Neighbourhood at a loss in heart of St. James Town
What happens to a community after 1,500 people are forced to move? Some tales of those living in 650 Parliament’s shadow
What happens to a community when roughly 10 per cent of its residents disappear overnight?
That’s what happened in St. James Town on the hot afternoon of Aug. 21, 2018, when the two towers of 650 Parliament St. were devastated by a six-alarm fire and power outage, setting off a chain of events that have kept about 1,500 residents out of their units for a year.
An upcoming report from the Office of the Fire Marshal has determined the building’s electrical system was outdated and incompatible with the province’s safety guidelines.
Since the fire, the building’s residents have had to bounce from community centres to hotels to apartments, stay with family or friends, or break their leases and move on, as the estimated date of return is pushed again and again.
It has left St. James Town — bordered by Sherbourne, Wellesley, Parliament and Bloor Sts. — with a1, 500-personsized hole in the centre of their densely populated community.
The Star spoke to various people still living and working in the area about how the fire has affected the neighbourhood. The multimedia teachers who lost their students Volunteers at the St. James Town Community Corner Mohamed Eissa and Sachintha Fernando ran a free multimedia hub for kids between the ages of 5 and 12. Eissa taught them guitar, graphic design, audio and video editing, while Fernando taught photography.
Before the fire, the weekly classes attracted between 15 and 25 kids, and “they really got into it,” Eissa says. “Some of them even started recording their own songs and videos.”
The duo didn’t keep track of which building the kids came from, but it became apparent after the residents of 650 Parliament were displaced that a significant number were from that building.
“Attendance went down very quickly, and some kids were very late (to) the classes because they had to travel from far away,” Fernando says.
The program was eventually discontinued after only a handful of kids were able to attend on a consistent basis — a painful outcome for the two volunteers, who had started seeing the program’s impact on the kids.
Fernando remembers sending the kids out into the neighbourhood to take a picture and write a short story about it. One kid took a picture of a police officer and wrote a story about how he wanted to become an officer and stop a robbery. Another student took images of hoops and wrote about playing basketball.
“They were learning a lot about life and having fun,” he says. “I miss them. I don’t even know where they live or if they’re able to take pictures.”
Eissa says the children who were able to continue attending the program often talked about their friends who were displaced from 650 Parliament, discussing how they had to change schools and were living in new neighbourhoods. Kids also started asking about the history of fire incidents in St. James Town and how to survive in such emergencies.
“We sometimes turned those classes into safety procedures,” Eissa says. “You could tell it had affected them mentally.” The store owner who’s stocked for an absent clientele At Philippine Variety Store, a small store at the ground level of 240 Wellesley St., owner Leonida McNabb has eight freezers full of food items she imports from the Philippines — such as daing na bangus (fried milkfish that’s a staple Filipino breakfast dish), galunggong ( blackfin scad), grated cassava and sampalok.
She says the majority of her clientele were people of Filipino descent who lived in 650 Parliament. A few of them still come to buy stuff at her store, but not as consistently as before because they now live far away.
“You see how my store is now squeezed full? Things used to run off the shelves quickly before,” McNabb says, as she gestured toward merchandise covering even the counter in front of her. “I have no idea what to do with them.”
McNabb has been operating her store in St. James Town for the past 11 years and says the absence of residents from 650 Parliament is nearly running her business into the ground.
“Sales have gone down so much. There’s less people buying my stuff now. It’s very bad,” McNabb says. She says she’s lost about $100,000 since the fire.
She has started contacting her suppliers back in the Philippines to negotiate returning the products shortly before they hit their expiry dates, something she says will also be costly.
“I just hope the residents can return here soon,” she says, adding many of them were close friends. “I don’t think I will survive in this business without them.” The senior who’s missing her friends Name any residential building in St. James Town and chances are Dorotea Mallari has lived in it. Since arriving in Toronto as an immigrant from the Philippines in 1989, the community has been her home until very recently when she moved into a Toronto Community Housing building near Yonge and Gerrard Sts.
She returns regularly to visit friends, and so when the fire broke out at 650 Parliament a year ago, it was a personal matter for her.
“I felt like my own house was on fire. It was very sad,” Mallari says, noting she lived in 650 Parliament for about10 years. “I love that place, and every time I go back now it’s like there’s a big part of that community that is missing.”
She and a tight group of about a dozen seniors, the majority of whom were residents at 650 Parliament, used to meet on a weekly basis for cooking sessions, as well as hold evening prayers at one another’s places.
Now all those routines have been disrupted.
“Look, we’re old and we loved to meet to talk about God or about food,” says Mallari, who will turn 80 on Friday.
She said the cooking meetups had become “a wonderful opportunity” to socialize and learn about one another and about culinary practices from different cultural backgrounds.
She said a few of the members who are nearby still gather from time to time, but it’s just not the same when so many others live far away and can’t attend. They mainly keep their bond alive by constantly communicating over the phone, which she says does not feel the same as meeting in person.
“I miss my friends so much,” she says. The neighbours who fear for their own homes Ruby Gupta, a longtime resident at 240 Wellesley St., hosted a family of three in her onebedroom apartment last August following the six-alarm fire at 650 Parliament. She and her guests thought it would only be a short time before displaced residents could return to their apartments, but days turned into weeks.
The family then moved into a temporary unit nearby, but, a year after the fire, they are “still nowhere near” having a firm return date, Gupta says.
“Nobody really knows. It’s so stressful for these families who have had to basically start over with their life,” says Gupta, a test engineer at Toronto Hydro.
That prolonged uncertainty is having a pessimistic effect on the rest of the community, she says.
Many other buildings in the area are old (they were built in the 1960s) and, although city staff conducted a safety inspection blitz of residential buildings across the city in the months following the fire, residents fear they could meet the same fate as 650 Parliament at any time, she said.
“There have been fire incidents at other buildings, too,” Gupta says, referring to a series of fire and power outages at various highrises in the community — including most recently a fire at the under-renovation 650 Parliament.
Samiea Bashir, a displaced resident of 650 Parliament now living temporarily in an apartment at 77 Howard St., also says the level of stress and anxiety has increased among residents in the St. James Town community since last year’s fire.
“We talk about it all the time. It’s so uncomfortable. It’s like 650 Parliament fire was a signal that we are all in trouble here,” she says, adding that many in the community can’t afford to leave simply because rent has become expensive everywhere in the city.
“Look how long it took to repair that building. All these buildings are in the same conditions.”