project, patterned after a similar development along Spadina Avenue, was to dedicate two central car lanes to public transit, reducing space for cars while helping to rejuvenate the area. The Corso Italia BIA opposed the streetcar project, fearing that construction would severely disrupt businesses and established shopping patterns. They commissioned a report from Brown + Storey Architects to propose an alternative to the streetcar ROW improvement proposal.
Noting that St. Clair Avenue was unusually wide, Brown + Storey saw an opportunity on St. Clair to broaden sidewalks and improve the public realm, turning it into a patio-lined broadway, with every element of the street in balance.
A decade later, Jeff Gillan of the Corso Italia BIA stands by Brown + Storey's proposal and says that the streetcar project has been, overall, hurtful to main street businesses on St. Clair. A better solution, he argues, would have been to implement Brown + Storey’s recommendations.
"The situation they have on Jarvis would have been perfect," he says, referring to the reversible middle lane that is the defining feature of the road. He says the extra space could then have gone to pedestrians, creating a destination for shopping in Toronto.
Brad Ross, chief spokesman for the TTC, feels that the St. Clair right-of-way has contributed to the public realm significantly.
"The TTC and the city built new water mains, new gas lines and new sidewalks as well as new tracks," he says. "The project also included a decorative element, the design of which was contributed by the local community."
He cites expanding the entrance to Lansdowne Park, improving accessibility at streetcar platforms, and installing new lights as additional examples, not to mention the St. Clair time-based-transfer system, where a paper transfer is valid anywhere on the line for two hours.
"It's part of our commitment to working with local businesses," says Ross. Initially implemented as a way to encourage traffic to St. Clair West and to mitigate the delays caused during construction, it is now a feature of the line, and there is talk of expanding the system to other parts of the city.
"Our estimates show that expanding the time-based transfer system would cost 15 to 20 million dollars," Ross explains. "But we're definitely looking into it - and a group that's studying the issue is reporting back to the board before the end of the year."
A neighbourhood on the rise
Despite Gillan's issues with the project, he is optimistic of St. Clair West's prospects. "We're one of Toronto's hidden gems, as far as living is concerned," he says, praising the city's efforts in beautifying the area. "You’ve got a lot of new families coming in and buying up the older houses."
When I first moved to St. Clair West, the area around Oakwood was rundown and derelict. Some of it still is. But in one renovated space is the
Gallery of the Portuguese Pioneers, which officially opens in June. It is part art gallery and part museum, celebrating the Portuguese immigrants who built the neighbourhood into what it is today.
Perhaps that's a model for the whole community. You won’t find as many glass towers on St. Clair as you will on King, or as many trendy restaurants as on Ossington. But what you do find--in small storefronts, old brick homes, and in stately, gorgeous churches--is a neighbourhood on the rise.