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.