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.