Corktown, a Wal-Mart and the Malvern Crew
I know every centimetre of the stretch of pavement I'm driving now, on Morningside Road, between the Fossil and Haggis at Military Trail with its stubbornly cheerful sign and the smallish strip mall at Sheppard with its black and yellow clock. I know each crack on the sidewalk. I know where the wild rabbits used to venture out from the bushes late at night, before the new condos went up. Maybe they still do. I stopped going there after dark a long time ago. I've walked it winter, spring, summer and fall, shivering, sweating, crying, smiling, sneezing and pacing in fury. I’ve ridden it on my bicycle cursing at motorists or flying in the breeze. I’ve ridden it on buses packed with sad-eyed, tired mothers and sullen, raucous or studious adolescents. I’ve driven it in taxi cabs, or in everyone else's car, or mine, before that piece of crap broke down after costing me more in repairs than I paid for it in the first place. I’ve cycled, bused and more rarely walked along the road south of there. From Ellesmere and the shiny new college campus, I’ve been down to Morningside Park with its families in the daytime and its alleged drug dealers at night, then up again to Lawrence Avenue.
Seven years. This place held me seven years.
This part of Morningside is like an asphalt ribbon linking two worlds, both much alike: Malvern to the North and West Hill to the South. The Malvern Crew and the Galloway Boys rule their respective underbellies. I heard the gangs deal in credit card fraud mostly, though the shootings get more attention. Rivalry between the two street gangs is fierce; a Malvern girl had better not go out with a Galloway Boy. Maclean's, in an article called “Streets of Fire”, offers the following details: as of June 2004, there had been five gun-related deaths in Malvern alone in the preceding year. Nineteen percent of its population lives below the poverty line according to the most recent census figures, which is almost three times the 1981 level.
Other crime includes rashes of muggings, as the bump on my skull could attest for weeks after my head was smashed against concrete. It was dark. I couldn't get a good description. The thieves got only my 12-year old vinyl bag and a bilious green poncho that no one else would ever wear but me, because I am eccentric. This afforded me little satisfaction since I was afraid to go anywhere in the dark for over a year. I still am. The police nodded knowingly when I related what happened. At the nearby Swiss Chalet, I overheard two police officers confirm my worst suspicions: Malvern was the second most crime-ridden neighbourhood in Metropolitan Toronto, after the Jane-Finch corridor. Why they call an intersection a corridor is not clear, but perhaps this sounds more dramatic.
According to torontoneighbourhoods.net, “The history of Malvern began in 1856, when the Malvern Post Office was opened in David Brown’s general store, which stood at the south-east corner of Finch Avenue and Markham Road. This post office was named after a resort town in England; The former Malvern Schoolhouse, built in 1872, is still standing today at 5810 Finch Avenue, and is now a private school”;. There isn’t much left of the resort thing - and the private school kids must feel they stick out like sore thumbs when they walk home.
Malvern, though, was also the place I discovered curried goat roti. There is something wild about goat meat, something musky and intense that is absent in beef, pork or lamb. I would walk 30 minutes to the plaza to get my roti, or sometimes just a samosa at the bakery. I learned to enjoy walking, eventually, after the loss of my car. Along the way to Malvern Town Centre, with its thrifty No Frills at one end and Zellers at the other, I delighted in the cherry trees in bloom and the many flowered gardens. Homeowners there can be just as proud and meticulous as in the most upscale neighbourhood. Malvern is also the place I met my upstairs neighbours, who had the best parties in the area and were kind enough to invite me along. Undoubtedly, they sensed my solitude and, though I didn’t speak Tagalog like everyone else there, I was happy to be surrounded with human warmth.
West Hill also started as a post office, in 1879. The streetcar used to reach there although there’s no trace of that now. It used to be known as Corktown because so many of its original inhabitants came from Cork County in Ireland. They settled mostly in two-room shacks, refugees from the potato famine. Not so long ago, the motel rooms along the seedy Kingston Street strip in the area were home to other kinds of refugees: Roma from the Czech Republic claiming persecution. Most people call them gypsies. This name stems from the word Egyptian and therefore is inaccurate. I remember a woman begging there, at a time when I had no money of my own. I remember begging myself in a manner of speaking when I lived up the road in a basement around Sheppard. Since I made less than the yearly income cut-off line at the time, I applied for a swim pass from the parks and recreation office. I felt like a thief despite my right to anything. I remember saying to the clerk that I wouldn't apply the next year, because I wouldn't need it and didn't want to. I wasn't lying. She was very kind and didn't look down her nose at me at all. Maybe she'd had lots of practice.
Both neighbourhoods fall within the purview of 42 Division, where police take three hours to answer a call about a next-door domestic dispute in which a woman appears to be getting strangled, when they are only down the block. I was the one who placed the call in question. Twice in the same month. The second time, police didn't even bother showing up, as far as I know. The woman survived, apparently, though her clothes were strewn all over the carpet of the condo building hallway we shared, at Galloway Road and Lawrence, only three buildings or so from Division headquarters. The man who was strangling her and screaming at her threatened me but never followed through. I was lucky. They moved away, I think. There was no more shouting there anymore.
I notice they're got a big new mall now off Morningside on Milner, near the cineplex. It's one of those Commons types of malls, the ones where you need a car to drive from one store to the other, or a scooter I suppose, though that would be tricky in winter with all the ice and snow. Now the Wal-Mart is nestled here. Malvern is trying to get a face-lift, taking on airs. Wow - there's a Boston Pizza, even a Kelsey's; none of these run-down two-dollar-pint places with little-to-no sunshine struggling to stream through the windows at midday and where they have karaoke Fridays when the owner's wife tries to get attractive women to dance with the new customers to drum up a better tab. I wonder if the shine will take or if the Boston Pizza and the Kelsey's will get graffiti on the walls and urine on the flower beds.
The Wal-Mart was the first to get here. Just like me, it got the hell out of its old neighbourhood, down the road in Morningside Mall at Lawrence and Kingston. I heard that place is slated for demolition and to be replaced with big-box stores. The community apparently wants to keep it an indoor facility, but it's pretty run down as it is. Several stores have closed, leaving brown paper in the window in the place of displays. Last time I went there it was turning more and more into a bazaar, with hawkers lined up three to four deep, depending on the day, on the first floor between the Dominion's and the dry cleaner's, selling everything from books to painted mirrors to ten pairs of socks for five bucks. They don't seem temporary anymore, since they're not vanishing like they used to after two or three weeks' worth of business. Meanwhile, the very last fast food vendor in the food court upstairs looks closed for good. This is the only mall I've seen anywhere that doesn't have a food court anymore. The whole place seems rag-tag except for the library and the stores left open that still have walls.
It makes me think that there are no histories of malls and shopping areas the way we have histories of television sets, the modern family, city neighbourhoods or even Cola bottles - none that I've heard of anyway, though I'm sure there's a dusty thesis about the topic on a shelf somewhere at the National Archives. Funny how we take the time to go excavate all these old markets from the 14th century, or we think a souk in Morocco is the most exotic thing in the world, but when it comes to looking at what happens in our own back yard, it's never quite interesting enough. Our lives are interesting, of course, down to the very last snot wiped from our children's noses - just not anyone else's in the same neighbourhood.
(c) 2007 Dominique Millette