S
samsonyuen
Guest
Death of a neighbourhood
Mar. 12, 2006. 07:15 AM
ANDREW CHUNG
STAFF REPORTER
Call it extreme, but when Taiwan native Henry Fu was studying engineering in Thunder Bay in the early 1990s, he would sometimes jump in a car and drive 17 hours straight to Toronto, eyes held open by strong, truck-stop coffee, just to get a bite to eat in Chinatown.
"People would say I was crazy, and yes, I was," recalls Fu, now 44. "But I had no choice. It's the food; you need it. It's an emotional thing. And Toronto was the only place you could get it."
After eating, he would raid the many crowded shops and browse among the frenetic outdoor vendors, returning to Thunder Bay the next day with a carload of Chinese groceries, herbs and newspapers to last him until the next time.
How things have changed in less than a generation.
Once a prosperous hive of activity, Toronto's downtown Chinatown, centred on Dundas St. W. and Spadina Ave, is now dismal and bleak. Most of the good restaurants have gone. Businesses are suffering. Only a few fruit stands remain. Litter swirls around the cold and lonely sidewalks.
Once the sun always seemed to shine on bustling Chinatown, but now it seems only to be setting.
"It's dying," says Vyona Ma, who, if it weren't for her job at her mother's Chinese herb and teashop, would never venture down Spadina for things Chinese.
"I only come here to go clubbing," says Ma, 22, a Seneca College marketing major. "When I go shopping or to go eat, I never come here. This Chinatown gives people the idea of traditional, old-fashioned stuff."
Last Wednesday, a group of business owners met for the first time to hash out a plan to rescue Chinatown through a partnership with the city.But some figure it might be too late. While downtown Chinatown was once the primary locus of Chinese culture and commerce in Canada, it has been decisively supplanted by what many are calling the New Chinatown, much farther north in Markham, which is very much responsible for its downtown counterpart's decline.
New Chinatown is a different world. The focal point is near the intersection of Kennedy Rd. and Steeles Ave., on the border between Toronto and Markham. Here sit two huge Chinese malls, jam-packed with cars on any day of the week, filled with shops that are bright and bursting with products.
Market Village features large flat-screen and projection TVs near its sky-lit food court, which offers cuisine from all over Asia. Upstairs, a cultural centre teaches courses in brush painting, kung fu and calligraphy.
The inside of Pacific Mall, a coliseum filled with hundreds of tiny shops, resembles the markets you'd find in Hong Kong or Beijing. In one glassed-in store, a man replenishes his jars of sliced ginseng and dried fish stomach because they've sold out; in the nearby atrium, people take a short rest in vibrating massage chairs. You can also find a sprawling karaoke club and a video-game arcade on the second level.
Already huge, these shopping centres are planning major expansions. But that's not all. Across Steeles, another large mall is under construction: the Splendid China Tower, whose design will mimic Beijing's Forbidden City, and which promises to eclipse Pacific Mall as the largest indoor Asian marketplace in North America.
"You walk along Steeles and you see the facilities are getting more and more because the Chinese population is booming," says Fu, the former Thunder Bay student, who now presides over Pacific Mall. "In our community people call it the New Chinatown."
New Chinatown has evolved alongside ethnically Chinese areas of Scarborough. Now it ripples out in every direction, with Chinese-themed strip malls and big-box super centres pushing as far north as Highway 7 and into Richmond Hill.
"The north is where most people are emigrating and staying," says Emily Ng of the Federation of Chinese Canadians in Markham. "It's much bigger, and the buying power is there. That makes it much more vibrant."
That migration of wealth from downtown Chinatown to the suburbs has happened before with other ethnic groups.
Spadina Ave. has always been one of Toronto's main landing strips for new immigrants. When the Jews began to arrive from Europe in the early 20th century, they ended up on Spadina. They worked in and then owned the many garment factories. But after World War II, and with their growing affluence, they packed up and began to move north.
Until the war, the Chinese community in Toronto was quite small. There were first a few Chinese laundries in what is now the financial district. Then the Chinese moved to the area Nathan Philips Square now occupies, says Shirley Lum, who guides walking tours around Chinatown.
After Canada repealed a federal policy preventing Chinese immigration after World War II, the population increased steadily. Today there are more than 400,000 Chinese in the Greater Toronto Area.
By the 1970s, many immigrants were arriving from Hong Kong, and later as Vietnamese boat people — many them were of Chinese origin — and they moved west along Dundas St., eventually reaching Spadina. A second Chinatown sprouted at Broadview Ave. and Gerard St. E., but it never reached the size or importance of its downtown cousin.
