Where we live

The first house Kathleen and I owned still sits at 11 Amroth Street in Toronto— very near Danforth and Woodbine. It was, as I recall, a crooked little house on a street that friends, from better parts of town, likened to living in Beirut. The house was 13 feet wide. The lot was 14 feet wide. So narrow and so crooked that only a nimble child could navigate the irregular passage between our house and the one next door. It was a semidetached home, so there was no way to get to our back yard except through the house. This made trimming the front lawn an extra challenge each week. Our back yard was so narrow that when we urged our dog to fetch the ball, Tyke had to run backwards to return it. Not quite true—but you get the idea.

As we were settling in to our new neighbourhood, friends came over to help us celebrate. During dinner, their car was stolen from the street in front of our house—the side window smashed, ignition wires ripped out and paired until the car started. Moments later the vehicle was driven into the side of a nearby drugstore, simply for the thrill of setting off the airbags. This was sport in our part of town.

We went to the theatre one evening midweek— it is something folks do before children arrive. We came home to find our crooked house filled with Toronto police officers sipping coffee, wandering room to room and chatting amongst themselves. While we had been out, neighbours had alerted police to a break-in at our home. There had been a rash of such crimes in this neighbourhood.

We were instructed to assemble an inventory of items that had been stolen. Then. a kindly young policewoman sat down with us to advise how better to equip and secure our narrow, crooked house on Amroth. It was about 2 a.m. and we were expected at work in the morning. Unwisely, I observed that so many police officers were traipsing through my home there could scarcely be anyone left in the city to actually look for and catch the burglar. This only served to change the tone of the late night seminar from that of soothing advice to a wagging finger, scolding us for our flimsy doors and windows. Our neglect in this regard, according to the finger wagger, was an invitation to ne’er-do- wells to break into our narrow house and steal our things.

On Amroth Street, it seemed, anything less than a walled fortress and a manned gun turret was a bright neon sign ushering thieves to our narrow, crooked house.

Just a kilometre or two south of Amroth is the Beach. The Beach is a leafy, mostly affluent neighbourhood in which the streets are lined with European cars and Montessori schools. Steaming hot and creamy latte flows through underground Starbuck pipelines to each and every home. Nannies trained in exotic martial arts serve double duty as child guardians and neighbourhood watch. Would-be thieves stick out in the Beach like a Chevrolet on Queen Street.

A CN main line track runs between our no name neighbourhood and the Beach—helpfully defining each community and discouraging intermingling between these vastly different worlds. Each of us knows which side of the tracks we belong—which world we inhabit.

Yet, when it comes time to vote in the municipal election—our worlds come together—if but for one day. Ward 32 captures all of the Beach, across the tracks north to Danforth and west to Leslie—about three world’s past the western edge of the Beach. There is very little in common between Amroth and the Beach. Lives rarely intersect. We rode the Danforth subway. They take the Queen streetcar. Our kids skateboard past drug dealers and panhandlers on the way to the Valumart. Beach kids watch mom unpack their gear from the Volvo stationwagon for private skating lessons at Ted Reeve arena. The Beach newspaper doesn’t come north of the tracks.

We lived on Amroth through a handful of municipal elections. If it rubbed the folks in the Beach the wrong way that their neighbourhood was lumped in with ours to vote—I didn’t hear it. No one complained on Amroth. But neither did they complain when Mel Lastman was elected as mayor—suggesting a rather subdued level of engagement in the affairs of the city.

Ward 32 has been reshaped and its boundaries have shifted at least once since the city was amalgamated. Yet the Beach remains the Beach.

Amroth is looking a bit better these days—a bit less of a war zone. There are more potted plants on verandas, fewer grocery carts. It is not yet part of any defined community—but it is beginning. Whatever Amroth is—it isn’t the Beach. Leslieville is more wishful thinking than an actual community, but given time one might well emerge.

The point is that electoral boundaries aren’t where we live. They are arbitrary lines on a map that attempt to roughly balance population (not electors as some would suggest—a subject settled nearly 175 years ago in Upper Canada) to enable us to choose someone to represent us in local, provincial and federal government.

Communities as strong as those in Prince Edward County easily endure the fleeting assembly of the electorate cobbled together once every four years. No matter how the lines are drawn in The County— Milford will always be Milford. Hillier always Hillier. Prinyers Cove. Demorestville. Cherry Valley. Rednersville. South Bay.

Those who tell you your community is at risk vastly underestimate the strength and vitality of the folks who inhabit these places. They underestimate the connection we have to our communities and the sense of belonging our communities gives us in return.

There are many factors to consider in regard to the size of council and ward representation. The erosion of community identity is not one of them.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca