Government's house and housing the governed
Parliament Street: Regent Park, Cabbagetown (old and "Old") and St James Town
Bebout, Rick
http://www.rbebout.com/queen/mtc/2pparl.htm
Date Written: 2001-11-01
Publisher: Rick Bebout
Year Published: 2001
Resource Type: Article
Cx Number: CX24183
A recent history of the neighborhoods around Parliament Street in Toronto, with a focus on the planning challenges and the function of mixed-income communities.
Abstract:
-
Excerpts:
They lost front doors, stoops, windows looking directly onto the street. Eugene Faludi, planning Thorncrest Village in 1946, had made all living room windows face south; he was irked when residents didn't like it. They wanted to see their street-- sensing proprietorship, even responsibly, for the world outside their doors. In Regent Park they lost that, lost even the streets themselves. They got instead those "fine" parks running right to their doors. Common land became no man's land, under the purview of no one in particular.
...
People in the original Cabbagetown likely didn't post signs declaring its identity. As Edward Relph has written: "They knew where they lived. The new residents feel differently. The name and history of the area, with associations of hardship, became interesting, worth declaring." The streets, shops and homes of new Old Cabbagetown, he says, "wear their new oldness as self- consciously as models in a fashion show."
Toronto is dotted with neighbourhoods morphing from taciturn working class understatement to showily signified identity. "Old Cabbagetown" went up over turf at first called simply, if vaguely, "on the Don." City planners later tagged its northern reaches Don Vale. As late as 1985 Patricia McHugh's tour of the area in Toronto Architecture: A City Guide still called it "Don Vale" east of Parliament, its west side "Old Cabbagetown" -- the quotation marks her own: each tag, she said, was a misnomer.
Subject Headings
