Queen Street West
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Queen Street West describes both the western branch of Queen Street, a major east-west thoroughfare, and a series of neighbourhoods or commercial districts, situated west of Yonge Street in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Queen Street begins in the west at the intersection of King Street, The Queensway, and Roncesvalles Avenue. It extends eastward in a straight line to Yonge Street where it becomes Queen Street East; eastbound Queen TTC streetcars loop at Neville Park Boulevard near Queen Street East and Victoria Park Avenue in the The Beaches neighbourhood.
Queen Street was the cartographical baseline for the original east-west avenues of Toronto's grid pattern of major streets. The western end of Queen (sometimes simply referred to as "Queen West") is now best known as a centre for Canadian broadcasting, music, performance, fashion, and the visual arts. Over the past twenty-five years, Queen West has become an international arts centre, and a major tourist attraction in Toronto.
[edit] Evolution of the area
Since the original survey in 1793 by Sir Alexander Aitkin, commissioned by Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe, Queen Street has had many names. For its first sixty years, many sections were referred to as Lot Street, but in 1851 it was named after Queen Victoria.
"Queen West" is local vernacular which generally refers to the collection of neighbourhoods that have developed along and around the thoroughfare. Many of these were originally ethnically-based neighbourhoods. The earliest example from the mid-19th century was Claretown, an Irish immigrant enclave in the area of Queen Street West and Bathurst Street, now known as West Queen West. From the 1920s to the 1950s, the area was the heart of Toronto's Polish and Ukrainian communities. From the 1950s through the 1970s, many immigrants from Portugal settled in the area. Gentrification over the past twenty years has caused most recent immigrants to gradually move to more affordable areas of the city as desirability of the area drives up prices.
Like other gentrified areas of Toronto, the original Queen West is now lined with expensive boutiques, chain stores such as Roots, Zara and Gap, restaurants and hair salons. Perhaps the best-known landmark on Queen West is the CHUM-City Building, headquarters of Citytv, MuchMusic, Speakers' Corner, Bravo!, and many other cable television and radio stations.
[edit] Art Crawl
The Queen West Art Crawl is an annual weekend-long festival celebrating the arts on Queen Street West. For three days each September, the artists, arts organizations and businesses of Toronto's Queen Street West throw open their doors to the city and present the annual Queen West Art Crawl.
The Queen West Art Crawl is produced by Artscape, in association with the Queen Street West community. Artscape is a non-profit organization engaged in real estate and program development for the arts and creative sector. Areas of specialized expertise include property management, master planning, development of arts districts, creation and management of multi-tenant arts centres, engagement of stakeholders in creative cluster projects, and research on monitoring the impact of arts-driven revitalization projects.
[edit] Yonge to University
Since the 19th century, Queen Street West at Yonge Street has been one of Toronto's primary shopping destinations. Originally, the Eaton's and Simpson's department stores faced each other across Queen Street, with the rivalry between the two stores being at one time as central to Canadian retailing as the Macy's/Gimbel's competition was to New York City's retail history. The pedestrian crosswalk on Queen Street, just to the west of the intersection with Yonge Street, was for years one of the busiest in Canada, as thousands of shoppers a day comparison shopped between Eaton's and Simpson's.
Today, Eaton's is gone, but the Toronto Eaton Centre still remains at the same location, one of Canada's largest office and shopping complexes. Similarly, Simpson's is also gone, but the historic department store building remains on the south side of Queen Street, occupied by The Bay department store.
Further west, this stretch of Queen Street is dominated by institutional and cultural buildings such as Old City Hall, Toronto City Hall, Osgoode Hall and the Four Seasons Centre.
[edit] University to Spadina: Queen West
The area between University and Spadina Avenues was a cultural nexus in the 1980s. In the 1960s and early 1970s, this stretch of Queen Street West was an aging commercial strip, known for "greasy spoon" restaurants and inexpensive housing in the area. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the area was transformed by local students, including those of the nearby Ontario College of Art & Design, and the area developed an active music scene which largely defined Canadian music of its era.
This scene included key figures such as Martha and the Muffins, Jane Siberry, Blue Rodeo, Mary Margaret O'Hara, Parachute Club, Boys Brigade, Spoons, Blue Peter, The Viletones, The Diodes, The Pursuit of Happiness, B. B. Gabor and Dalbello.
The vibrant arts culture soon attracted other artists, audiences, and wealthier people to the area. Since then, the name "Queen Street" has become synonymous with the words "trendy", "hip", and "cool". Older and hipper bars such as the Cameron, the Horseshoe Tavern and The Rivoli have not changed too much, and top Canadian musical and comedy acts can still often be found performing in the area.
The CHUM-City Building, housing CHUM Limited's television operations, is located at the corner of Queen and John Streets in this area. Most notably among the CHUM operations, MuchMusic has become intimately associated with Queen Street's culture; the station's VJs have often broadcast their segments live from outside the building, and programs such as Electric Circus and the MuchMusic Video Awards have regularly taken place on the street.
A movement by local citizens to rename the area "Soho" after a side-street in the area has never been taken seriously by the municipal government. Some people compare the "Queen West" experience with that of New York's SoHo or London's Soho.
