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<\/p>\nThe last time I saw a hooker in our back lane, she was trying her everything to satisfy a male client. They were in the open parking space across from our garage. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s a comment on the hooker or me, but it was boring and I didn\u2019t bother watching. It was still winter and she was dressed, or undressed, in something inappropriate for the cold weather part of this occasion. She was doing no harm but she was an undesirable element. Off with her head. The Queen of Hearts would have had a field day in this part of Toronto, circa 1984.<\/p>\n
My neighbourhood, Trinity Bellwoods, has changed since then. Hookers and condoms are seldom seen and the needles have disappeared. Here\u2019s how I now orient our house to strangers: \u201cIt\u2019s near Trinity Bellwoods Park.\u201d When we first moved here, I said: \u201cYou know 999? The Looney Bin on Queen Street? We\u2019re just up the street, on Shaw.\u201d (I\u2019ve given myself permission to use Looney Bin here because I\u2019m describing the historical vernacular.)<\/p>\n
Way, way back–around 1845–Shaw Street stopped at Queen Street West. The Province of Ontario owned 50 acres of farmland south of Queen, and that\u2019s where they built the Provincial Lunatic Asylum–the anchor of our community, or the elephant in the living room.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This pretty Victorian watercolour doesn\u2019t do the building justice. It was dark and it loomed. Moans could be heard over the sounds of old creaking wooden floors as you walked the corridors, from one locked door to the next. Patients stared you down, some plucked at your sleeve. I know, because I had a tour of the original building when I was writing a fund raising brochure.<\/p>\n
A brick wall taller than the average man surrounded the property. Over the years, bits of the wall have been removed, replaced, removed again, and mostly destroyed. Patients built the first wall as part of their moral treatment therapy. The wall is now touted as an example of the patients\u2019 creativity, and unpaid slave labour. The bits of the remaining wall are designated by the City of Toronto as heritage property. For whatever that\u2019s worth.<\/p>\n
In the 1970s, the Victorian Asylum came down and replacement buildings went up. The words asylum and loony bin fell out of favour when political correctness clawed its way into Trinity Bellwoods. The address of the mental hospital at that time was 999 Queen Street West and nine-ninety-nine (999) became the common name. Ahhh, the stigma. It didn\u2019t go away. Presumably that\u2019s why, the new building became 1001 Queen Street West–the next street number to the west,. And the building\u2019s common name became one-thousand-and-one (1001). Well that\u2019s the belief in the neighbourhood.<\/p>\n
The door of the new building looked straight up Ossington Avenue and that made it easy for a man-with-a-mission to drive his car straight down Ossington and through the glass of the mental health hospital\u2019s doors and into the lobby. The man had come to save his mother who was a patient there. It did not go well for the man, and I presume for his mother either. The front walkway to the building became a repository for huge concrete standards like the ones protecting the American Embassy on University Avenue.<\/p>\n
There was a floor in 1001 where prisoners were sent for assessment to determine if they might be criminally insane. That\u2019s where I went with a small documentary film crew to interview a young man charged with assault. It was either his 18th charge, or he had used an 18-inch two-by-four to smash in someone\u2019s head, or he\u2019d hit someone 18 times with a two-by-four. I\u2019ve tried to forget the details–and it\u2019s worked. The hospital psychiatrist with us said the young man was probably a psychopath. <\/p>\n
To feel anything at all, the man repeatedly burned himself with cigarettes and his arms were covered with scabby circles. We filmed the young man in the hospital\u2019s gym where he pounded the punching bag until his scabs broke, his cigarette burns bled and I had to leave the room. (The criminally insane defence didn\u2019t work and the young man went to jail.)<\/p>\n
Looking after the mentally ill has changed. Now it looks as if it\u2019s medicate and out the door into the community\u2019s open arms. Many patients ride the TTC as far away as North Toronto. I know–I\u2019ve recognized them there. But twenty-one lucky ex-patients live a few houses up our street in the House of Compassion. <\/p>\n
In 1914 our house sat in a treeless suburb. Three row houses were built just a house away and they, along with the rest of the suburb, went through wave after wave of immigrants: Brits, Jews fleeing pogroms, Russians deserting armies, Ukrainians, Hungarians and Poles escaping communism. When we arrived in the early 1980s, large Portuguese families filled the old rooming houses with a smattering of every group before them, plus the most recent arrivals\u2014the Vietnamese. <\/p>\n
Our next-door neighbors were Polish and relatives of the families next to them in those three row houses. A little piece of Poland. All the children are Canadian. The mother, Monica, ruled from her porch. A big brassy blonde, Monica had a voice she boomeranged up and down the street. Naughty English words were her friends and she referred to us as The English.<\/p>\n
In contrast, Monica\u2019s son\u2019s girlfriend, who lived with them, was a skinny little piece of muscle. And the son loved muscle–especially his muscle car. He couldn\u2019t keep his hands off it. Paint this, rub that, polish here, poke there. When the son and his girlfriend fought, he retreated to his non-judgmental car in the back lane. Then they had The Big Fight. He sought solace from his car. But soon came the clickity-clack of his girlfriend\u2019s sling back high heels as she headed for the lane. When she got to his car, she reached up–and ground her lit cigarette into the car\u2019s new paint job. Ingenious.<\/p>\n
