I’m living for the month in a one-bedroom apartment that the landlord is trying to rent as a two-bedroom by converting the living room into another bedroom and the oversized kitchen into a kitchen/dinette/living room combination. It’s not really a feasible proposition, but as a one-bedroom this apartment would be fabulous for a couple; it’s large, and attractive, and very reasonably priced. (Although due to a variety of reasons I won’t go into here, I am currently living here for free.)
The apartment is on St. Clair Avenue West in Toronto, near Dufferin. Those who know Toronto will be aware that this places it smack dab in the middle of the Corso, the Italian/Spanish/Mexican uptown strip. Indeed, just around the corner is a tiny little Mexican diner, pupusas only $2.25 apiece, made on the spot, stuffed with pork, beans and cheese, and loaded down with cabbage and thin, spicy tomato sauce. (And their burros are even better, and only three-fifty.) A gelateria down the street provides some of the smoothest, most delicious gelato I’ve ever had. The laundromat across the street is clean, open twenty-four hours, and obviously entertaining in its way. The fruit market downstairs next to the tiny little cafe I live over (which provides the free wireless I am stealing right now) has fresh pineapples for seventy-nine cents apiece.
Right now, as I study Cooper v. Hobart for Legal Process tomorrow, the back porches that cover the rears of these stores and buildings are alive with Italian and Mexican families, chatting quietly in the twilight. Somebody starts up a CD of slow sambo music, and a chorus of half-a-dozen voices dotting across the night spontaneously arises. Occasionally, there is laughter, of the sort that you only hear when a really dirty joke just got told. Sure, the dirty jokes are in Spanish and Italian – but you can tell by the delivery (and the occasional cuss word you might understand) that they’re dirty jokes.
I know there are arguments for small-town life, but for the life of me, I hope I never understand them, that I continue to understand them as little as I do tonight.
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In some ways what you’re describing there is the good parts small town life writ into the big city. Maybe not the way American or Canadian small-town life is usually described, in that the food served is not hamburgers and the language spoken is not English or even French. The skins are not white. It’s neighborhood life though, where people who live close by each other co-exist in harmony and even fellowship. It’s hard to do that in the big city, where social groups are often scattered among many different residential units and linked more and more by technology.
I am not sure either one is intrinsically better. They just suit different preferences. I live in Austin, where similar scenes are a fairly common occurrence, while technorati may cluster at a cafe across the street to blog by wireless.
I don’t agree that it’s smalltown life writ large, because it’s so fundamentally crosscultural, just like most ghettoes in Toronto end up becoming. The Corso is Italian/Spanish/Mexican (with an advancing Chinese supplement). Ossington and Dundas is Portuguese/Brazilian, except for all those Vietnamese moving into the area. Bloor and Christie is where the Greeks and the Koreans live side by side. Even the classic Chinatown on Spadina is heavily infiltrated by downtown Kensington hipsters now.
Big cities create tolerance as an ethic simply by forcing it upon their inhabitants in order to survive day to day life. You can’t say the same for small towns, and there’s a distinctly different dynamic at work.
sambo: a derogatory name for a negro.
samba: a Brazilian ballroom dance.
Wait, now I feel guilty for copy/pasting a dictionary definition with the word “negro” in it. Dammit.
It seems self-evident that anyone can understand the appeal of less traffic, less crime, and a deeper involvement in your community. It’s just that city life has other benefits that many feel outweigh those. And hoping to remain immune to empathy with those who disagree with you is an odd thing to wish for.
If you mean the “arguement” of homogeneity put forth by ignorant bigots, i.e. “Thar’s no slants or colored people in Pigeon Fart, Alberta. It’s just normal white folks.”, then say so. There’s no need to slam the entirety of small town life by equating it with bigotry.
That being said, it sounds like a cool neighborhood. I can see why you like it.
I’ll grant less traffic, but urban crime rates are in a lot of cases comparable or lower than rural crime rates (the United States is actually an outlier in this regard, admittedly), and community involvement can be just as prevalent in the city as out of it.