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.