[edit] Spadina to Trinity Bellwoods Park: West Queen West
As rents rose, most artists began moving westward along the five kilometre thoroughfare. In the early 1990s, the new vogue area became "West Queen West". This area was associated with the Goth revival that hit Toronto during the same timespan. Night clubs such as Sanctuary, Catacombs, Freak Show, the Abyss, Savage Garden, The Bovine Sex Club and The Velvet Underground catered to this group of individuals. Occupying the same area, between Spadina Avenue and Trinity Bellwoods Park, is Toronto's Fashion District. Many individuals of the Goth subculture took advantage of cheap textiles to make their own distinct style of clothing that was unavailable on the Toronto market. In the later 1990s, high-priced clothing stores opened in the same area to capitalize on this clientele.
"West Queen West" has since stopped serving its mid-1990s Goth clientele and now caters mostly to urbanites. "Wallpaper"-styled fashion businesses, such as Parallel and EQ3 (which since has moved to interior design-rich King Street East) serve newly moneyed, fashionable young adults.
[edit] Trinity Bellwoods to Dufferin: Parkdale East (the Gallery District)
Between Trinity Bellwoods Park and Dufferin Street is Parkdale East, also known as the Gallery District. For this one kilometre stretch, nearly every storefront on the north side is either a gallery or nightclub (the south side of the street is largely taken up by the buildings and grounds of the former Queen Street Mental Health Centre, now part of CAMH.) The Major player in the development of this recent phenomenon is Katharine Mulherin. One of the causes of this gallery conglomeration was the conversion of an old building into Gallery 1313, with extensive financial assistance by the city. This excess of gallery space allows Toronto artists of all levels of ability to show their work at a low cost.
Unlike the boutique-oriented storefronts of the eastern portion of the street, the Gallery District contains an abundance of space available for special events. The lack of retail in the area, however, creates a void of weekday pedestrian traffic.
Parkdale East has undergone rapid transformation in the past couple of years. Rents have increased dramatically and many galleries have left. Recent departures include Sis Boom Bah, Luft Gallery, Burston Gallery and Brackett Gallery. At the same time as galleries have closed, many new bars have opened. Many attribute this sudden shift to the development spearheaded by the Drake Hotel.
The Gladstone Hotel is one of few pre-existing fixtures in the area that has been able to capitalize on the recent boom. This grand old railroad-era hotel had over the years fallen into disrepair and barely maintained itself by renting boarding-house style accommodation. The tavern on the first floor is now home to a weekly "Art Bar", where locals from the arts community converge to socialize. In 2005 it underwent a major renovation spearheaded by Eberhard Zeidler, the architect who designed Toronto's Eaton's Centre.
The Drake Hotel, a high-class hotspot in the '20s turned flophouse in the '80s, has also been recently restored to its former glory with $6 million in funds.
Recently filmmaker Atom Egoyan opened the trendy Camera Bar, a bar and screening venue which shows independent films.
[edit] Dufferin to Roncesvalles: Parkdale
Dufferin and Queen is a two-legged intersection broken up by the Queen Street Subway (an historic CN railway bridge underpass - first built in 1898) in the 1200 block. Once past there, Queen Street West makes its way through Parkdale Village. Parkdale is one of Toronto's oldest and poorest neighbourhoods, with an abundance of social housing on the south side of Queen Street, as well as soup kitchens and day centres toward Sorauren Avenue.
The market value and desirability of the old houses on the north side have made it possible for young professionals to renovate and raise property values. Nevertheless, one can still find many ethnically-oriented stores in this part of the city, which stay in business as a result of the constant influx of immigrants who largely live in the residential areas south of Queen.
Recently, local Parkdale taverns have been rented by members of Toronto's art community for social events and performances.
[edit] Lower Queen TTC line
Beneath Queen Street West is a little-known urban artifact. In the 1940s, the Toronto Transit Commission proposed to construct, in addition to a rapid-transit subway under Yonge Street, a second tunnel under Queen Street that would allow the PCC streetcars from certain routes to avoid other traffic as they ran through central areas. The Queen subway would run from Trinity Bellwoods Park in the west to Broadview Avenue in the east. This two-line plan was approved by referendum in 1946, but when hoped-for funding from the government of Canada did not materialize, the Queen line was postponed. In the 1960s, the TTC decided that a subway to replace the crowded Bloor Street streetcars would be more valuable, as after the construction of the Yonge line most of the passenger traffic had moved north with the subway. While the Queen line remained on the list of proposals into the 1970s, it was never a priority again.
However, when the Yonge subway was being constructed in the early 1950s, the shell of an east-west station for the Queen line, sometimes called Lower Queen, was built under its Queen station, and passenger flows within the station were laid out on the assumption that it would eventually be an interchange. In the 1990s, some of the space was reused for a pedestrian passage when the subway station was being made wheelchair-accessible, but the rest of the empty station shell remains to this day. More information and pictures of "Lower Queen" and other secret subway stops can be found at Transit Toronto. Queen Street West is also served by Osgoode station at University Avenue.
Even without the subway, the 501 Queen streetcar remains one of the TTC's busiest and longest streetcar routes; it runs every six minutes in each direction (traffic permitting) and is one of only two lines to use the articulated double-length ALRV streetcars.
[edit] See also
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