Excerpted from uTOpia: Towards A New Toronto {Coach House Books} Rating: NNNNN
In a tight basement space, Mordechai Sorek, known as “Motti” around his shop, is wedged between a pair of industrial-sized freezers, a shelving unit with a closed-circuit security TV and large plastic tubs filled with grain. This is his office.
The morning I met him, he was keeping a watchful eye on the monitor and cheerfully extolling the virtues of old-fashioned baking as it was taught to him 21 years ago, when as a young Israeli émigré he bought the Haymishe Bagel Shop.
“You can make a bread,” shrugs the barrel-chested 56-year-old, “and you can make a bread. As my old baker says, ‘If you want to sell good baked goods, you have to suffer. ‘”
Customers come in expectantly and leave with fragrant buns, bagels, loaves of various shapes and sizes, desserts. Sorek brims with a merchant’s pride, that sense of satisfaction culled from the combination of profit and the knowledge that he’s selling products his customers can’t get just anywhere.
If you think you know how Toronto’s retail sector works, you might assume that Sorek’s independent business is located on one of the city’s bustling, vibrant main streets: the Danforth, Bloor out near High Park, College, Queen, Yonge north of Davisville. These retail strips – serving high-density urban neighbourhoods – have proven over the years to be exceptionally fertile commercial soil for independent stores.
But Sorek’s shop is actually located in an inauspicious-looking suburban strip plaza on Bathurst near Lawrence – a part of Toronto that was developed in the 1950s and 60s. It’s a standard-issue post-war retail development: two storeys, a bit shabby, resolutely utilitarian in design, with a cracked sidewalk and a skinny row of angled parking spaces out front.
Sorek’s neighbours include a meat shop, a fish monger, two frame galleries, a cleaner and a greengrocer. Not more than 100 metres away, however, is a large, all-purpose chain-store shopping mall anchored by a 24-hour Dominion. The little plaza thrives anyway, and not because it’s a thing of beauty.
In any taxonomy of urban retail establishments, the strip plazas around Toronto’s inner suburbs enjoy the status of a weed species. They don’t have the utility of local shopping plazas, the ones wrapped around a large parking lot and tenanted by a supermarket, a bank, a drug store and a video rental outlet. Nor do they have the vitality and aesthetic appeal of the downtown retail strips.
Urbanists indict them for crimes against the pedestrian realm because they’re separated from the sidewalk by those narrow, unattractive parking lots. Yet they are qualitatively different commercial creatures than the endlessly blah stretches of stand-alone drive-through fast food and auto-body outlets that have had such a profoundly deadening impact on suburban arterials.
Toronto planners have nevertheless come to view these low-slung structures as development fodder. Why? Because they under-use commercial land that can support denser mixed-use buildings.
Many suburban arterials have been redesignated as “avenues,” where landowners will be given carte blanche to develop buildings that are as high as the street is wide, provided they hug the sidewalk and keep the parking out of view. The goal is lofty and urban-minded, at least in theory.
The truth is that these older strip plazas facing onto busy arterial roads have become as important, in an urban sense, to their communities as the old warehouse and market districts have been to the inner city. We demolish them at our peril.
Nearly 45 years ago, Jane Jacobs taught us to look at old urban buildings in new ways – not as historical artifacts or monuments, but as a kind of rich social and economic soil. “Time,” she writes, “makes the high building costs of one generation the bargains of a following generation.”
Mortgages have been paid off, original tenants have died or moved on, landlords have declared bankruptcy, rents have dropped. A certain shabbiness sets in. In the old factories downtown, such conditions proved to be perfect for the artists who, in the late 1980s, began to rent warehouse loft space on the sly.
Out in the suburbs, there’s been a fascinating variation on this reclamation of neglected commercial space, but one that gets a lot less adulation.
Bit by bit, immigrant entrepreneurs over the last two decades began renting space in these low-rent plazas, setting up hair and nail salons, ethnic restaurants, cleaners, food stores, travel agencies, electronics outlets and so on. For most, it’s a matter of pure economics.
