White painters’ work lives on downtown
The fashionable neighbourhoods and Victorian houses of today are the result of baby boomers fixing up the slums of yesterday
White painters are a legendary bit of Toronto lore, an early wave of neighbourhood transformers who bought and moved into houses in rundown areas, often painting the tired old homes in bright colours.
They’re most often associated with Cabbagetown, when the baby boomer generation moved into the area during the early 1970s, an era when people could buy their own homes before age 30.
They took what was an Anglo-Saxon slum and eventually turned it into the Victorian wonderland it is today, where the hammers have never stopped pounding to keep the gingerbread intact.
An April 1964 Maclean’s article by Harry Bruce titled “Glory Be, The White painters Are Coming,” dates the term even earlier. Writing about his childhood neighbourhood a few blocks south of Yonge St. and St. Clair Ave., around Farnham and Woodlawn Aves., Bruce even suggests he’s responsible for the term. And, he asserts, at the end of the Second World War his neighbourhood’s demographics were somewhere between working and middle class, populated with “widows, salesmen, machinists, printers, a draftsman, a tailor, one minor banking official, one engineer” and so on. The people who replaced them were sometimes television producers, professors, musicians, architects, and even a “newspaperman,” a group a little more middle-class than before.
For a few years in the late 2000s I lived in a Victorian duplex in Cabbagetown. The adjoining neighbours, genuine white painters who arrived in the early 1970s, told me the side of the house I lived in was then inhabited by a benevolent “gay biker gang.”
Later it became public housing, part of a vestigial Toronto Community Housing Corporation policy of maintaining individual homes, properties Mayor Rob Ford wishes they would sell off. Later, the house was sold to a private owner and it, too, was renovated.
The Maclean’s article was somewhat tongue-in-cheek and included a “Whitepainters Cut Out Kit,” with an overwrought iron fence, brass knocker, neoclassic door, mandatory coach lamps and facsimile colonial shutters; all clichéd renovation items of the day and part of the rediscovery of older architecture after the first couple of decades of modernism. Today, a similar cut out might be a pastiche of items from Restoration Hardware and Ikea.
Bruce writes that in 1964, “the whitepainters are only the most ostentatious evidence of a swing back to downtown living in Toronto.” Toronto never lost its downtown life the way so many cities south of the border did after the war, but the inner city did go out of fashion here for a spell. Other neighbourhoods like the Annex and even Rosedale saw many homes converted into rooming houses, some that still exist today.
In white painter stories we rarely ever hear about what happened to the gay bikers or the machinists and salesmen who left. Some cashed out on higher property values, but the renters are lost to history. Like Parkdale, going through its own white painter phase, these neighbourhoods on the down side of up are relatively affordable places.
Today, the printers and tailors that lived on Bruce’s street work in the service-based economy. They are the publicists, marketers, copywriters and bank tellers, and a lot of them live in condos — which are out of fashion judging by the derision they receive in a city where condo hate is a religion. Yet for those inclined to buy their own home, it’s the only somewhat-affordable option left.
Fashion is fickle and condos may yet have their day in the spotlight, but the attention may not fade as the dream of the single-family home is increasingly out of reach for all but the upper middleclass in Toronto.
Everyone has a right to live in the city; condos and apartments represent the future and like life in other big cities around the world, Toronto will abandon the single-family home dream by necessity. Shawn Micallef writes every Friday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef.