SOMETIMES IT’S WORTH TALKING ABOUT THE WORK WE DON’T GET. Late last year I got an email from Pallavi Kumar, an editor at Conde Nast Traveler, who said they were working on a story about Corktown, and specifically a stretch of King Street East here in Toronto – a neighbourhood just by the old downtown that’s seen some restaurant and retail revival in the last few years, to go with the astronomical housing prices all over that part of Toronto. (To be honest, the whole city has been experiencing a housing bubble for at least a decade and a half now, so that statement could be applied almost anywhere.)
She asked me if I had any photos on file of that part of the city. I said I didn’t – at least nothing recent – but that I could go out and shoot some if she wanted. (Never ignore what could be a break.) She told me it would be strictly on spec – no guarantee that they’d get used or that I’d get paid – but if I wanted to send some photos in ASAP, she needed some local colour to go with the shots they already had – interiors provided by the restaurants.
It was a chilly, overcast weekend when I set out with my cameras. As neighbourhoods go, Corktown is one of our oldest, and full of red brick Victorian storefronts alongside industrial remnants and the usual mix and match of architectural styles from over a century of indifferent urban planning. It has history – notably Little Trinity Church and Enoch Turner Schoolhouse – but it also has a couple of looming overpasses that carry Richmond and Adelaide streets to where they link up to Eastern Avenue and cross the Don River, just to the east.
There are some streets of Victorian townhouses and worker’s cottages, and others lined with recent developments that loosely copy them. I doubt if any of them sell for less than a million and a half these days. And now that Conde Nast Traveler is writing about the area, I can guarantee that you can add at least another twenty-five grand to your bid if you’re competing to buy one. Toronto is that kind of city, and sometimes I have to ask myself: why?
The area isn’t wholly charmless – the Victorian storefronts along the northern side of King Street East somehow managed to survive mostly intact during the area’s decades of gritty, mixed-use, low-income neglect. Enoch Turner Schoolhouse is a museum and event space now, and in addition to the restaurants and bakeries along King there’s actually a bookstore – a rare amenity almost anywhere these days, and not just in Toronto. As far as historical districts in Toronto go, this is one of our best, but that’s mostly because we tore down most of them back when there was still coal smoke staining the red bricks and houses were still affordable.
I remember when there were still machine shops along King and the side streets, and when the area was an unofficial “photo district” in the ’80s and ’90s, full of labs where you’d courier your film after a shoot to get it developed quickly. They’re all gone now, and the old industrial buildings house restaurants and art galleries. If you frame your shot carefully, it can look rather pretty, evoking nearly two hundred years of the city. But if you’re walking around with a camera, trying to come up with something to compete with photos of Tuscan villages and resorts in Fiji and European cities with Roman walls, it’s hard to ignore the thought that Toronto is a rather unlovely city. In the end Conde Nast Traveler decided to go without the local colour, and I can’t say that I blame them.
Rick McGinnis Photographs 