“If I had to start today, I’d go broke,” says Armand Moyal, who’s run the framing gallery a few doors down from Sorek’s bagel shop for 33 years. “You go somewhere else and you’re working for the landlord.”
The offices above these stores are rented by professionals, a great many of whom are also new Canadians: tax preparation firms, doctors, alternative health clinics, realtors, as well as offices for all sorts of indescribably exotic businesses. Unlike stand-alone chain outlets, strip plazas aren’t purpose-built their no-nonsense design allows new businesses to move in without the need for substantial renovations.
The cumulative result is that these strip plazas reflect the teeming ethnic diversity of the inner suburbs – dozens of small-scale Kensington Markets sprinkled around North York, Scarborough, Etobicoke and East York.
An older plaza at Lawrence and Victoria Park, in Scarborough, is home to Nasar’s, the city’s largest halal supermarket.
A few doors down, in the Wexford Plaza, there’s a venerable Greek diner that’s well known in the city’s east end as a must-go stop for Scarborough politicians who want to get the pulse of the neighbourhood. The rest of the stores in the Wexford Plaza are always rented, but there are no chains.
It’s not the only plaza that’s become a kind of destination unto itself. In the barrens of northern Etobicoke, you drive along and suddenly find yourself staring at a lively conglomeration of East Asian restaurants and sweet shops arrayed in a single plaza at Islington and Albion Road. At night, these vividly lit eateries buzz with the sort of activity downtowners associate with Little India on Gerrard.
As has always been the case with local retailers, these stores serve as landmarks for immigrants trying to carve out their own space in an alien urban landscape.
Such retail developments have an organic, self-correcting tenant mix that’s typical of retail streets but very uncommon in commercial shopping centres. Why? Because in many such plazas the individual units have different landlords – sometimes the merchant, in other cases offshore investors.
They tend not to be owned by the huge institutions and real-estate investment trusts that control large malls. In shopping centres, the mall management closely manages the assortment of tenants, focusing on high-end chains and imposing their owners’ investment expectations on a commercial environment. Mega-malls are not “free markets.” Strip plazas are.
After I left Haymish, I headed up Bathurst, which is lined with little plazas dominated by businesses serving the heavily Jewish population in that part of the city.
At the Bathurst-Wilson intersection, I found one wrapped around the north-west corner. It revealed more of the shifting texture of the area: there were some businesses catering to Jamaicans, others to Jews. An Eastern medicine clinic and a Korean accountant had offices upstairs. There was also an Internet café, open until midnight, and a new Starbucks, packed with young mothers and babies in strollers. Though it wouldn’t win any urban design prizes, the corner was bustling with life.
A bit further north and west, I pulled into the Finch Weston Centre, an L-shaped strip plaza. It was busy and prosperous, with, among other tenants, an electronics shop, a Vietnamese restaurant, an Italian jeweller, a KFC, a cheque-cashing outlet and a store curiously calling itself Cleptomania Shoes. I wandered into an Argentine bakery, a tiny store with a few tables, where the owner also sells Argentine baking products and magazines and meticulously displays the business cards of several other Argentine businesses on the counter next to the cash register.
In its own way, this modest shop is the nexus of a network of Latin American immigrants, serving the same role as the Hungarian eateries on Bloor did in the 1960s for their patrons.
Back at the bagel shop, Sorek was philosophical. The owner of his store, he’d been approached many times over the years to expand or to move into better commercial premises. He’d always refused. But, as he knows, eager developers have been erecting luxury condos all along Bathurst, and their appetite for desirable locations like his is unlikely to be sated any time soon.
But if those modest 1950s strip plazas begin to disappear in the name of suburban intensification, a critical piece of what built Toronto’s peaceful diversity will go with them.
After all, the luxury condo developers won’t be leasing their ground-floor stores to tiny Argentine bakeries. They simply couldn’t afford the rent.
Perhaps there’s an alternative future, one that can grow out of a renewed appreciation for places like Wexford Plaza and their evolving role as surprisingly spontaneous community hubs.
Because the fact is that they have become “places” in their own right.
In our vision of a transit-friendly, compact city, let’s not lose sight of the fact that in these unassuming corners of suburbia there’s already a there there.
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