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.