THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT
by Christopher Hutsul, Toronto Star

The Toronto Star, Canada
August 14, 2005 Sunday

Sako Ghanaghounian saunters through Kensington Market with his chin up,
a good 15 paces ahead of his mom and dad. En route from his home on
Kensington Ave. to daycare on Bellevue Ave. on a hot summer morning,
the five-year-old greets his friends with the grace of a nobleman. They
all know his name.

“Buenos dias, Tony,” says Sako without stopping.

“Buenos dias, Sako,” responds the fruit vendor, jostling pineapples.

Heading northbound, Sako sidesteps two drunks outside a bar, presses
his face against the window of the butcher shop, waves at Rita, then
steps into the bakery for his usual morning snack – a spinach bagel.

He breezes through waves of fish smell, tromping with sandalled feet
on sidewalks slick with brown stuff leaking from garbage bags and the
occasional oily mash of errant vegetables. He plunks himself down at
Louie’s coffee shop, where Ozzie pours him a tall cup of tap water,
just as he does every morning.

The children who grow up here, the princes and princesses of
Kensington, the market rats, experience a childhood as unique as the
market itself.

What was once a Jewish market, a place to buy poultry and dry goods,
has become a melee of cultures and lifestyles. The pioneers of this
place were the owners of the trendy T-shirt shops, hipster furniture
stores and punk-rock watering holes. Now artists and hippies share
the sidewalks with bullhorn-wielding socialists and teenaged bargain
hunters. This is a village where rich and poor, chic and crazy,
young and old, bump bumpers and bike wheels, finding, miraculously,
a way to get along.

Sako, for instance, was there when market residents and vendors
protested the opening of a Nike-owned store on Augusta Ave. a few
years ago. Residents believed the store’s presence compromised the
independent spirit of the market, and took issue with the company’s
questionable labour practices. Sako was too young to know what was
going on, but his mother, sociologist Mai Phan, wanted to immerse
him in the spirit of activism that flavours market life.

There are other eclectic neighbourhoods in the city, to be sure,
but none could claim to be quite as socially and culturally diverse
as Kensington – especially by day, when merchants from a variety of
backgrounds take to their stores in a community already rich with
Portuguese, Chinese and Vietnamese residents. The Danforth, Chinatown
and Little Italy – all vibrant neighbourhoods – are ethnic cliques
by comparison. Kensington Market, nestled between busy streets,
is emblematic of Canada’s vision of a cultural mosaic.

Love it or hate it, the market captures our imagination, and occupies
a sense of Toronto folklore, past and present. In her novel The Way
the Crow Flies, Ann-Marie MacDonald describes Kensington Market as
experienced by a child.

“The sights and the sounds envelop her, she is comforted by the
ramshackle opulence of it all,” writes MacDonald. “Feathers lilt up
with the breeze of passing feet, narrow streets are gridlocked with
cars at the mercy of pedestrians as disregarding as pigeons. Madeline
looks up; buds are on the trees and the thousand market smells have
begun to blossom too in the warmth of the April noon…”

The market, as described here, is not the cleanest place to raise
a child. In fact, it’s filthy. It isn’t the most restful either.
Rather, it’s hectic day and night and the air is filled with hoots
and honking. It probably isn’t even the safest place. There’s crack
cocaine and petty theft and heavy street traffic.

It would be no place for a child – if not for the colour, the energy,
the art and the diversity.

I spent some time with people who grew up here or who raise children
here to gain an understanding of what the world looks like when home
is Toronto’s famous Kensington Market.

Michele Gould and her daughter, Maizy, couldn’t have picked a worse
time to move into the market. In the days of Toronto’s infamous
garbage strike the market was at its rankest.

Maizy’s folks had moved into the market in 2002 not because they
loved it, but because it made good business sense. Maizy’s dad had
just opened a hair salon on St. Patrick St. and figured if rent
got too steep, he could move the salon into the main floor of their
Kensington Ave. home.

Early on, when Maizy was a baby, it seemed like a mistake.

“When I first moved here, I asked Paul, ‘Why did you drag me to the
armpit of Toronto?'” says Michele. “The whole place (stank).”