In her 1985 book, Spadina Avenue, Toronto curator Rosemary Donegan wrote that the Chinese newcomers were "rebuilding moribund shops, restaurants and theatres and revitalizing social and economic patterns."
But in the past few years, many of those immigrants, having amassed their own wealth, moved to Mississauga, Scarborough and Markham. A large number also returned to Hong Kong.
Most of the recent immigrants have come from mainland China. More geographically dispersed than earlier waves of Chinese immigrants, this community hasn't succeeded in revitalizing old Chinatown.
"The character of Chinatown has changed," says Stephen Chan, owner of Bright Pearl Seafood restaurant on Spadina. "The elders have retired and their kids became professionals and are doing other things. There is nobody to carry the torch, so Chinatown has been left unattended."
Markham and Richmond Hill, says Chan, who is also the vice-president of the Toronto Central China Town Development Association, are drawing the younger generations. "Look at the houses up there. They're larger, newer. It's urban sprawl."
He sees history repeating itself. "The history of Chinatown is the same, whether European, Irish, Jewish, Chinese. They make money and they're gone."
In the past, downtown Chinatown could always count on both locals and tourists to bring in business. By 1997, however, Pacific Mall and Market Village had set a course entrenching that region as a Chinese stronghold.
Then, the tourists dropped off dramatically. The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, as well as Toronto's SARS outbreak in 2003, reduced visits from abroad. Chinatown hasn't recovered.
Chan says business along Spadina is down at least 30 per cent. Along Dundas St. it's even worse.
With no time to lose, he's organized a group to create something he says could be the answer to Chinatown's problems: a business improvement association.
A BIA is a partnership with City Hall that helps local property owners and businesses revitalize their areas through organizing and cost-sharing (there are currently 54 of them in Toronto). The city collects a levy from owners based on their property values, and then distributes money to the local BIA, which can be used for anything from sidewalk improvements to street furniture to festival lights.
"It's the first step," Chan says. "We need to band together to clean up, beautify and promote the area."
About 30 people attended the BIA steering committee's first meeting last week. Many talked about the need to find a solution to the lack of parking in the area, the traffic problems, and even Chinatown's stigma as "dirty."
There are other signs, too, that Chinatown is fighting back.
Since December, there's been a formal partnership with Tourism Toronto, Chan says, allowing the agency to do heavier promoting of Chinatown.
And for the Chinatown Centre mall south of Dundas St., a new hotel is being built on the top two floors, which have been empty for years.
Still, these are small solutions compared to the big problem the area faces.
Walk through the glass doors of Chinatown Centre and you'll understand. Many of the stores are empty, papered over with newsprint. The escalators to and from the lower level, where you find a performance stage, sit idle, thick with dirt.
In one far corner, hairdresser Yan is cutting a long-time client's hair. Opposite her salon is an empty shop, for sale. The owner is asking $52,000. A smaller spot in the coming Splendid China Tower in Markham would cost twice as much.
"You see how dead is this mall," says Yan, who declined to give her last name. "Even I want to get rid of this business, but nobody will buy it. That's why I have to be here every day. It's very, very hard."
Her client, Haphung Hien, 78, says the thinning crowds have left her feeling unsafe. "I don't wear jewellery when I come," she says. And she points at her coat: it's an old one, so she doesn't look like she has any money to steal.
Down the corridor, Vyona Ma, surrounded by dozens of traditional Chinese herbs and tonics, says her mother wants to move her business to Markham.
But it's not all bad news for Alfred Yuen, the mall's manager. He says many empty shops are currently changing hands. And there is hope because of the new hotel, which he says will bring tourists and new customers to live where they can shop.
"I can see a better future for our shopping centre and for the whole of Chinatown," says Yuen, also a driving force behind a new BIA.
Tour guide Lum, who takes frequent treks through the downtown Chinatown, points to a new Taiwanese bakery, a herbal shop where the owners' son has decided to carry the torch despite his computer degree, and a good dim sum restaurant that opened recently as bright lights amid the dullness.
"We need," she says, "to find again that focus — our connection with the neighbourhood and its whole history.
___________________________________________________________
It's an interesting article, but I've seen Chinatown migrating north for a decade or so. My parents live right next to Market Village and Pacific Mall, but before that, we lived in another then-emergant Chinese area, in Agincourt.
There's always going to be a market for a downtown Chinatown though. In London, the Chinese live farther out, and the Chinatown has become more like a preserved attraction to sample Chinese culture. That seems similar to what's happening in Toronto. However, Spadina-Dundas is also welcoming new immigrants from China and Vietnam, changing the face of the area from the former Hong Kong and Taiwanese immigrants.
