West Queen West

At the start of September, I moved into a new home in the West Queen West neighbourhood in Toronto, and I’m just starting to feel settled in that place. The first thing to know about my apartment is that it is genuinely tiny: 250 ft², including the bathroom. Knowing that, I left all my furniture in Vancouver and bought new, space-conserving items when I arrived. But trying to combine furniture shopping with a heavy class schedule proved challenging, and I didn’t finish the process until last weekend.

The building is big, and undergoing major renovations. My suite had just been renovated before I moved in, so I got nice new appliances, kitchen and bathroom, and a fresh coat of paint. But the half-renovated/half-unrenovated situation leads to an unusual demographic mix in the building: some hipster bachelors in units like mine, and some lower-income families in the larger unrenovated apartments. It can lead to strange encounters, like when Zhan came over and we passed an elderly Chinese man in his tighty-whities in the hall, taking his garbage over to the chute. But that’s the charm of urban living, I suppose.

For all that I espouse the values of density and urbanity, I’ve only actually lived downtown once in my life, while I was in Montreal in the summer of 2001. So far, I’m quite happy with swapping semi-suburban Vancouver living for urban Toronto. I haven’t really taken advantage of the colossal range of activities around me yet, but I do appreciate the quick commute, the wide variety of groceries, and being close to many friends. Before, it was always a trip out of my way if I wanted to pick up concert tickets at Zulu, find an obscure magazine on Commercial Drive, go to a movie, or attend a meeting at city hall. Now, those stops are always on my way to other activities, and ridiculously close to boot. And yes, I’ve sacrificed a lot of space. I managed to carve my micro-apartment into two pseudo-rooms, and I have to make my bed double as a couch, and my dining table double as a desk, but it’s liveable. My building has a green inner courtyard, and I’m right next to the spacious Trinity-Bellwoods park, so I’m not really giving up much in the way of green space. And yet, I’ll really miss jogging among the giant trees of Pacific Spirit park.

West Queen West is a pretty great district. In undergrad, my universe never really extended west of Bathurst, with a few exceptions like Little Italy. Now, the renovations at the Drake and the Gladstone have put West Queen West firmly on the map, and this artist’s community is bracing itself to be overrun by gentrification… I guess that’s my role. There are dozens of galleries out here, and plenty of workshops and weird restaurants mingling in the backstreets. I’m still trying to find a good cafe, but everything else I could want is right at hand.