No need for artists to go to Steeltown
Re Hamilton Calling (NOW, December 15-21). Toronto artists have no need to go to Hamilton for affordable rents. Oakwood Avenue between St. Clair West and Eglinton has affordable live-and-work spaces for artists. It’s designated in the Official Plan as an Arts District.
The neighbourhood has a lot of architectural jewels and a great down-to-earth vibe.
Al Rezoski, Toronto
Why Kensington is not the Distillery District
Re The Once And Future Kensington Market, by Richard Longley (NOW, December 15-21). Longley made some useful suggestions for saving Kensington. However, his unflattering description of Wychwood Barns and the Distillery District as soulless “gentrified playgrounds” and therefore examples of what not to do doesn’t help his cause.
I was on the board of Artscape when it organized the renovation of the Barns and introduced arts uses to Distillery buildings. The original industrial uses of both were long over and impossible to revive. The sites were dead. The repurposing of those buildings as new art centres revitalized their neighbourhoods.
Not so with the Market, where the objective is to keep an already lively area vibrant: a very different problem, which of course requires a different solution.
Michael Kainer, Toronto
Gentrification or just newest incarnation?
Your recent cover package on Kensington Market (NOW, December 8-14) suggests, among other things, that the neighbourhood of grocers is currently being gentrified by “ever-fancier and ever-bigger restaurants” and that pot dispensaries have helped “revitalize the area.” Where are these fancy restaurants? How has the new incarnation of stoner Kensington, with its fast food joints and dispensary start-ups, kept landlords from letting greed guide the way?
A good restaurant, like a good bike shop, café or grocery store, brings people together. Great street food and progressive legalization of pot are good things, too, but externalizing the real costs of doing business and having no eyes on the street do not necessarily build community.
One must be careful when making sweeping generalizations about what agents are gentrifiers.
Shamez Amlani, Kensington resident, La Palette co-owner
Market reality check on rents
There many things that are true in Jane Lytvynenko’s article on Kensington Market (NOW, December 8-14), but raising rents is not “intimidation.” It’s standard commercial real estate practice.
The average commercial rent downtown increased by 113 per cent between 2007 and 2012. Kensington, meet the real world.
Adam Berel Wetstein, Toronto
In defence of plop art
Re Art For Art’s Sake, by Eldon Garnet (NOW, December 15-21). Some plop art is good. For example, I find the Anish Kapoor sculpture on Front very inspiring – I don’t need it to tell me about the area. Nearby is a sculpture emplaced by the Workers Safety Board that I find so prosaic as to be un-elegiac and ignorable: a worker depicted chiselling into a granite wall.
Sometimes it’s good to see work that informs you of the neighbourhood, but sometimes you want imagination, not instruction. I’m also fine with artists “imposing” their unique style or vision, not just illustrating history.
Beauty is fine, too – I don’t need to understand the geological history of southern Ontario to be awed by Niagara Falls. Sometimes you want artists to strut their stuff (especially locals), and with a bit of a budget to boot.
K.I.A., From nowtoronto.com
Getting it backwards
Thank-you, Michelle Adelman, for a sensitive, balanced and (mostly) correct story on my sheep struggles with CFIA (NOW, December 15-21).
One giant oops re “When one of her pregnant ewes got sick, a CFIA veterinarian diagnosed it as toxaemia, but post-mortem tests showed scrapie, which again didn’t make sense. The agency refused to allow third-party testing. And a destruction order was issued….”
It reads like a ewe died on my farm of scrapie and that justified CFIA’s actions to issue a destruction order. Sure it would! But that is not what happened. Not at all. It’s backwards.
The CFIA had already issued the destruction order solely based on “suspicion of scrapie” in my flock, after a sheep I had sold to an Alberta farm tested positive.
Montana Jones, Hastings
J’Accuse Michael Coren
Re J’Accuse Kellie Leitch (NOW, December 15-21). What a BS article. Which “party higher-ups” would ever speak to Michael Coren except in his dreams? Kellie Leitch tells it as she sees it. Once upon a time that was called honesty. Remember? Many support her, many don’t. But trying to minimize her by using Coren’s jealous ranting and raving doesn’t work. You are obviously afraid she will win. Like your fear of Donald Trump.
Patricia Starr, Toronto
