Chinatown and Kensington Tour

Chinatown and Kensington Tour

In all of my recent excursions to Toronto, I've discovered that, in addition to countless world-class landmarks and attractions, the city has many lesser-known nooks and corners filled with history, intriguing tales, and anecdotes. Bruce Bell, a well-known novelist, writer, actor, and standup comedian who is also a devoted historian and has become one of Toronto's most well-recognized history specialists, is one of the greatest people to learn about the twists and turns of Toronto's past.

My brother, who lives in Austria, was reading a German travel magazine that featured a story about Bruce, so he called me up and said that there is this guy who is doing all these cool walking tours through Toronto, and that's how I met Bruce—through a European detour. I've done two of his trips in the last several years, both of which covered the downtown area and included a gourmet investigation of Toronto's famed St. Lawrence market. I'd always liked the experience and had hoped to undertake another tour with Bruce for quite some time.

So I felt it was certainly time for more amusing and interesting excursions in Toronto, and this time it was going to be Chinatown-Kensington, one of the city's most active and intriguing neighborhoods. So I called Bruce and suggested we make another trip. To share the experience, I gathered six of my friends yesterday at 6:30 p.m. in one of Toronto's contemporary architectural landmarks, the OCAD Building at 100 McCaul Street, just south of the University of Toronto campus. The OCAD Building, dubbed the "gift box on stilts" by me, is part of the 2004 reconstruction of the Ontario College of Art & Design Campus. The Sharp Centre for Design has a one-of-a-kind "table top" structure that has swiftly become one of Toronto's most identifiable landmarks.

The Grange, which is being renovated, is located near the AGO.

We met at Butterfield Park, surrounded by the stilts that support the tabletop of this amazing structure. We next went west into a grassy space that has Toronto's oldest house: "The Grange," which was constructed in 1817 for D'Arcy Boulton Jr., a member of one of early Toronto's most influential families who controlled roughly 2000 acres of property in the region. The classical home recalls 18th-century British architectural traditions. The Grange is now owned by the Art Gallery of Ontario and is being refurbished and incorporated into the AGO's Frank Gehry-designed redevelopment.

We continued north on Beverley Street after leaving this park, which boasts multiple yellow-brick houses of some of Toronto's most prominent families, the "Family Compact"—the  actual power brokers of the early 19th century. Families like the Cawthras and others held vast swaths of property in what is now downtown Toronto. The Bolton family even had their own racetrack at the junction of Dundas and Beverley, and numerous formal social events were held on their sprawling estate. We also drove by a former hotel from 1822, one of the few hotels surviving from that period that is now a men's apartment.

Our walk brought us west on Baldwin Street, which is lined with large mansions, ancient apartment buildings, and small Victorian residences with appealing architectural elements and incredibly exquisite woodwork. Bruce came to a halt in front of the residence of one of Toronto's most prominent historical figures: George Brown (1818–1880) was a Scottish-born Canadian journalist, politician, and one of Canada's founding fathers. He also founded and edited the Toronto Globe newspaper, which is now known as the Globe & Mail.

Bruce informed us that George Brown was a key player in the Underground Railroad, a network of secret passageways and safe homes that enabled African slaves to escape to Canada in the nineteenth century. Despite his support for the abolition of slavery, George Brown remained an ardent anti-Catholic. While the United States was marked by a continuing war between blacks and whites, Bruce said that early Canada's disputes were mostly between Protestants and Catholics. Bruce adds that George Brown was shot in 1880 by one of his former Globe newspaper workers, a man named George Bennet, who had been discharged for drinking. Although George Brown just had a leg injury at the time, he died from the wound around 6 weeks later.

A few steps farther west, we came upon the residence of Robert Baldwin, a member of the Upper Canadian Parliament and a major public figure during the 1837 rebellion of the Toronto inhabitants against the established British power system. The Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837 was a failed rebellion against the British colonial authority, primarily for land allotment. The "Family Compact", a collection of highly rich Anglican orthodox families that constituted Canada's aristocracy at the time, held the majority of the property in and surrounding the ancient city of York. Robert Baldwin was a driving force behind the formation of Responsible Government, which fought for greater independence from Britain and self-government for Upper Canada.

We'd arrived on Spadina Avenue, the broad north-south thoroughfare that runs through Toronto's Chinatown. This historic neighborhood, one of three Chinatowns inside the municipal limits of Toronto, is located around Spadina and Dundas and is the city's major Chinese retail sector. Old Chinatown is one of the biggest in North America, which is not unexpected given that Toronto has the second largest Chinese population in Canada behind Vancouver.

In recent years, there has been a movement of Chinese immigrants to the suburbs, resulting in the closure of several local eateries. Many previous Chinatown inhabitants, originating from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, have left the city, and the hole has been filled by a large number of ethnic Chinese immigrants from Vietnam. As a consequence, in addition to the well-established Chinese establishments, a growing number of store signs are now in Vietnamese.

Fruits and vegetables, meat and seafood, low-cost clothes, and miscellaneous commerce are among the items offered at extremely cheap prices. Recently, there has been a noteworthy local rise in Latin American immigration, demonstrating that Toronto's demographics are still changing.

The same may be said about Toronto's Kensington neighborhood, which is approximately surrounded by Spadina Avenue, College Street, Queen Street, and Bellevue Avenue. As Bruce stated, it is one of Toronto's most ethnically varied and eccentric neighborhoods, drawing immigrants from all over the world over the last 130 years. The Kensington district, once the Denison estate, became a residential area for Irish and Scottish immigrant laborers. The modest working-class dwellings in this traditionally low-cost neighborhood have been occupied by successive waves of immigrants from various areas. Beginning in 1910, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, as well as some Italians, began to arrive in the region. The whole Kensington region became known as "the Jewish Market," and in the 1920s and 1930s, around 60,000 Jewish inhabitants resided here, worshiping in approximately 30 local synagogues.

We came to a halt before the Minsker Synagogue, located at 10 St. Andrew Street and home to Congregation Anshei Minsk, Toronto's Downtown Synagogue. The synagogue's construction began in 1922 and was finished in 1930. As a consequence of the outmigration of many Jewish inhabitants from Kensington, it is now one of the few operating synagogues in downtown Toronto.