Let's allow neighbourhoods to be great

Is there a more celebrated neighbourhood in Toronto than Kensington Market? It has been the setting for at least two television shows, subject of a Heritage Minute, designated a National Historic Site and factored into the origin mythology of our first megacity mayor.

The Finch Store on Dewson Street near Ossington Avenue and College Street has been ordered to stop serving coffee because the street it's on is zoned residential. Never underestimate the city's capacity to stamp out the very things it says it is trying to encourage, Edward Keenan writes.

It is famous and revered for its ramshackle mix of fresh food of all kinds, clothing shops, jewelry stores, restaurants and assorted other eccentricities, most of them housed in — and spilling out of — buildings that were built as houses on narrow residential roads. It was not planned that way, it evolved as successive waves of immigrants and outcasts adapted the neighbourhood to their own needs and ambitions.

Even today, as it has changed further and gentrified, it is kind of magic. And as John Michael McGrath of TVO — among others — has observed, if it didn’t already exist that way, the city of Toronto would never allow it.