GLORY DAYS
In Toronto’s past, bars and stores used to dot side streets, mixed with homes. There are still some remnants of that age, if you know where to look.
When I moved to Toronto I recall somebody telling me there was a bar in Little Italy where a sign read: “Bring your own sandwich.” That sounded a bit too cute, perhaps something Toronto locals told themselves to make the place feel like Sesame Street.
Then there it was, affixed to the Monarch Tavern on Clinton St. The sign seemed almost libertine in its looseness. Take food from one place to another, along the sidewalk? Next-door was San Francesco, an old-school Italian takeout shop famous for its big sandwiches. The two establishments seemed to work in harmony; a local economy unique to this specific spot, something that’s hard to pull off organically in a place as regulated as Toronto and Ontario.
Ultimately, what was more interesting about the Monarch was its location: it wasn’t on College St., but on Clinton, a side street that is mostly residential and tightly packed. There since 1927, the Monarch is two storeys high, with a pub upstairs and a lounge and performance space downstairs that hosts bands, literary readings and other events.
Today the Monarch’s neighbour is still San Francesco, though it’s been redecorated since I first saw it in the early 2000s. Across the street there’s Bitondo’s Pizzeria, another local landmark, and a block north a men’s wear store. Most of the rest of the neighbourhood is residential. All of it would be almost impossible to recreate now.
This little neighbourhood pocket, and the things that are allowed to happen here, are a gift from the past, “grandfathered” into the contemporary city.
There are often neighbour objections to new bars and restaurants opening on main streets, so you can imagine what would happen if somebody tried to open such things in the middle of a residential block. Today we have what’s sometimes called “shrink wrap zoning” that allows of just one kind of use in particular areas — residential here, commercial there, and industrial way, way over there.
It wasn’t always this way though. Cities like Toronto blended other uses in the past, and commercial and even industrial operations were woven into neighbourhoods where you could live, work and even play. When walking through older parts of the city, you’ll often see “ghost” corner stores that have been converted into residential units. On the University of Toronto campus, walk up by Nichol Lane, north from Sussex Ave., and you’ll find Coach House Press. Look in the windows and you’ll see the two old Heidelberg presses whirling away, printing books. Though they date to the 1960s, they’ve got a steampunk look to them, hearkening to an even earlier era, and inside the smell of ink is in the air.
True to its name, the press is housed in an old coach house (another gift from the past) behind a former mansion on Huron St. that now houses students. Walk through the laneways of the older parts of Toronto and you’ll find old coach houses and machine shops tucked in behind multimillion-dollar homes, an indication of a neighbourhood’s working class past. Narrow laneways are special too. Today fire regulations insist on roadways wide enough for massive fire trucks, but in Europe and elsewhere they keep lanes narrow and instead buy smaller fire trucks.
Stumbling upon the Monarch is not unlike finding a cosy pub tucked into a residential neighbourhood in London or in any other city in the United Kingdom or Ireland. Despite the deep cultural importance of these places, officials in London estimate a quarter of the capital’s pubs have disappeared since 2001, in part due to skyrocketing land values and redevelopment. London has a “Night Tsar” though, a position created in 2016 by Mayor Sadiq Khan to preserve and promote the city’s night economy and ensure that new housing can coexist with music venues, clubs and pubs as it did in the past.
A little over a kilometre west of Clinton along College is the Matador on Dovercourt Rd. For many years it was a performance venue and after-hours booze can, but it made the mistake of closing down for a while. The new owner, Paul McCaughey, has been trying to revive it as a legitimate event hall since 2010 and has gone through many rounds of negotiation with the city over zoning and, of course, fighting neighbourhood opposition, even though the Matador existed long before most current residents moved to the area.
Almost giving up and selling the building last year, McCaughey said in December he’s going to give it another shot this year and is optimistic.
The areas around Toronto’s hundreds of apartment towers, most of them outside of the old city of Toronto, have lots of potential to accommodate places with interesting varieties of uses. In 2013, city council adopted the “Residential Apartment Commercial” zoning bylaw. Approved by the Ontario Municipal Board in 2016, it opens up the shrink wrap around the towers and allows for a variety of non-residential uses including small-scale shops, food markets, other businesses and community facilities where none were allowed before. It should go a long way to making the often-dreary zones around towers interesting and provide residents with more services and economic opportunities.
Back in Little Italy, the Monarch is an unexpected old tavern in a once-puritanical town that likes to think it’s left the days of Toronto the Good behind, but perhaps we’re more puritanical now than ever, at least when it comes to how elastic our neighbourhoods are.
An evening at the Monarch last week for a birthday party reminded me of all this, something easy to take for granted. When you look around, downtown or in the suburbs, there are not too many places like this. Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef