Cycling with John Sewell · 28 November 2005, 21:09 by Walt Jarsky
Dear Friends,
This morning John Sewell and I rode our bikes around the boundaries of our new association. We met up at Stavros’s on Queen and Sorauren sharing a coffee with Phurbu Tsering. Phurbu spoke of being Tibetan and growing up in Nepal. He came to New York City in 1998 to earn some money and to return to invest his savings in Nepal. When he returned, however, Nepal was even more difficult for the Tibetan refugee community. When he left, although educational and work opportunities were limited for Tibetans at least there was some political stability. When he returned, however, Maoist revolutionaries, with weapons better than the governments, had control of huge parts of Nepal, most of the royal family was assassinated in the course of one week and a new king emerged, and political instability among the various parties all contributed to his decision to try and find another country to live in.
In 1998 Canada allowed Tibetans to claim refugee status in Canada even if they first went to another country. Phurbu left New York and Came to Toronto as a refugee in 2001. Only five months ago he was able to arrange for his wife and two daughters to join him. With many other Tibetans they now live on Jamieson Avenue. There are about 3,000 Tibetans in Toronto, and about 2,000 in Parkdale. On Saturday mornings more than 200 children attend Tibetan language classes on King and Springhurst. This refugee community seems surprisingly developed for its brief settlement in Toronto. Besides these classes organized with Culture Link, there are an office of the Tibetan Youth Congress, and the Tibetan Association of Ontario in our neighbourhood.
John was familiar with the situation in Nepal because his sister went to work there temporarily upon retiring as a teacher. In fact she was in the country when all communication with the world was cut off for one week following the assassinations. There is no Canadian consulate in Nepal, but nevertheless during that crisis a car covered in Canadian flags came to her house urgently encouraging her to leave and gave her 30 minutes to pack.
When we finished our coffee at Stavro’s John and I began our bike tour. We started down Beaty Avenue where I live. We noted the Lebanese Maronite (one of the seven rites of the Roman Catholic Church) church on the south east corner of Queen and Beaty. Many Lebanese started coming to Canada during their civil war in the seventies. I don’t think many of the churchgoers actually live in the community.
We stopped at the oldest group home in the city, Beverly Lodge, at 69 Beaty Ave. Started over 30 years ago by the Anglican Church to help young men in trouble with the law. We noted 67 Beaty next door, owned by Ecuhome, providing housing for vulnerable persons. In Toronto group homes must have 250 metres between them. Does Ecuhome operate legally by not considering this a group home because technically it has no on-site staff? We noted the large building immediately to the north of Beverly lodge, a rooming house also accommodating vulnerable persons, also not a group home because it has no on site staff.
We also noted four other rooming house on this one block. Beaty Avenue is about 200 metres long going south from Queen to King street. There are 61 buildings on the street, including a church and 3-storey apartment building on the north end. Most of the buildings are 2 1/2 storeys. Few are are single family and most have between 3 and 30 units. There are 6 rooming houses. There is a 18 metre wide parkette in the middle of the block. The lot sizes are generally between 7 and 16 metres wide and 50 metres deep. There are number of mature white maple and chestnut trees. Some have already died and been replaced with other varieties.
We stopped at 28-30 Beaty Avenue, two licensed rooming houses, and noted that although these buildings are inspected and licensed on an annual basis and the landlord has recently made numerous improvements, that the neighbours and tenants have been pressuring the landlord to maintain the property properly, there are still serious fire safety issues, and building code violations.
From Beaty Avenue we headed east on King Street and then south on Springhurst. We noted another house owned by Ecuhome which provides housing to vulnerable persons, and then stopped at Springhurst and Close, just north of the Gardener Expressway, to view the houses rented by the Catholic Worker Community which also provides hospitality to vulnerable persons. Unlike the other non profit housing providers for vulnerable persons, the Catholic Worker consciously lives without government support but by individual donations. It neither seeks formal recognition as a non-profit, nor issues receipts for donations.
