Residents fed up with raucous frat parties

Former governor general joins neighbours in calling on city to address complaints

- ALYSHAH HASHAM

The Saturday night partying at a nunnery-turned-frat house wouldn’t stop. The guest staying on the frat-facing side of former governor general Adrienne Clarkson’s house in the Annex couldn’t sleep because of the shouting, loud music and the “clanging of metallic objects.”

“This is simply unacceptable behaviour in a residential area. We don’t understand why we cannot regulate these types of houses,” Clarkson and her husband, author John Ralston Saul, wrote in a scathing letter submitted to a recent meeting of city council’s planning and housing committee. "This has been going on much too long and residents have been extremely patient, Please let's do something about it right away!"

Like most of the 19 fraternities and sororities clustered among rooming houses, midrise apartments and stately heritage homes belonging to eminent authors and academics or converted into student housing, Delta Kappa Epsilon was there long before Clarkson and Saul moved in nearly 20 years ago.

But being part of a long-standing university tradition has not dampened a decades-old war between the fraternities and some of their neighbours.

Eddy Brake, who lives in a rooming house next door to Alpha Epsilon Pi, is angry about the noise that comes from the neighbouring fraternity. "It's been hell," he said.

In the most recent skirmish, a group of Annex residents fed up with living among frat houses that flout the city rules for residential areas took their fight to city hall, hoping for new regulations and an improved enforcement of bylaws.

Eddy Brake, property manager of the Madison Avenue rooming house where he also lives, takes a drag on his cigarette and points from his porch to three paper signs stapled to the utility pole in front of the fraternity next door.