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A Community of Tenants in the City of Homes
Photo of King, Queen, and Roncesvalles, looking southeast, by Alfred Pearson, April 17, 1923. City of Toronto Archives, Series 71, Item 2014.
Parkdale was established in the late nineteenth century as a suburban enclave where middle-class families could enjoy parks, the lakeshore, and the new exhibition grounds far from the bustle of the central city. Over the course of the twentieth century, Parkdale became increasingly seen as a slum at the end of a downward spiral. Then, in more recent years, the neighbourhood has been resurrected as a gentrifying urban village. So goes the commonly accepted version of Parkdale’s history.
But it’s all bunk. In Suburb, Slum, Urban Village (UBC Press, 2009), Carolyn Whitzman, an Australia-based lecturer in urban planning, explodes the simplistic narrative of decline and rejuvenation. Whitzman—who lived in Parkdale both as a tenant battling her building’s slumlord and later as a home-owner with a young family—argues instead that this uncomplicated image of Parkdale was repeated by journalists, real estate agents, local politicians, and social reformers until it became a taken-for-granted, dominant urban myth. But their version of events obscured the neighbourhood’s true diversity throughout its history. As a nascent middle-class suburb, the majority of residents actually walked to their jobs in the nearby industrial and railroad works; even as it was labelled a slum, it still provided good quality housing for those with moderate incomes; and, even as it became “a community of landlords and tenants in the City of Homes,” institutional lenders like the St. Stanislaus’ Credit Union helped working-class Polish and other immigrant communities become homeowners.
With some impressive digging through city directories, assessment records, land registry books, and building permits, Whitzman is able to compare cultural images of Parkdale to the neighbourhood’s real economic and social conditions. The result is an impressive book that demonstrates that the way history is framed—what/who is included or left out—and how we talk about the city has an impact on urban planning and real lives.
After Abel’s dad’s tailor shop went bankrupt in the mid-1890s, prominent friends secured him a position at the nearby provincial lunatic asylum—a step down from owning his own business. “By the turn of the century,” Whitzman writes, “the family was renting out at least part of their twelve-room house, which by the 1930s had become a full boarding house. Rather than a story of residential stability and middle-class affluence, as it was used, Abel’s narrative can be seen as an example of the lengths to which some Parkdale families went in preserving an image of stability and affluence in the face of downward mobility.” Yet her story was published in neighbourhood newspapers, the Star, and repeated verbatim in planning reports in the 1970s and 1980s. The example illustrates the common pattern of urban mythology, left unquestioned, impacting public policy.
As Toronto steadily expanded outward in the early twentieth century, Parkdale was increasingly associated with the disorder of the central city rather than the suburbs. Moreover, Parkdale was home to a large stock of “flexible housing”—large houses that were converted into apartments during times of economic recession or high housing demand (and could be later de-converted). At certain historical moments, flexible housing was common at times across Toronto—35% of city households had lodgers during the 1890 economic depression, and 33% did in 1931. But, while neighbourhoods like Rosedale and the Annex actively resisted subdivided houses and eventually succeeded in getting the desired zoning protections, Parkdale’s flexible housing helped get the neighbourhood defined as a slum in 1934′s Bruce Report on housing conditions in Toronto. Parkdale’s housing stock was generally surveyed as being fair-to-good, but its housing forms didn’t fit the acceptable norms and the Bruce Report’s label stuck.
That Parkdale was a problem in need of major renewal became an accepted tenet of city planning. Zoning decisions in the 1940s and 1950s protected Rosedale and the Annex and others at the top of a hierarchy of good neighbourhoods. Parkdale, on the other hand, was near the bottom and an obstacle standing in the way of progress—as symbolized by the proposal to build the Gardiner Expressway. Not everyone, however, agreed with the doom and gloom of city planners. Immigrants empowered by their community’s institutional lenders transformed swaths of Parkdale into havens for working-class homeownership generations before Parkdale’s gentrification.
Parkdale’s decline into slum status by the 1960s and 1970s, when Whitzman detected a “decisive change in the health and welfare of neighbourhood residents,” was not accidental or inevitable but the sum of planning and political decisions. It was also facilitated, she continues, by the city’s over-emphasis on policing the class of housing instead of housing conditions.
Over the course of the century, municipal officials campaigned against immoral apartment houses in its earliest years, and looked down upon flexible housing in the 1930s and bachelorettes—or single room–occupancy units—more recently, rather than focusing on the quality of the housing or on the welfare of the citizens. The sad irony is that the city was never particularly successful at preventing any of these housing forms in Parkdale. And for all the rhetoric of city-building and calls for good housing, in practice “the regulations sought to limit housing choices for low-income people.” With a selective reading of history that ignored just how socially diverse Parkdale had been throughout its past, government policy privileged the priorities “of the minority—higher-income single-family homeowners—and ignored the needs of the majority—lower-income families and singles living in rented accommodation.” Whitzman’s political leanings are clear from her emphasis on social justice. But rather than targeting any particular politicians or parties, she targets the unequal division of power.
Whitzman’s intended audience is academic—and the book includes the requisite extended excursions through terminology, sources, and the broader intellectual debates impacting her work. Parkdale, then, is a case study she’s placing within the much broader academic context of urban theory, seeking to provide a “deep understanding of one place which is transferable, with modifications, to” other cities in Australia, the United States, and Britain. The localist wishes for some more sustained comparative discussion of the neighbourhood in relation to other Toronto neighbourhoods, like Rosedale and the Annex (both of which are mentioned at times) to clarify how specific decisions in one of our neighbourhoods affect others and to provide better understanding of exactly how other neighbourhoods succeeded while Parkdale failed.
Although as an academic book Whitzman’s argument defies easy or singular narrative, her deft handling of sources rewards with fascinating detail. In one case, it allows her to demonstrate the neighbourhood’s downward evolution through the prism of two individual properties:
On Dowling Avenue, for instance, a house owned by a barrister in 1913 was rented by his son to a car dealer in 1931. By 1951, it was owned by an absentee landlord and had been subdivided into four flats, lived in by a clerk, a salesman, an engineer, and a postal clerk. James Beaty’s villa, occupied by his widow in 1913, had been subdivided into three flats by 1931, rented to a civil engineer, a designer, and a widow. In 1951, these three flats were rented to another widow, a barber, and a booker.
Her book is a reminder that local histories and the assumptions we make about our communities need to be unpacked, questioned, and investigated further to come to a deeper understanding. It’s also a reminder about the power that language carries whenever we talk about the city and city-building. Loaded terms, which over-simplify a neighbourhood’s complexity, serve only to skew debate. After all, as Whitzman notes, if Parkdale is talked about as “a scapegoat, a dumping ground, barren and sterile,” it’s a small step to dismissing its residents with dehumanizing language like “riff raff” and “two-legged rats.”
