Queen Street West
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Queen Street West is a street and a series of districts in the city of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It begins 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 and at Victoria Park and Queen streetcars stopping at a loop at Neville Park Boulevard. Queen Street was used as the cartographical baseline for establishing the orientation of the east-west avenues of Toronto's grid pattern of streets.
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Evolution of the area
Since its original survey in 1793 by Sir Alexander Aitkin, commissioned by 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 rechristened "Queen Street" after Queen Victoria of England.
"Queen West" is local vernacular that refers vaguely to the collection of neighbourhoods that have coalesced around the thoroughfare. At one time, these were ethnically-based neighbourhoods, but gentrification over the past twenty years has forced immigrant populations to move to more affordable areas of the city.
The area between University and Spadina Avenues was home to a cultural nexus in the 1980s. This area was once home to "greasy spoon" restaurants, decrepit bars and inexpensive housing, but was transformed by local students of the Ontario College of Art & Design, and an active music scene that included key figures such as Martha and the Muffins, Jane Siberry, Blue Rodeo, Mary Margaret O'Hara, Parachute Club, Spoons, Blue Peter, The Viletones, The Pursuit of Happiness and Dalbello.
The pedigree of their activities attracted wealthier and wealthier people to the area. Since then, the name "Queen Street" has become synonymous with the words "trendy", "hip", "cool" and ultimately, "expensive". This is usually what Torontonians now refer to as "Queen West" when they speak the name.
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.
As rents rose, most artists began moving westward along the five kilometer 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, 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 the 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 clientel.
"West Queen West" has since stopped serving its mid-1990s Goth clientele and now caters mostly to urbanites. "Wallpaper*"-styled fashion businesses, such as Coupe Bizzarre (http://www.coupebizzarre.com/,), Parallel, and EQ3 serve newly moneyed, fashionable young adults.
Between Trinity Bellwoods Park and Dufferin Street is the Gallery District. For this one kilometre stretch, nearly every storefront is a gallery. Major players in the development of this phenomenon include Katherine Mulherin and DeLeon White. 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 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 traffic.
The Gladstone Hotel is one of few pre-existing fixtures in the area that has been able to capitalize on this boon. The grand, old railroad-era hotel has over the years fallen into disrepair and barely maintained itself renting boarding-house style accommodation. The tavern on the first floor is now home to a weekly "Art Bar", where locals from the art community converge to socialize. 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. In 2004, the Gladstone began undergoing renovations in hopes of achieving the same level of success.
Past the Queen Street Subway (a railway underpass) in the 1100 block, Queen Street West makes its way through what is called Parkdale Village. This still remains one of Toronto's 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 viability of the housing stock on the north side, however, has made it possible for young professionals to raise property values. Nevertheless, one can still find ethnically-oriented businesses in this part of the city, which stay in business as a result of the constant influx of immigrants, which inhabit residential areas on the south side.
Recently, local taverns have been hired by members of Toronto's art community to hold their social events.
Like many other gentrified areas of Toronto, the original "Queen West" is now home to expensive boutiques, GAP stores and hair salons, as well as the CHUM-City Building.
Lower Queen TTC line
Under Queen Street 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 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 (http://transit.toronto.on.ca/transit.cfm?tt=subway&id=5006). Queen Street West is also served by Osgoode station.
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.
See also
External Links
- A line on a map: Queen Street History (http://www.rbebout.com/queen/2pline.htm)