Our Polish neighbors began to move, or die (some were very old). One by one, the three row houses were bought by a Baptist group and the whole row miraculously became The House of Compassion. We neighbours were told the House of Compassion was a home for 21 older single adults coming out of hospital. At first there was a bit of NIMBY when the single adults turned out to be former mental patients. Ha! They blended right in. Most of us had bought in the area because of its diversity and active family life\u2014and the tolerance for eccentricities. <\/p>\n
One middle-aged man from The House didn\u2019t wear shoes. We called him Socks. Up and down the sidewalk he walked, in his socks, writing in a notebook. We asked the home administrator about Socks. \u201cAhh that would be Our Jeffery.\u201d He\u2019d been an economist and obsessively wrote down license plate numbers. And now many years later, he still does. And he wears shoes. We call him Our Jeffery, a more fitting name than Socks. He suffers from Schizophrenia. <\/p>\n
Then there was The Cougher. She smoked\u2026cigarette papers. Think of a medieval witch with layers of long ratty black clothes wafting around her. A peaked ball cap thing with black desert storm flaps kept her face in total shadow and her hair askew. <\/p>\n
I work at my front window–it frames my world. One day The Cougher stomped passed two immaculately dressed Portuguese women who looked to be in their twenties. As soon as The Cougher was behind their backs, both women each made the sign of the cross. Maybe even made it twice just to be sure. Creepy. Not everyone likes eccentrics. <\/p>\n
On another day, The Cougher sat hacking in her black getup. She was on the park bench beside the sidewalk, across from my window. She was outside the school grounds–hat\u2019s important. Within minutes, two young policemen appeared and gave her a hard time. The Cougher waved her arms and looked frightened. So I went out and interfered. <\/p>\n
The cops were, well, really pissed off\u2014they had heard a weird woman was smoking marijuana on school property. \u201cNo,\u201d I said. \u201cShe\u2019d faced away from the school, was on that public bench and she was smoking cigarette papers.\u201d So there.<\/p>\n
She couldn\u2019t do that. Children could see her. Yes, the police understood the bench wasn\u2019t on school property. But she had no I.D. \u201cShe has me and I\u2019m telling you she lives in that house across the street, The House of Compassion.\u201d They officiously walked her home. <\/p>\n
Years later, I saw The Cougher walking along Shaw Street, quietly holding hands with a man equally quiet. She wasn\u2019t coughing and she was dressed in twenty-first century clothing. It made me smile. Her stay in the House of Compassion had disturbed no one\u2014except the young police officers who felt that dressing like a witch and smoking paper was inappropriate for the edge of a schoolyard.<\/p>\n
It was, as they say in the education business, a teaching opportunity. But I held my tongue. Where were the police when the hookers worked our lane, when the drug dealers staked out the local community centre doors and frightened moms and tots away from their swimming lessons. And what about the local \u201cboys\u201d who used baseball bats to go after gays in our parks? And don\u2019t forget the teenage sister of two of those boys. What did she do with that gun\u2014how did she get it? Was it ever found? Did the boys ever do jail time for breaking into the Roots Warehouse?<\/p>\n
Eventually, the school and the neighbourhood had enough of the hookers and drug dealers doing business on the school\u2019s grassy playground. Someone in the know had the timer for the in-ground sprinkler system set to go on and off sporadically throughout the night. That worked. The arts group, Artscape, turned the deserted warehouse at the end of our lane into a live\/work building for artists. Those artists figured out legal ways to drive the hookers, dealers and general sleazes out. They\u2019ve made a community garden complete with a bee-hive. Save the Dying Bees. Artists are what turned our area around.<\/p>\n
Now the former Lunatic Asylum has been renamed yet again. CAMh (stet). That stands for Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. It\u2019s being rebuilt into an \u201curban village\u201d complete with a First Nations sweat lodge. It\u2019s not going away. Nor is the House of Compassion. The sidewalks are clogged with young parents and their super-sonic, doublewide strollers complete with cup holders and WiFi. Coffee Cafes have pushed out the Vietnamese fruit and veg stores. You can\u2019t park and none of us can afford the trendy restaurants. To us, the area\u2019s cycle may be on a downward trend. Hope not. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The last time I saw a hooker in our back lane, she was trying her everything to satisfy a male client. They were in the open parking space across from our garage. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s a comment on the hooker or me, but it was boring and I didn\u2019t bother watching. It was still winter and she was dressed, or undressed, in something inappropriate for the cold weather part of this occasion. She was doing no harm but she was an undesirable element. Off with her head. The Queen of Hearts would have had a field day in this part of Toronto, circa 1984.<\/p>\n Read More...<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/barbaraboyden.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/barbaraboyden.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/barbaraboyden.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barbaraboyden.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barbaraboyden.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=616"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/barbaraboyden.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":621,"href":"https:\/\/barbaraboyden.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616\/revisions\/621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/barbaraboyden.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barbaraboyden.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barbaraboyden.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}