Mar. 12, 2006. 07:15 AM
ANDREW CHUNG
STAFF REPORTER
Call it extreme, but when Taiwan native Henry Fu was studying engineering in Thunder Bay in the early 1990s, he would sometimes jump in a car and drive 17 hours straight to Toronto, eyes held open by strong, truck-stop coffee, just to get a bite to eat in Chinatown.
"People would say I was crazy, and yes, I was," recalls Fu, now 44. "But I had no choice. It's the food; you need it. It's an emotional thing. And Toronto was the only place you could get it."
After eating, he would raid the many crowded shops and browse among the frenetic outdoor vendors, returning to Thunder Bay the next day with a carload of Chinese groceries, herbs and newspapers to last him until the next time.
How things have changed in less than a generation.
Once a prosperous hive of activity, Toronto's downtown Chinatown, centred on Dundas St. W. and Spadina Ave, is now dismal and bleak. Most of the good restaurants have gone. Businesses are suffering. Only a few fruit stands remain. Litter swirls around the cold and lonely sidewalks.
Once the sun always seemed to shine on bustling Chinatown, but now it seems only to be setting.
"It's dying," says Vyona Ma, who, if it weren't for her job at her mother's Chinese herb and teashop, would never venture down Spadina for things Chinese.
"I only come here to go clubbing," says Ma, 22, a Seneca College marketing major. "When I go shopping or to go eat, I never come here. This Chinatown gives people the idea of traditional, old-fashioned stuff."
Last Wednesday, a group of business owners met for the first time to hash out a plan to rescue Chinatown through a partnership with the city.But some figure it might be too late. While downtown Chinatown was once the primary locus of Chinese culture and commerce in Canada, it has been decisively supplanted by what many are calling the New Chinatown, much farther north in Markham, which is very much responsible for its downtown counterpart's decline.
New Chinatown is a different world. The focal point is near the intersection of Kennedy Rd. and Steeles Ave., on the border between Toronto and Markham. Here sit two huge Chinese malls, jam-packed with cars on any day of the week, filled with shops that are bright and bursting with products.
Market Village features large flat-screen and projection TVs near its sky-lit food court, which offers cuisine from all over Asia. Upstairs, a cultural centre teaches courses in brush painting, kung fu and calligraphy.
The inside of Pacific Mall, a coliseum filled with hundreds of tiny shops, resembles the markets you'd find in Hong Kong or Beijing. In one glassed-in store, a man replenishes his jars of sliced ginseng and dried fish stomach because they've sold out; in the nearby atrium, people take a short rest in vibrating massage chairs. You can also find a sprawling karaoke club and a video-game arcade on the second level.
Already huge, these shopping centres are planning major expansions. But that's not all. Across Steeles, another large mall is under construction: the Splendid China Tower, whose design will mimic Beijing's Forbidden City, and which promises to eclipse Pacific Mall as the largest indoor Asian marketplace in North America.
"You walk along Steeles and you see the facilities are getting more and more because the Chinese population is booming," says Fu, the former Thunder Bay student, who now presides over Pacific Mall. "In our community people call it the New Chinatown."
New Chinatown has evolved alongside ethnically Chinese areas of Scarborough. Now it ripples out in every direction, with Chinese-themed strip malls and big-box super centres pushing as far north as Highway 7 and into Richmond Hill.
"The north is where most people are emigrating and staying," says Emily Ng of the Federation of Chinese Canadians in Markham. "It's much bigger, and the buying power is there. That makes it much more vibrant."
That migration of wealth from downtown Chinatown to the suburbs has happened before with other ethnic groups.
Spadina Ave. has always been one of Toronto's main landing strips for new immigrants. When the Jews began to arrive from Europe in the early 20th century, they ended up on Spadina. They worked in and then owned the many garment factories. But after World War II, and with their growing affluence, they packed up and began to move north.
Until the war, the Chinese community in Toronto was quite small. There were first a few Chinese laundries in what is now the financial district. Then the Chinese moved to the area Nathan Philips Square now occupies, says Shirley Lum, who guides walking tours around Chinatown.
After Canada repealed a federal policy preventing Chinese immigration after World War II, the population increased steadily. Today there are more than 400,000 Chinese in the Greater Toronto Area.
By the 1970s, many immigrants were arriving from Hong Kong, and later as Vietnamese boat people — many them were of Chinese origin — and they moved west along Dundas St., eventually reaching Spadina. A second Chinatown sprouted at Broadview Ave. and Gerard St. E., but it never reached the size or importance of its downtown cousin.
