Cherish the stories of strip malls
As downtown becomes gentrified, small, quirky businesses have been pushed to unloved plazas
When Drake and Rihanna shot the music video for “Work” at the Real Jerk on Gerrard St. E. last year, it seemed just about perfect.
Not just because it’s an awesome place, but because the story of that restaurant and how it wound up there was an interesting episode symbolic of Toronto’s commercial and cultural evolution.
The Real Jerk had been serving Jamaican food and good times in a building on the corner of Broadview and Queen since 1989, when it became a victim of that strip’s gentrification — evicted by a landlord who wanted to jack up the rent — in 2012.
So the Real Jerk found a home in a little strip mall on Gerrard St. E. And when two of the world’s biggest music stars wanted to celebrate and make art in Toronto that would be appreciated across the globe, it was to that little strip mall they went.
It’s one specific story that mirrors a long-emerging trend in Toronto: As more and more traditional, trendy main street strips become dominated by multinational chain stores and high-end boutiques, the really interesting, independent, quirky joints are more often found in the aging, ugly and mostly unloved strip plazas, the kind of places that dominate the city’s streets in Scarborough, Etobicoke, York and much of East York and North York.
I was thinking about that this week when I went to see director Joyce Wong’s Wexford Plaza, which may be the first feature film to be set in a Scarborough strip mall.
It’s an excellent little story about a plaza night security guard and the bartender she hopes to spark a romance with, set mostly in the parking lot of the strip mall and in the wide streets and tiny bungalows around it. Wong told the Scarborough Mirror she hoped to capture a feeling of “being stuck and lonely,” and she succeeded. Though charming and funny, it’s ultimately a crushingly sad movie that uses the alternately vast emptiness and cramped suffocation of its locations to portray characters grasping for connection and failing to reach it, hurting themselves and each other more with every innocent attempt to make things better.
I’m glad Wexford Plaza got made, and that I got the chance to see it — and I hope it becomes one in a long line of Toronto arts and cultural pieces that explores life in the drivein plazas that define so much of the city. Because they aren’t all scenes of desolation and crushing loneliness.
I went out to the real Wexford Heights Plaza at Warden Ave. and Lawrence Ave. E. this week, where the film got its name (though it was actually shot at a different strip mall, in North York), to have breakfast at the Wexford Restaurant. The place is a Scarborough institution of wood veneer and vinyl-bench booths, which claims to have cracked millions of eggs in its decades of making all-day breakfast. It is the opposite of desolate and lonely — it’s the kind of place where the waitress calls you sweetheart and offers you three coffee refills in an hour, and where regulars fill the seats and chat with each other from across the room.
It’s a throwback to a Scarborough culture of a few decades ago, and it appears to continue to thrive — though now with newer neighbours who appear to have set roots in the same rich soil. A sari shop, a Singaporean jeweller, a Middle Eastern patisserie, an Islamic clothing superstore. Across the street, in another strip mall, is Uncle Seth’s African and Caribbean grocery. Nearby, a Vietnamese food place is opening soon and down the street, there’s a Filipino grocery. Of course, there are also nail salons, the MPP’s office, hair salons and a raw pet food store, too.
It is exactly the kind of hodgepodge of places — from so many different cultures, of different sizes, with different purposes, almost all independent — that we used to love about the places we’d call main streets. Today, in the more established downtown neighbourhoods where the rents are higher, it often seems like “diversity” on a commercial strip means a Tim Hortons and a Starbucks, and maybe four different burger chains to choose from, too. Meanwhile, in the rundown strip malls in less fashionable areas, independent entrepreneurial character reigns.
There has always been life in these plazas, of course: when I lived in Scarborough as a teenager and young man, our most interesting hangouts — comic book shops, coffee stops, used bookstores, arcades, pubs and pool halls — were almost all in strip malls. That’s the nature of how these areas were built. But back then the downtown seemed to have more exotic, exciting versions, in more bustling form.
But as the inner city has become more expensive, condofied and conglomerated, and the outer suburbs more and more big-boxed in, it now begins to feel like the strip mall is the last outpost of independent commerce in the city. I wondered a while back if “the city needs ugly buildings” to serve the same purpose Jane Jacobs suggested old buildings did: as a home for small, independent, new-thinking, risky businesses. In 2005, journalist John Lorinc wrote an essay suggesting strip malls, despite being viewed as a kind of “weed species” by urbanists, were already then serving that important purpose, in exactly that way Jacobs had said was so necessary.
“The fact is they have become ‘places’ in their own right, in the way commercial districts centred around the Danforth, College St. and Kensington Market transcended their retail function and gave rise to true urban communities,” Lorinc wrote.
Just so. More obviously so all the time.
Those places have stories to tell. Ever so humble, strip malls are home to new generations of Torontonians who live and work and date and dance and socialize in the shops just beyond their asphalt front lawns. Here’s to a culture — including music videos and movies and books and storytelling of all kinds — exploring and celebrating and lamenting these unassuming, but thriving, eyesores. Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire