‘The Danny’ seems just a bit contrived
“The Danny.”
Does that sound like a rejected Seinfeld plot line in which Elaine’s boyfriend tries and fails to get people to call him by a clumsy new nickname? A boy for whom the pipes the pipes are calling, from glen to glen and down the mountainside? Or the section of Danforth Ave. between Donlands and Woodbine subway stations?
According to new city street signs and the local business improvement area group, the answer is the last of those — rebranding a neighbourhood real estate agents (and Google) have called “Woodbine-Lumsden” and “Coxwell-Greenwood,” that the Star recently called “Danforth East,” and that just a few years ago people proposed calling “Little Ethiopia.”
“In a world of the mass-produced, the bland and the me-too chains, we are all looking for things that are real and authentic,” says the intro at thedanny.ca, the newly relaunched website of the Danforth-Mosaic Business Improvement Area. “We’re The Danny, and we’re the real thing.”
Huh. “Authenticity.” If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
That seems to be the gist of the online complaints from local residents, who took to a Facebook group in hundreds of dismissive comments. “Never heard anyone in my whole life call it The Danny,” wrote one that was echoed dozens of times.
I lived there for a bit, and never heard anyone use “The Danny” in that time, though since then I have once or twice heard former east-end cab drivers call it that with a laugh. Still, to many who live there, the name is the opposite of “real and authentic.” It’s contrived.
And maybe not as cool-sounding as it wants to be. “Annoying,” “juvenile” and “trashy” are words locals used to describe it. “Like a marketing agency trying too hard to be hip.”
That’s what it sounds like to my ears, too. Like something that annoying long-ago Saturday Night Live character would come up with in the copy room. “The Daaanforth! Danna-ranna-ring-dong! Danfortharoonie. THE DANNY!”
But there it is on the official signs. And in the ads: “The Danny Loves a Deal Sidewalk Sale.” Ugh. But what do I know? Nicknames are weird. Certainly “The 6” sounded at first like an affront to many who thought of themselves as residents of the T-Dot (and T-Dot sounded like silly wannabeism to those who already called the place Hogtown). When something catches on and people actually use it, a name becomes familiar and seems natural, almost inevitable.
Neighbourhood branding by business associations seems to work about the same way. “Bloor West Village,” which straddles longtime neighbourhoods that already had names such as Swansea, High Park North and Runnymede, seems to have been the pioneer here, marketing itself and its made-up name to compete with malls starting in the late 1960s.
I remember, growing up in the east end, everyone mocking the people in the southeast corner of Riverdale who suddenly started calling themselves “Leslieville” in what we all thought must be a trumped-up marketing gimmick (but actually has more history than that). The name took root and became a regular part of the city’s lingo. “Cork- town” and “Riverside” were historical but almost forgotten neighbourhood names that seem to have been fairly successfully revived in the past decade and a half.
Of course, just as often, it seems, it doesn’t quite work out that way. A 2009 effort to rename the Jane and Finch corridor “University Heights” doesn’t seem to have really taken hold.
If you have any clue where the “MarketTO District” is, I’m sure you’re part of a select group (which includes the members of what was formerly the Dufferin Wingold BIA who paid a marketing and branding firm to come up with the new name officially approved this spring).
My own current neighbourhood, the Junction, has the simplest but coolest gritty name this side of Hell’s Kitchen. It’s a name that stretches back to its incorporation as the Village of West Toronto Junction in 1884. And yet, for a time before the turn of the millennium, when it was down-at-the-heels, the local business association tried to rebrand it “Junction Gardens,” under the apparent impression that the vague evocation of horticulture would persuade people to love its stretches of concrete and industrial brick near the railroad.
These years later, they write about the neighbourhood in the New York Times, and there’s no hint of flowers when they do. The “Gardens” has long disappeared from the street signs, too.
Journalist and east-end resident Stephen Wickens, writing recently in the Beach Metro Community News, reminds us of perhaps the most infamous Toronto neighbourhood name slap-fight: the decades-long battle over “the Beaches” versus “the Beach” that ended (sort of) in a referendum just over a decade ago.
Wickens also points out the straightforward problem faced by the business owners of the, uh, Danny. Most residents call the street and the area “the Danforth.” But when people say that name anywhere in the city, what they most often think of is the area between Broadview and Pape, in Riverdale, also known as Greektown. Somehow that stretch of Danforth has an embarrassing surplus of “real and authentic” sounding names that everyone uses and embraces. Which means that saying, “Come shop on the Danforth” won’t bring people out to the corner of Greenwood.
So . . . Woodbine-Lumsden, Danforth East, Little Ethiopia, Danforth Mosaic. And now, the Danny. Who knows? It may catch on. We’ll keep laughing in the meantime, but if they stick with it maybe it will eventually become as authentic as they hoped it would sound. Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire