Anecdotes from the village of 200 Wellesley

They called her Miu-Miu because that’s what she said when you happened to meet her in passing; it was a signature of sorts, her little, preppy, hyper, happy hello. “Miu-Miu.” You remember her story. She was found a couple of months ago dying of a drug overdose late at night near the entrance to a stairwell in 200 Wellesley St. E.; she had been dumped there by the people she had been shooting up with. Her revival was a miracle, and a timely accident.

And so it was that Miu-Miu came by 200 Wellesley once again a few weeks ago, stepping lightly on borrowed time in the late afternoon. And she walked right into another overdose; the paramedics, when they arrived, gave her chest compressions all the way into the ambulance. This time, she died. Somebody said, “She was a good person. I don’t know that she stole from anyone. She didn’t have a bad attitude.” Let that be an epitaph, of sorts. But Miu-Miu did not live in the village that is 200 Wellesley; like so many others, she came there to get high, and she came often enough that she was known to many of the tenants.

Would she have died if the right sort of attention were being paid to the dealers who use that building to sell drugs? Or would she simply have died somewhere else? No matter. The village, made smaller. The village was made meaner recently, when bylaw officers swooped in and shut down the outdoor market. An informal thing, that market: a souk, a few days a week, in the form of a few tables set up out back, overflowing with outof-date electronics, knick-knacks, household goods, clothes and shoes and jewelry.

The vendors made a few discreet bucks; what of it? You can’t get by on welfare, or on a disability pension. For the privilege, they paid an informal seasonal rent to the tenant rep who used the money for social events such as the recent corn roast; those funds are now gone.

Joyce was one of the vendors. “I sold lipsticks, makeup, earrings, clothing, toys.” You could get a lipstick from Joyce for a couple of bucks, whereas a tube of lipstick at the drugstore costs a whole lot more than that.

Joyce was unconcerned about the loss of her profit; it was the loss of something more important that bothered her. “They take away people being out there, talking to each other.” She also said, “Now people will be in the stores, stealing.”

And that is the law of unintended consequences, explained swiftly and in practical terms. I do not know whose fevered brain ordered the takedown of the market, but I do know what that person has done — made the village meaner, less sociable, more expensive, and made the nearby stores more prone to shoplifting. And then there’s this: A flower garden once grew in a little raised bed on the east side of 200 Wellesley, not far from where the market used to be. The garden was much like the village: a bit unruly, a little unkempt, but colourful and sort of sweet. It was a 10-year project, off and on. One day not so long ago the gar- dener — he was a one-man volunteer — passed by and saw that the flowers and bushes he had planted had been weed-whacked, brush-cut, slashed; the ground, laid bare. The village, made harder. The gardener wrote a note to TCHC asking who did the damage and why it was done; was it TCHC or the property manager who did the deed? Were there no other solutions available than laying the garden to waste?

He got no answer. He wrote again. No answer again. He wrote a third time. Still no answer. What kind of village is this, where questions about flowers have no answers, where social events are crushed and where people die needlessly?

It is a village that needs a mayor. Joe Fiorito appears on Monday. jfiorito@thestar.ca.