In her 1985 book, Spadina Avenue, Toronto curator Rosemary Donegan wrote that the Chinese newcomers were "rebuilding moribund shops, restaurants and theatres and revitalizing social and economic patterns."
But in the past few years, many of those immigrants, having amassed their own wealth, moved to Mississauga, Scarborough and Markham. A large number also returned to Hong Kong.
Most of the recent immigrants have come from mainland China. More geographically dispersed than earlier waves of Chinese immigrants, this community hasn't succeeded in revitalizing old Chinatown.
"The character of Chinatown has changed," says Stephen Chan, owner of Bright Pearl Seafood restaurant on Spadina. "The elders have retired and their kids became professionals and are doing other things. There is nobody to carry the torch, so Chinatown has been left unattended."
Markham and Richmond Hill, says Chan, who is also the vice-president of the Toronto Central China Town Development Association, are drawing the younger generations. "Look at the houses up there. They're larger, newer. It's urban sprawl."
He sees history repeating itself. "The history of Chinatown is the same, whether European, Irish, Jewish, Chinese. They make money and they're gone."
In the past, downtown Chinatown could always count on both locals and tourists to bring in business. By 1997, however, Pacific Mall and Market Village had set a course entrenching that region as a Chinese stronghold.
Then, the tourists dropped off dramatically. The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, as well as Toronto's SARS outbreak in 2003, reduced visits from abroad. Chinatown hasn't recovered.
Chan says business along Spadina is down at least 30 per cent. Along Dundas St. it's even worse.
With no time to lose, he's organized a group to create something he says could be the answer to Chinatown's problems: a business improvement association.
A BIA is a partnership with City Hall that helps local property owners and businesses revitalize their areas through organizing and cost-sharing (there are currently 54 of them in Toronto). The city collects a levy from owners based on their property values, and then distributes money to the local BIA, which can be used for anything from sidewalk improvements to street furniture to festival lights.
"It's the first step," Chan says. "We need to band together to clean up, beautify and promote the area."
About 30 people attended the BIA steering committee's first meeting last week. Many talked about the need to find a solution to the lack of parking in the area, the traffic problems, and even Chinatown's stigma as "dirty."
There are other signs, too, that Chinatown is fighting back.
Since December, there's been a formal partnership with Tourism Toronto, Chan says, allowing the agency to do heavier promoting of Chinatown.
And for the Chinatown Centre mall south of Dundas St., a new hotel is being built on the top two floors, which have been empty for years.
Still, these are small solutions compared to the big problem the area faces.
Walk through the glass doors of Chinatown Centre and you'll understand. Many of the stores are empty, papered over with newsprint. The escalators to and from the lower level, where you find a performance stage, sit idle, thick with dirt.
In one far corner, hairdresser Yan is cutting a long-time client's hair. Opposite her salon is an empty shop, for sale. The owner is asking $52,000. A smaller spot in the coming Splendid China Tower in Markham would cost twice as much.
"You see how dead is this mall," says Yan, who declined to give her last name. "Even I want to get rid of this business, but nobody will buy it. That's why I have to be here every day. It's very, very hard."
Her client, Haphung Hien, 78, says the thinning crowds have left her feeling unsafe. "I don't wear jewellery when I come," she says. And she points at her coat: it's an old one, so she doesn't look like she has any money to steal.
Down the corridor, Vyona Ma, surrounded by dozens of traditional Chinese herbs and tonics, says her mother wants to move her business to Markham.
But it's not all bad news for Alfred Yuen, the mall's manager. He says many empty shops are currently changing hands. And there is hope because of the new hotel, which he says will bring tourists and new customers to live where they can shop.
"I can see a better future for our shopping centre and for the whole of Chinatown," says Yuen, also a driving force behind a new BIA.
Tour guide Lum, who takes frequent treks through the downtown Chinatown, points to a new Taiwanese bakery, a herbal shop where the owners' son has decided to carry the torch despite his computer degree, and a good dim sum restaurant that opened recently as bright lights amid the dullness.
"We need," she says, "to find again that focus — our connection with the neighbourhood and its whole history.
___________________________________________________________
It's an interesting article, but I've seen Chinatown migrating north for a decade or so. My parents live right next to Market Village and Pacific Mall, but before that, we lived in another then-emergant Chinese area, in Agincourt.
There's always going to be a market for a downtown Chinatown though. In London, the Chinese live farther out, and the Chinatown has become more like a preserved attraction to sample Chinese culture. That seems similar to what's happening in Toronto. However, Spadina-Dundas is also welcoming new immigrants from China and Vietnam, changing the face of the area from the former Hong Kong and Taiwanese immigrants.