Back to Spadina, Rosemary Donegan wrote a book documenting the history of Spadina Avenue which have quotes from people who grew up in the neighbourhoods around Queen and College streets, early in the previous century. What is interesting is that this general area became known for housing some of the most well-known live music clubs;

“People who are not in the area think it’s fascinating, but people who are don’t think much of it. When you come up through it and you experience it, it’s nice to read about it, but it’s not nice to experience it. You have good moments but you have more bad. Sometimes you want to work and you can’t work. The economics are bad and in those days it was certain jobs for certain people. The Jews had the garment industry, local blacks worked in service jobs- an the trains and as domestics. I guess if you were an Orangeman or something you worked at City Hall...Around Queen and Bathurst, when I was a kid, everyone was Ukrainian, Jewish, Hungarian, Polish...The kids you hung out with, usually their mother could never speak English. You never really spoke correct English to them, you spoke a kind of funny English. That’s all they seemed to be able to understand. If you spoke correctly they didn’t really understand.” Interview with Ernie Richardson, May 27, 1984. (Donegan, 1985: 84)

“How I managed to grow up at College and Spadina, in that place at that time, I’ll never know. ...with my parents bootleggers, my aunt and my grandmothers’ bootleggers, one of my uncles also outside of the law working as a professionall gambler, a cousin having done time for what the law came within a whisker of calling murder, another in-law so mixed up with the criminal element (The Purple Gang, no less) that he spent a solid year in hiding, in fear of his life, and the street itself swarming with citizens of the most dubious legitimacy, each of them polishing up his own little corner of the action.” (Donegan, 1985:163)

Donegan, Rosemary. Spadina Avenue. with an introduction by Rick Salutin. Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre Ltd., 1985.

I spent two weeks this summer interning in Moss Park.

I love that neighbourhood. Of all the places listed at the link above, the Berkeley Cafe was my favourite.

I briefly went to Inglenook at King and Sackville and my father had an office at Queen and Sherbourne. Sometimes we met at The Mystic Muffin or Schnitzel Queen. Both of these places predate gentrification.

I went to school at King and Sackville when The Distillery District was a bunch of vacated buildings.

Okay so King and Sackville and the Distillery District are technically not in Moss Park. But they are close.

As for bars, my favourite pre-gentrification drinking spot in Moss Park would be Betty's.

There are a lot of cool pre-gentrification things in this area.

Images from torontoneighbourhoodguide.com and torontoist.com

Check out the Chicago Bar Project, created by Sean Parnell,

it has lots of information on bars in Chicago, including former speakeasies and "gone but not forgotten"

Some Toronto Spots

Here is the beginning of my Toronto bar project.

Please feel more than free to comment with any suggestions/corrections

“A working hotel and bar for 80 years, The Cameron began this most recent incarnation in 1981 when it morphed from a flophouse into a full-fledged arts community.” (www.thecameron.com). Just ever so slightly too far west to be considered a part of the trendy Queen St. strip that includes the Rivoli, the Horseshoe Tavern, and the CHUM City buildings, and just south of the Alexandra Park housing co-operative, it represents many elements of an urban arts community that could otherwise be seen to be incompatible.

Building on the success of The Cameron House, many more of this genre of bar would seem to be cropping up of late along Queen St. West. Of Parkdale’s relatively new Mitzi’s Sister restaurant, Toronto Life says, ‘The crowd here is much less Rosedale trust-fund baby than Parkdale loftier who sees glamour on the grittier side of Queen West.’ (see www.toronto.com) In its own website, the Drake Hotel at Queen and Beaconsfield, just west of Dovercourt, the same area that houses the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, is described as ‘Housing beautiful contradictions, where highs meet lows and the healthful coexist with the decadent, the Drake embodies urban wildness...By the 80’s, The Drake had fallen upon hard times - at times a punk bar, all night rave den and come-by-chance flophouse. The current owner purchased the property in late 2001 and undertook the extensive renovations that give the hotel its current form - a celebration of its fabulous history.’ (www.thedrakehotel.ca).