Stigma, Smoke and Espresso Machines

Up to this point I thought I would begin the gentrification chapter with a vignette, a description of a party in the Concerto Cafe, June 1955.  It was an occasion where an interesting bunch of the city's urban creatives gathered in a retail gentrification strip, and held a social gathering.  It provides a means of establishing the connection between gentrification and the creative economy.

But the chapter also needs to deliver a discussion of the way that gentrification was kept out of those parts of the inner city where persistent unpleasant air pollution still lingered.  The locations vary.  The Junction Triangle remained unpleasantly polluted until the 1990s.  Eastern Avenue, Bathurst-Niagara, Dufferin-Geary remained sites of heavy airborne lead pollution until the late 1970s, the city's inner east end remained a zone of heavy coal smoke pollution until the 1960s.

Gentrification did not enter these zones of pollution until the problem had been addressed, although a great deal of the contaminated soil remains to this day, the primary air emissions have ceased.

So the chapter needs to set up a tension between the zones of stigma, anchored by smoke, and the emerging zones which attracted the gentrifiers, and their espresso machines.

I think I will do this by opening the chapter with two contrasting stories or vignettes, both from 1955 and both from Toronto's inner city.  I will begin with the story of the police raids on the Ingwer flophouse/slum empire, which brings out some of the decrepitude and symbolic sleaze of the inner east end.  I will offer, by way of contrast, the vignette of the Shelagh Gilmour birthday party at the Concerto Cafe, with its espresso machines, Viennese pastries, and members of the Hungarian-Canadian intelligentsia.

The chapter will be more complex to write, but should be better designed to put zones of stigma up against the transformations of gentrification.

The gentrification research is revealing just how important these zones were for the formation of the city's present creative economy.  These zones were probably of national importance.  We also need to show how the fashionable critiques of gentrification are themselves part of the culture of gentrification.  This is awkward, but fundamentally true.

And air pollution, long ignored by the Gentrification Literature, turns out to play quite an important role in the story.

Jack Creley and David Smith, pioneer Gentrifiers

I'm in the City Archives today trying to collate the research on gentrification, and tie up some loose ends.  Over the past months I have been following the history of gentrification in Toronto.  In more recent days I have been working on George Herczeg, a key figure in the old-house renovation trade.

I am now able to bring two of these threads together.  It seems that Herczeg got his start in old-house renovation on MacPherson Ave in 1961.  In one of his 1968 interviews he mentions that he bought his first house on MacPherson for $22,000, and apparently in 1961.

A check through the TEELA market survey books reveals only one house being sold on MacPherson in 1961 for $22,000, and that was 82 MacPherson.  It sold in January 1961 for $22,000 and resold in July 1961 for $24,170.  Checks in the assessment rolls seem to show that 82 MacPherson did not change hands before late June 1961, and remained owned by Jack and Drusilla Mitchell, who lived next door in 84 MacPherson.

But the 1962 assessment rolls show that by late June 1962 82 MacPherson has passed into the hands of David Smith and Jack Creley.  Smith was a couturier, who kept an antique shop in Bloor-Yorkville.  Creley was a celebrated actor, US-born, but firmly settled in Canada.  These guys were a couple.  David Smith was listed as tenant of part of 82 MacPherson, with Milan and Isabelle Chvostek tenants of the other unit.  Milan Chvostek was a production assistant with CBC.

Creley and Smith were still living in 82 MacPherson in 1979 when they had it remodelled, and a balcony added.

So Herczeg, pioneer developer of old-house renovations, who had done more than 200 by 1970, sold his first serious house reno to David Smith and Jack Creley, two key figures in the city's arts and gentrification scene in the 1960s.  A very neat conjunction between two threads of the story.

Incidentally, one of our family friends was Mona Colicos, ex-wife of John Colicos, John was an actor contemporary of Jack Creley and appeared with him in several productions, at Stratford and elsewhere.  Actor James Doohan, best known for his role as Scotty in the original Star Trek series, was another contemporary of Creley, and another actor who appeared in productions with him.  John Colicos has the distinction of playing the first Klingon with a speaking part on the original Star Trek.  I realize now that James Doohan, John and Mona Colicos must have been frequent visitors to 82 MacPherson Avenue.  It's a small world.

Being from Cabbagetown

I've been looking at Toronto's inner east end and I have noticed the city's politicians claiming to be from Cabbagetown.  It's time to talk about this.

Cabbagetown is a district of Toronto's inner east end which was never very posh.  Emerging as a residential area in the second half of the Nineteenth Century, it was a dense but respectable white and blue-collar suburb.  The worst of the smokes and smells of the St Lawrence Ward lay to the south, although they did penetrate into Cabbagetown.  The tony areas along Jarvis and Sherbourne lay to the west, the Irish working class occupied Corktown (at least symbolically). 

