I touched down in Toronto on December 30, 2000, thinking I would be here just one year. Almost 18 years later I’m still here, thanks partly to a neighbourhood named “the Danforth.”
I came to Toronto from Calgary for a one-year program at Humber College. Aside from an arboretum, Humber’s Rexdale Campus doesn’t boast much charm, unless industrial parks are your thing. In Calgary I lived near downtown on a street lined with restaurants, cafes and shops. Rexdale was a bit of a shock, but I knew nothing about Toronto, so it seemed easiest to stay in residence at Humber until I got my bearings. After six months I needed out. I asked for recommendations, and the same neighbourhood kept popping up: the Danforth. I answered a newspaper ad for a room (this was 2001, when advertisements were printed on dead trees) and found one just off Danforth Avenue.
It was a rooming house, with an odd assortment of characters: a Greyhound driver going through a divorce, a short order cook who disappeared in the middle of the night on his bicycle, and Ed, a busking classical guitarist and vegetarian, who despised vegetables: he survived on soy products, constant coffee during the day and NeoCitran to help him get to sleep. I worried Ed would get scurvy, but said nothing.
The Danforth was everything I needed: an eclectic people street, rough around the edges in parts, chi-chi in others. It still had a strong Hellenic presence from its time as the centre of the Greek community, even though most of the Greeks had bugged out long go for suburbia. I taught myself the Greek alphabet so I could read the signs in shop windows, including everything from the octopod in the fish store to the galaktoboureko in dessert shops.
The Danforth became home, from the hippie shop selling patchouli and wispy dresses, to the organic food market, to the pub with the sign outside that shouted “Put tzatziki on it!” Roaming the back streets lined with old brick houses and their neat little gardens was positively therapeutic. Walking and discovering all its hidden gems was like a full-time hobby.
I moved out of the Danforth after a year and a half. Past a certain point, you need an apartment of your own, not a rotating cast of eccentrics you share a bathroom with, but the Danforth will always be Toronto for me. Whether it’s a visit to my doctor and dentist, stocking up on remainders at my favourite bookstore or just seeing what’s changed, it’s the heart of my Toronto.
That’s why I know it’ll bounce back from the shootings that happened in July. These things leave a scar. I know that. I also know the Danforth is the place that showed me it’s possible to have a community in a big, sometimes cold, often indifferent city of six million. That’s why it has the capacity to recover in a way that other places don’t. Communities have an identity, a cohesion that comes with being more than just a name on a map. They’re more than a place to sleep and pick up your mail: they’re places you’re a part of, which become a part of you.
I’m going to the Danforth’s annual street festival, like I do each year. My wife doesn’t get it: she tells me I can get the same stuff without being jostled by a million people, but that’s actually why I go. It’s not like I can’t get ortiki, little grilled quails, at a bunch of places along the strip 364 days a year. There’s a bunch of pastry shops where you can find galaktoboureko and baklava done a dozen different ways, and you don’t have to wait for the one weekend each year when half the city floods the street to get some.
I want to go when that craziness is happening, now more than ever. I actually like that part. The place has changed since I lived there: it’s less Greek than ever, I see more “for lease” signs than 17 years ago, and the old movie theatre has become a concert venue. But its core hasn’t changed: it’s a community, one I still want to be a part of, even for just a few days a year. And now – more than ever – I feel like I want to support it as it bounces back from tragedy, even though I’ll only be a small drop in an ocean of humanity. That’s important to me on some silly, sentimental level, because I still have a connection with that place. I always will.
It’s why I love the Danforth.
