I didn’t have much time in Toronto, but I spent much of it in Kensington Market, a tangle of small streets and mismatched buildings just past Spadina Avenue. It isn’t a very big neighbourhoods, but it does a lot with what it’s got.
Before I left Montreal, my geography geek friend Sam Imberman organized an event for all of the other geography geeks he knew. He called it “Shots and Corners.” For three hours, we walked through Little Italy, Outremont, Mile End and the Plateau to visit everyone’s favourite streetcorners.
We honoured each corner with a toast and a shot of various types of liquor. My corner was the intersection of Groll Avenue and the laneway between Esplanade and Jeanne-Mance, which I picked partly because I like the way it looks and partly because I’m the kind of annoying person who has a preference for the obscure. (My drink, in case you’re curious, was gin.)
There are a few café terraces I really love, like Caffè Beano at 9th Street and 17th Avenue in Calgary, or Social Club at St. Viateur and Esplanade in Montreal. They’re perfect places to watch the city, but they’re also interesting social spaces in and of themselves, with regular customers and even little cliques that seem to claim sections of the terraces for themselves.
My favourite outdoor café, though, has got to be the Casa Acoreana at the corner of Augusta and Baldwin in Toronto’s Kensington Market. The coffee here is pretty good, and it’s certainly cheap, but what I really like about the place is the way it opens onto the street, becoming a sidewalk café in the truest of senses. With barely more than a dozen seats inside, all of them running along a narrow bar facing open windows that give out onto Augusta, most of Casa Acoreana’s seating space is on benches or at the bar outside. It feels open and accessible in the same way as Kensington as a whole.
I don’t think I’ve ever been so entertained by simply sitting at a café as I did when I was at Casa Acoreana. This part of Toronto has some of the most engaging streetlife I’ve ever encountered, diverse in every possible way. Across the street, I liked to watch people shopping at the Sun Wah Grocery while late morning cyclists rode past.
Kensington Place
Hidden within the clutter of Toronto’s Kensington Market is a strange and surprising collection of little streets. Lined by diminutive rowhouses, they are nestled within larger blocks of houses. They usually culminate in a dead end; some are accessed only by an unassuming laneway, making the discovery of one seem like so much more of a surprise.
Stumbling across one of these streets is like opening a Russian doll: they reveal a secret, smaller world tucked away behind the city’s more officious façade. When I wandered into Glen Baillie Place, away from the street market frenzy of Spadina Avenue, I came across two rows of squat, narrow houses. The houses on the north side of the street, clad in vinyl with mansard roofs, looked like something I might find in a weatherbeaten corner of Halifax. Across the street, the houses were mostly brick, with arched entranceways, an imperfect reflection of their neighbours.
There’s a kind of stillness in these streets. In Glen Baillie Place, a man sat in front of one talking on his cellphone in Cantonese. Across the street, two restaurant workers sat quietly, smoking. In nearby Kensington Place, an even more discreet street behind the shops of Kensington Avenue, an old man sat on his front porch, watching me as I walked by. When I snuck up a fire escape to take a photo of street above, a teenage boy delivering boxes to a Chinese restaurant looked up to see what I was doing.
These streets were apparently built to house English construction workers in the 1880s and 90s. They remind me of the mews scattered across Central London, tiny lanes lined by brick houses that were once stables. Mews houses are now some of the priciest properties to be found in London; recently, in Toronto, news broke that a group of investors has been quietly buying up property around Kensington’s laneways, perhaps with a plan to develop them with shopping and housing.
“If the city moved to make [Kensington's] warren-like laneways more accessible — a process that would involve expropriations, public-space improvements and changes to the city’s policy of rejecting laneway development — it could trigger a jump in real-estate prices as galleries, boutiques and cafés move in to these newly created mews,” wrote John Lorinc in the Globe and Mail. If that ends up being the case, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that Kensington’s little streets might lose some of their secluded charm.