In the early Twentieth Century, as the smoke thickened, and new suburbs opened up, Cabbagetown began to drain of its more upwardly mobile population.  Much of the middle class moved on, and the district began to slide down the social scale. 

Relatively quickly, it developed social stigma.  Hugh Garner produced his classic novel The Cabbagetown Slum which described the Depression Era in the district, perhaps especially the south eastern part.  It was, he said, the largest Anglo-Saxon slum in the world.  He was exaggerating, but it was a place of poverty and decrepitude. 

The sense of stigma is echoed in the photographic record in the city archives.  Compared to other more favoured districts, Cabbagetown, and especially Corktown are photographic deserts in this era.  Mr. James took his camera all over the city, but seldom seems to have visited this part of the inner east end.

But in the city's political culture, the stigma of Cabbagetown allowed it to become a badge of authenticity.  Those who now lived elsewhere claimed to be from Cabbagetown to seem authentic.

By the 1920s claiming to be from Cabbagetown had emerged as a cult of virtue display.  Politicians such as Tommy Church and Sam McBride hawked their Cabbagetown credentials at public meetings. But by then neither man still lived in Cabbagetown.  Church was an MP living in Rosedale, and McBride was an Alderman living in the city's west end. 

Vern McAree, a genuine son of Cabbagetown, was onother figure who had left the distruct.  In his case, he became a journalist.  By the 1920s he was writing editorials for the Mail & Empire, and living in Mimico.  But he retained a strong symbolic connection to the Cabbagetown of his youth, which he articulated through his newspaper columns.  Effectively a suburbanite, on paper he was always a Cabbagetonian.  In 1953, more than thirty years after leaving the place, he published his youthful memoirs as The Cabbagetown Store.  It was an instantly iconic book, well-received by other former Cabbagetonians, a monument to the Cabbagetown of nostalgia, if not the one of 1950s reality.

The cult of Cabbagetown authenticity lingered long into the 1950s and 1960s.  David Walter, Rosedale resident and Conservative MPP candidate in the 1960s would hold his nomination meetings in Cabbagetown, complete with pipers and dancing girls.  Another Rosedalian, on the Liberal ticket, Alan Lamport, alderman and mayor, was also inclined to play the Cabbagetown card.  He would embrace Cabbagetown audiences with open arms and god-bless-you-alls.  He would talk about how Cabbagetown people confronted him with reality.

Flophouses, White Painters and old Ville des Choux

Spent the day waiting for students to turn in assignments, and researching online.  Looked at flophouses, white painters and the changing role of gentrification in Toronto's Cabbagetown.

Toronto's inner city, perhaps especially its inner east end  was once a place of skid rows and flophouses, cheap rentals for transient street people.  There were several skid rows before 1970.  Spadina and College, Carlton and the Queen-Greenwood area were places of visible skid-row.

In these areas, especially south of Carlton, Charlie Ingwer was flophouse king.  Ingwer was an affable reclusive man of many outstanding work orders and housing standards violations. But he was a man who knew, or thought he knew, how to run a flophouse for a modest profit.  Notorious to the middle class, but effective toward his tenants he lingered in the flophouse biz from the early 1940s to the early 1980s.  In the later 1970s he was seriously considered to run a city flophouse, later known as Seaton House.

The flophouse, a necessity for some, was a notorious species of transient accommodation.  Operators of boarding and rooming houses liked to place as much distance between themselves and flophouses as they could.  By the 1950s it was a term of stigma, but lingered in the civic lexicon until the 1980s. 

When the establishment of Seaton House was being debated in the later 1970s aldermen struggled with the stigma of the flophouse.  Would it be a flophouse or a men's centre.  To some it seemed insulting, but to those more familiar with the homeless it seemed appropriate.  The client group would know it as a flop.

The term white painter also has a complex etymology.  Historic newspaper coverage does not use the term 'gentrification' much before the late 1980s.  Instead, it spoke of white painters.

The first references to "white house painters" came from the Roxborough St W/McPherson Ave area of the city.  In 1965 the regular home-owners of the neighbourhood rose in indignation as their tax assessments went up.  The culprit: renovating 'white house painters' who were transforming the neighbourhood and boosting property values.  White painters were active in Cabbagetown and Don Vale in the 1960s and 1970s.  In February 1980 Ellen Roseman, a recent gentrifier in the Annex, drew a distinction between the white painters and the genuine old-house renovators.  White painters were, she claimed, faux renovators.  They covered up the decrepitude with white paint and gave genuine renovators a black eye.

