He smokes. he doesn’t want kids. He’s gay. He’s too porous.
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I have heard many a reason for choosing not to date someone, but the other day I heard a relationship deal-?breaker that was entirely new.
My hipster friend Caitlin actually clipped the green shoots of a romance because she found out the guy lives at Yonge and Eglinton.
That same week, I had dinner with my brother, who hangs his hat near Yonge and Eg and is Mr. Finance. Over gummy pad thai at a generic Asian restaurant (his choice), he declared that if you’re new to Toronto, don’t know many people and are looking for a place to live, “Yonge and Eglinton is where you wanna be.”
I asked myself how there could be such steadfast and differing views about what’s really just an intersection.
Toronto has appropriately been called a city of neighbourhoods, but the other side of this is fanatic location loyalty and raging residential prejudice.
For example: Beachers – “I just love that it’s like living in a little town outside the city!” Yes, Beachers, that’s exactly what it’s like, commute included.
Parkdalers – “I just love that it’s so gritty!” These people probably camp only where there are flush toilets.
Yorkvillers – “I just love my piles of cash, I mean being so well located, I mean, um, er, Prada?” Enough said.
We might not be the churchgoing folk we used to be, but we blindly worship at the altar of our neighbourhoods like the urban fundamentalists we are.
Still, you can see the cracks in the partisanship. The same east-?enders, who go on and on about how nice it is to be out of the downtown core get defensive if you use the term “over the bridge” once too often.
West-?enders who love living in gentrifying zones will eventually move further west, since they don’t want to seem too mainstream when those spots become fully homogenized.
Downtowners who sing the praises of living right beside work hum a bitchier tune when you point out that they’re also living right beside the Gardiner.
The simple truth is that many of us live where we do because it was the best thing View It had to offer at the particular time we were apartment hunting, or because we found a house in an area whose price allowed us to still buy food.
We rationalized that the area had a library, good schools, close proximity to transit (insert your necessary neighbourhood amenity here), and we just blindly jumped into living there.
I live in the Annex. I’m not too pleased that I’ll never be able to afford one of the million-?dollar houses on my street, and the U of T students renting apartments on it need to shut the hell up, but overall the Annex is fine. It’s near a subway, it’s pretty safe and it suits me rather well.
I grew up at Yonge and Eglinton (incidentally, so did the aforementioned Caitlin). I’m not too pleased that they’re converting my old high school into a massive condo project with classrooms in the basement, and the SilverCity complex needs to button it, but overall Y&E is fine. It’s near a subway, it’s pretty safe and it suits my brother and his followers rather well.
I guess I’m what you might call a neighbourhood pluralist.
I told Caitlin she was insane to write off a guy off solely because of where he lived. If you like what someone has to say, and think they look good enough to touch, I said, then the area where they’ve chosen to sleep and keep their crap shouldn’t matter.
She vehemently disagreed. One’s choice of neighbourhood, she said, tells her pretty much everything she needs to know about who that person is. I handed her my copy of I’m Okay, You’re Okay to take a look at, but she didn’t want to read it.
She didn’t like the cover.
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