We continued east on Springhurst along the southern portion of our neighbourhood and then headed north on Tyndal. We went east on Thorburn and looked at one of the ugliest stuccoed boxes of a rooming house in the neighbourhood. It is some of these illegal and ugly rooming houses that are being normalized by the Parkdale Pilot Project. John, a former mayor of our city, was familiar with the illegal rooming house issue in our neighbourhood and recalled that when he was mayor he set up a special staff position within his office as mayor to work on this pervasive problem. His office initiated the legislation for the city to go in and do the remedial building work that was required, if the owner refused to do it. He noted that they actually acted on those powers on a number of occasions and the landlords started doing more of the work themselves when they realized the trouble and expense involved if the city had do the work.
This building sparked a discussion about the pervasive lack of enforcement of city codes across our city. John as a former city councillor and mayor obviously had more of a perspective on this problem than I did. We both agreed, however, that the catalyst for effective enforcement is grass roots activism. Perhaps he will say more about this at our inaugural meeting on May 31.
From one of the worst examples of housing in our neighbourhood we visited one of the best on Gwyne Ave just north of King street: a 20 year old hi-rise-townhouse infill project now owned by Toronto Community Housing Corporation, one of nine projects owned by them in our neighbourhood. We rode our bikes into the courtyard enclosed with lovely brick 2 1/2 storey townhouses.
From there we rode over to Cathedral Place on Cowan Avenue, a six storey non profit housing building developed with provincial funds 20 years ago. The red and yellow brick reflects some of the vernacular brick of the Victorian houses in our neighbourhood and provides a perfect surround for the small cathedral of the Polish National Catholic Church. The newer building is traditional and modern, balanced and asymmetrical, colourful and unobtrusive, like the best of Parkdale itself !
From there we headed north on Cowan to ride past Masyryk-Cowan Rec Centre, the Anglican church, the library, then across Queen Street, east to Brock Avenue past the beer and wine store toward one of the most infamous pair of buildings in Parkdale—- the West Lodge Towers, owned once again by the Wyn family. Although these buildings won design awards when they were built they have been allowed to deteriorate over the decades. Over the years they have provided often sub -standard housing to many immigrants and refugees from all over the world. The trajectory of Tibet to Nepal to West Lodge Ave boggles the mind, but could be made meaningful with the general development of our community and an effective residents association that addresses the issues of the tenants in those buildings.
In the discussions regarding the boundaries of our association we found ourselves using various criteria: physical, like the lake and the railroad tracks; social, like where do residents walk to in the course of their daily lives?, and also problematical, like were are the problems? We wanted to include them in our boundaries and not conveniently exclude then in some kind of deft NIMBY sleight of hand.
From the West Lodge towers we began the end of our tour. We headed up to Wabash Avenue, the future site of a recreation centre for our neighbourhood, and down Sorauren Avenue, past the Greek Orthodox Church, the new chocolate store, and Mitz’s cafe brimming with Sunday brunchers. We finished our tour where we begun, at Stavro’s, across the street from PARC (Parkdale Activity and Recreation Centre, a drop-in and community centre primarily for vulnerable persons.)
I think John enjoyed getting to know our neighbourhood, and thought this a great way to prepare for his talk at our meeting on the 31 st. He spoke of being willing to help us on an ongoing basis and then set off to one of his regular lunches with Jane Jacobs… We parted with a sense of hope, but also some questions: would this residents association become trully representative of our diverse community? Would someone like Phurbu, preoccupied with survival as a new immigrant, invest his energies now in the residents association and the betterment or our community? And eventually, when he was able to save some funds, invest in our neighborhood? Would the houses be too expensive for him by then? Or would some us have developed by then a community land trust? Or a neighborhood development corporation that would provide a variety of low-threshold investment opportunities for the variety of persons living in our community?
I honestly don’t know. The simpler question is whether we can develop a residents association which can be an effective forum to discuss these questions, and hopefully develop responses to them.
We thank John Sewell for his relevant and sincere speech at our inaugural meeting that was held this past May 31st. We hope this is the beginning of an enduring cooperation oriented towards improving our neighbourhoods and larger communities.
Walt Jarsky
This article was originally published here.
