There are few parts of down­town more sto­ried than Chi­na­town and Kens­ing­ton Mar­ket. Cit­i­zens of all stripes spend leisurely Sat­ur­days wan­der­ing the fish stalls on Bald­win, the used cloth­ing stores on Kens­ing­ton and Augusta or the fruit ven­dors on most cor­ners. And few neigh­bour­hoods are as starkly dichotomous—the dis­tinct cul­tures of Chi­na­town and the mar­ket mix only as much as geog­ra­phy requires.

The market’s infa­mous pop­u­la­tion of neo-hippies and other left-leaners typ­i­cally live and wan­der west of Spad­ina; the few Chi­nese fam­i­lies that are left after var­i­ous exo­duses tend to con­gre­gate east of Spad­ina, where family-name social clubs are still a com­mon sight among the old houses on D’Arcy and Cecil. Caribbean and South Amer­i­can stores spice up the area. Bald­win Street, chock­ablock with restau­rants, has a social scene all its own. Street­cars reg­u­larly rum­ble past Spadina’s late-night eater­ies, dis­count shops and green grocers.

To the south sits Alexan­dra Park, whose Victorian-style houses, built in the 1880s and ’90s, share the area with a mass of social hous­ing from the 1960s. The res­i­den­tial aspects of the neigh­bour­hood vary widely, as do the res­i­dents: arts pro­fes­sion­als on Sul­li­van Street, in the Grange and on Kens­ing­ton proper; busi­ness folk in the gra­cious town­houses on Phoebe; condo dwellers in the Kens­ing­ton Mar­ket Lofts; and stu­dents tucked into what­ever ram­shackle cub­by­holes are available.

Kens­ing­ton Real Estate Map

With Toronto’s real-estate boom going strong all around it, Kens­ing­ton can’t remain tatty for­ever. For years, Kens­ing­ton worked because it didn’t quite work. The market’s eclec­tic chaos evolved organ­i­cally, thanks to gen­er­a­tions of immi­grant mer­chants oper­at­ing in tiny shops on nar­row lots, many with res­i­dences open­ing onto rear ser­vice laneways. The streets aren’t eas­ily nav­i­gated, and frac­tured land-ownership pat­terns allowed Kens­ing­ton to remain essen­tially unchanged for decades.

The major­ity of homes in this cul­tur­ally diverse neigh­bour­hood are decoratively-accented Vic­to­rian style, small to mid-size, 1870 – 1890 vin­tage — many with mar­ket stalls in front. Newer homes include con­do­mini­ums at Kens­ing­ton Mar­ket Lofts, 21 Nas­sau Street and 160 Bald­win Street – and “New Vic­to­rian” town homes on Oxford Street. One of a num­ber of pre­dic­tions for the future is that some of the Market’s nar­row alleys will be restored as pedes­trian mews.

For res­i­dents of Kens­ing­ton Mar­ket homes, if the mar­ket doesn’t have it, there’s handy access to the stores of Por­tu­gal Vil­lage, Lit­tle Italy, Chi­na­town, or the fash­ion­able shops of Queen Street West. Street­car ser­vice is excel­lent, and Toronto’s down­town shop­ping, din­ing and enter­tain­ment is a quick con­nect for motorists via the Gar­diner Expressway.

The Eng­lish, Scots and Irish skilled trades­men and labour­ers who built homes here left their own mark in street names as British as fish-and-chips – Bald­win and Oxford Streets, Kens­ing­ton and Wales Avenues, and others.

Kens­ing­ton Market

Next to arrive, in the early 1900s, were Jew­ish immi­grants from East­ern Europe, many of them mer­chants. Start­ing out sell­ing door-to-door from hand­carts, they later began sell­ing from their carts in front of their homes… and Kens­ing­ton Mar­ket was born. Soon after, the ground floors of Kens­ing­ton Mar­ket homes were being extended and turned into store fronts.

Since then, each suc­ces­sive arrival of immi­grants has influ­enced the evo­lu­tion of Kens­ing­ton Mar­ket — from Por­tu­gal in the 1950s, from the Caribbean in the late 60s, and more recently from South and Cen­tral Amer­ica, Viet­nam and China.

In 2008, a 100-year con­tri­bu­tion to the life of the city was rec­og­nized when Canada’s only year ‘round mar­ket was des­ig­nated a National His­toric Site by the fed­eral government.

Any change may well be a tough sell for the market’s famously anar­chic denizens. The city’s tra­di­tional approach to the area has been one of benign neglect – a stance that helps sus­tain its funk­i­ness and resilience. For the past few years, how­ever, the city has had no sec­ondary plan for Kens­ing­ton, which is des­ig­nated as a his­tor­i­cally sig­nif­i­cant dis­trict in the offi­cial plan.

If the city moved to make the market’s warren-like laneways more acces­si­ble – a process that would involve expro­pri­a­tions, public-space improve­ments and changes to the city’s pol­icy of reject­ing laneway devel­op­ment – it could trig­ger a jump in real-estate prices as gal­leries, bou­tiques and cafés move in to these newly cre­ated mews.

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Con­tact the Jef­frey Team for more infor­ma­tion – 416−388−1960

Lau­rin & Natalie Jef­frey are Toronto Real­tors with Cen­tury 21 Regal Realty.
They did not write these arti­cles, they just repro­duce them here for peo­ple
who are inter­ested in Toronto real estate. They do not work for any builders.
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