Carole Corbeil, also writing in 1980, was a Cabbagetown gentrifier.  In the 1970s, when she moved in, the area west of Parliament Street was already expensive, bid up by the ‘white painters’ and turned into ‘realtor cocaine’.  She moved into the area east of Parliament, which was still affordable.  It was, however, still home to flophouses and rooming houses whose tumult added to local colour.  She noted too that the white painters were rapidly transforming the aesthetics of Cabbagetown into Ville des Choux.  There was, she thought, a certain choux style. White painters brought with them gobs of Victorianism.  

I like the term Ville des Choux.

Charlie Ingwer the Flophouse King

This week I am looking into Toronto's inner east end, and its history as an area of low-income housing.  I plan to look at the unfolding of renovation gentrification.  This seems to start in the mid 1960s.  Gentrification (if that is the right word) through new-build apartments seems to start in the 1950s.  There is a roughly 10-year gap between the two.

The inner east end is a part of town where I suspect air pollution inhibited gentrification.  Smoke remained severe into the mid-1950s.  This is the real objective of the research at the moment. To connect smoke to gentrification.

I will need to research the development of poor housing conditions in the inner east end.  I have uncovered an interesting series of stories about the slums and flophouses of this part of town.  New-build developers played quite a role in degrading the housing in the district from the 1950s onwards, as they built their land assemblies.  Low-income residents were squeezed out of many of the properties acquired, and prices rose in the remaining ones.  Various operators moved in to operate bottom-of-the-market rooming houses as tenants of the high-rise developers.  Many of these places were firetraps, and there were numerous fatal fires.  Developers were accused of blockbusting, and certainly had cosy relationships with key rooming-house operators.  It may not have been actual blockbusting.

There were also other operators building strings of rooming houses and flop houses.  One such was Charlie Ingwer, who started to build his flophouse empire in the 1940s.  By the early 1950s he had more than 80 properties under his control.  The money to fund the empire came from his contacts in South America.  He was a reclusive man, never married.  Speed typist, gold miner.  Born in 1909 in Vienna.  Seems to have been a Jewish man, from a family with ancestral connections to Spain [Shephardic?].  Lived in the Alexandra Hotel, Niagara Falls ON in 1935.  Worked for an oil company in Ecuador in 1940-41.  Started buying properties in Toronto in 1943.  Took on Steve Feron as a manager in 1949-50.  Feron a former debt-collector, difficult to trace in City Directories.  Holdings were restructured, with Inglewood Construction Co Ltd [never built anything] becoming the holding company for the flophouses.  Feron an employee.  Directors Julius Einbinder of Ecuador, Thelma Lind of Mexico, Linus Coghlan of Toronto, and Charles Ingwer.  In 1953, or so, it was restructured again with ownership of flophouses being transferred to Johanna Nemath, a practical nurse who lived and worked in New York City.  Ingwer's cousin, supposedly.  Nemath then gave power of attorney to Manchester Realty Co, operated by Feron.  Under Feron the flophouses began to shift emphasis towards prostitution, with the complex ownership screening the system from civic and police investigation.  Feron and Ingwer moved into a 3-storey Rosedale home, which had hardly any furniture, except a grand piano, which Ingwer played.  Both men had expensive cars.  Ingwer also acquired a 250-acre dairy farm near Port Perry.

In October 1955 Charlie Ingwer and his brother William, Steve Feron and Linus Coghlan were arrested by police in a series of dawn raids.  Charlie and Steve were tried before Magistrate Elmore in the longest-running magistrate's court trial in Toronto's history.  Feron and Ingwer were convicted for operating bawdy houses.  The city's print media treated the flophouse empire as somehow connected with international organized crime.

Subsequent years showed that Charlie Ingwer was probably just a strange character.  Reclusive, and somehow trying to make his living out of running flophouses.  He remained in the business until the early 1980s.  He found himself dragged into court several times over the condition of his flophouses, but was never again accused of harbouring prostitution.  I suspect that it was Steve Feron who had the crime connections.  Ingwer was simply a flophouse operator.

Charlie Ingwer is a little obscure and difficult to trace.  He continued to operate the farm in Port Perry.  He was still listing it as his residence in 1963.  In 1960 there was a fatal accident on the farm when a tractor rolled over during haymaking and a 23-year-old farm worker was killed.  Ingwer continued to operate his diminishing flophouse empire which, by the later 1970s was making an important contribution to housing otherwise homeless men in the city's east end.  Redevelopment and gentrification was squeezing them out of the housing market, and Charlie was managing to make some money by giving them some place to stay.  In 1979 there was serious consideration of asking Charlie Ingwer to operate a city-owned flophouse.  This was the facility later known as Seaton House.  Aldermen Dan Heap, John Sewell and Anne Johnstone all supported the scheme, but Alderman Allan Sparrow opposed.  Charlie was in his 70s by then, and his complex reputation made it awkward.  The job went to someone else.