Lejla Odobasic
Crucial questions about condo living still remain. How will the building type accommodate family growth? How might this affect the city itself– are we going to have an exodus of entire neighbourhoods back to the suburbs once the kids arrive? Are these then just ‘transitional’ buildings? Just a few blocks west of Liberty Village along King Street West is another kind of transitional building typology, also with a promise of a new start. Jameson Avenue is a north/south street that runs just a bit over a kilometre from Lakeshore Boulevard to Queen Street West, in a neighborhood known as Parkdale Village. Jameson Avenue is flanked with mid-rise multi-storey apartment buildings mostly dating from the 1950’s. The majority of residents in these apartment buildings are new immigrants to Canada. Jameson Avenue is where their Canadian life begins. Jameson Avenue dates from 1810 when Parkdale was quite a wealthy residential suburb of Victorian mansions overlooking Lake Ontario. In the mid-1950s Toronto built the Gardiner Expressway creating a grave barrier between the city and its waterfront. In Parkdale this greatly devalued the once prime lake view real estate, reorganising the area’s streets with the demolition of over fifty houses at the foot of Jameson Avenue. This in turn gave rise to the multi-storey mid-rise apartment buildings that line the street today, changing it from single-family dwellings to the multi- storey mid-rise apartment buildings. During the 1970s, Parkdale went through a large demographic change. The provincial government, in the hopes of integrating many long-term mental illness patients from the two adjacent psychiatric hospitals, decided to convert many old Victorian mansions into boarding houses. Many illegal small units were also created further driving the down property values. Soon Parkdale developed a reputation as a neighbourhood endemic
with poverty, crime, drugs, homelessness and large numbers of people living with mental illness. In a vicious cycle this reputation drew the real estate prices even farther down allowing the apartment buildings lining Jameson Avenue to become an affordable option for the many new immigrants to the city. Today, walking down Jameson Avenue there is a strange tension, an oscillation between its dangerous reputation and the undeniable comfort of the street’s proportions. Unlike the condo typology, here the ratio of street width to building height is just right. The apartment buildings embody an ephemeral feeling of frozen time; brick buildings stand proudly with their dancing balcony patterns, all demarcated with distinctly 50s signage with names such as The Manor,The Royal Court, Sunset Tower and Concord. Many of these buildings have fallen into a bit of disrepair but one can’t help but wonder if, like the condos, they too bring a sense of promise to the people who inhabit them? Do they too sell more than just rental square footage? Are they part of the dream of a transition into a new life? g References: Slater,Tom.‘Toronto’s South Parkdale Neighbourhood: A Brief History of Development, Disinvestment, and Gentrification’. Research Bulletin 28 . Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto, May 2005. Whitzman, Carolyn. Suburb, slum, urban village : transformations in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, 1875-2002. Vancouver, UBC Press. 2009
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