Agency

In Which This is Tronno After All

1800s to present

Berry, Berenice, their daughters and now James (for reasons they hadn't gone into because it was nice to have help with the girls and, anyway, Berenice found him good company and an easy house guest) lived in a relatively small house on the west side of the Don Valley River.

Spruce Street, on which their house sits, is neither grand nor seedy. It's the seam of one of Toronto's infamous "pockets" -- the kind of street where on the north side might stand a stately line of tall Victorians, still showing off their original Toronto-fired brick, BMWs tucked safely away in back carports. In contrast, the south side is squatted by short little homes covered in painted aluminum, flat and charmless, rusted children's toys and old cat litter bags blown into corners of unkempt lawns.

In this neighbourhood, just a block or so further up, you'll find looming three-story mansions with front gardens, beautiful parkland, a Starbucks and nice brunch restaurants. One block further down: the Regent Park projects, a homeless shelter, and a cockroach-ridden donut shop that inexplicably specializes in Beef Patties, where old men smoke cigarettes down to the filter and read yesterday's papers.

It would be hard to say whether Toronto is a city with pockets of poor within the rich, or pockets of rich within the poor. It hardly matters. The point is that the fabric of Toronto feels nubby and uneven because it's a city that paints over its history; that tears down what is old rather than restore it; that reinvents itself rather than remembering. The city went construction crazy in the 1970s (alas, a most unfortunate time for architectural style) and, in this fervour to embrace modernity, demolished many of its old treasures.

From a Euro-Afro-Asian perspective, the loss couldn't be considered all that big. After all, Toronto is comparatively young -- less than 200 years of establishment. But when you dig down into its earth, you find the uneven layers of cultures and times, each sitting atop the other like sediment at the bottom of the lake.

The bit of Toronto where the Rosses live is called Cabbagetown. Originally, like any part of Toronto, these were the ancestral lands of First Nations people: Mississaugas of the Anishinaabe, the Haundenosaunee Confederacy and the Wendat. While this layer of the city's history is almost entirely obscured from modern view, it is the bedding of everything that it is built above it.

The Europeans arrived in the 1700s, laying down the next layer of silt. By 1790, the city had been drawn, mapped and quartered; lands were merrily handed out to wealthy men and their children who built log houses, then factories, upgrading as their fortunes rose like in a game of Monopoly.

By the mid-1800s, they had erected neighbourhoods with functional, smaller houses for their workers: in large part, these were Irish potato-famine refugees who'd come in search of jobs and food and generally found enough of both to stay. It's these workers' homes, and the cabbage patches they grew in their front yards, that earned Cabbagetown its name.

All this to say, the Ross home on Spruce Street was one of many tidy but smallish formerly working-class homes in this neighbourhood. Cabbage patches long since traded in for rosebushes and iron gates; frontages painted in muted grays and blues or sandblasted to reveal their original brickwork; they weren't beautiful, but they were undoubtedly old. As old as any building you'll find in the city.

But to give you an idea of how rich even a short history can be, here's a quick review:

1885 : The first inhabitants move into the new house on Spruce Street. The O'Donnells are a family of 7. They are delighted with the many small rooms (easier to heat in the harsh Toronto winter) and by the dirt-floored cellar in which they can store their garden-grown cabbages. Mr. O'Donnell works at the cork mill and has a vicious temper when he's been "in his cups." He's a bit of cliche, unfortunately. Mrs. O'Donnell hangs hand-embroidered floral curtains, sweeps the porch daily and tries, in some years unsuccessfully, to make sure her children are fed adequately. In one terrible summer, she and the two youngest children die of measles in the back bedroom.