But the garbage strike ended, Maizy grew up, and Michele became
acquainted with the merchants. The guys at Casa Acoreana always snuck
Maizy a cookie, and Tony at the fruit market always greeted her with
a shiny apple. Michele’s trepidation melted away. She began to get
the feeling that people were looking out for her family. It reminded
her of the small Newfoundland town she’d grown up in.

“It started to sink in slowly. Little things … like how every Friday
my neighbours and I would gather on our porch for a barbecue to make
as much noise as we could because we had to rival the noise coming
from the Last Temptation,” a local bar, she says laughing. “I think
it’s really cool.”

So does Maizy. The rambunctious little four-year-old kid with an
untameable head of blonde hair lives in a community of artists and
therefore sees the world as a place for expression. For role models
Maizy has to go no farther than Rain, who lives on the ground floor.
Twentysomething Rain, eternally stylish, is an interpretive dancer,
visual artist and fixture at the city’s coolest art parties. Among
other things, she makes small doughnuts out of fabric. She’s idolized
by young Maizy.

“Whenever Maizy plays dress-up, she runs down to Rain’s apartment,”
says Michele. “She wants to show off her outfit.”

And there’s no shortage of other kids to hang out with. There’s
Sako next door, and Molly across the street. Up the way lives Jason,
the rugged tyke whose parents run a fruit shop.

“He’s kind of the street boss,” laughs Michele.

Next year, Maizy will have to venture outside the market. She’s
enrolled in school that has a French immersion program. There’s a
chance they could move.

“I ran the idea of selling the house by her, and she was freaking out,”
says Michele. “She loves it here and never wants to leave.”

That makes Michele uncomfortable. She knows her daughter feels safe
and loved in this neighbourhood, but would hate for it to become a
crutch. “I see some of the kids who have grown up in the market and
never left. So I wonder sometimes if Kensington kids become Kensington
adults. I wonder if it’s actually opening doors or closing them.”

Seth Scriver – a man known better in some circles simply as Seth –
graduated from Kensington kid to Kensington adult when he returned
from a stint at art school in Halifax a couple of years ago. Today,
the 27-year-old lives across the street from his childhood home.

The decision to settle here doesn’t seem to have closed doors for
Scriver. He is a celebrated artist and illustrator, and a sock-puppet
maker. In his drawings and paintings, hairy critters, bulbous monsters
and googly-eyed amoeba frolic in sparse landscapes. This is what you
might draw after spending your life in the midst of the characters who
roam the streets of Kensington. A suited white man is more likely to
turn heads here than squeegee kids with foot-high Mohawks, dreadlocked,
and the caped guy who looks like Gandalf The Grey.

“I was definitely influenced by the people walking around in the
market and the people who came into my parents’ store,” says Seth,
who is friendly and soft-spoken.

Like other kids here, Seth spent his summers in the eighties helping
out in his parents’ store, in his case, the vintage shop Courage My
Love. It wasn’t child labour, just part of his daily chores.

He roamed free in the market with his older sister. They busked at the
corner of Baldwin St. and Kensington Ave., and spent their earnings
on plantain cakes from a Jamaican shop. They played baseball in the
alleyways, mostly with Chinese kids. Seth didn’t actually realize
that he wasn’t Chinese until he was older.

He remembers seeing more animals in the area back then: chickens,
rabbits and other live things for sale.

Plus, there were musicians, painters and craftsmen from around the
world. There was also graffiti.

“I grew up with graffiti all around me and I just thought it was a part
of everyday life, so one day, I just started adding my own,” says Seth.

The graffiti led to drawing and painting, and, eventually, a blossoming
career.

“If I’d lived anywhere else, I don’t think I would have been the same
artist,” he smiles.

For a young Oswald Pavao, the world was split in two. There was
Kensington Market, and everything outside Kensington Market.

Pavao takes a break from his office – the espresso kiosk at the
corner of Augusta and Baldwin – to reflect on a childhood that began
in Portugal, and unfolded in the heart of the market in the late ’60s.

He was 2 when his family left Portugal. They gravitated to Kensington
Market, where they established Casa Acoreana, which has become a
staple of the market, famous for its coffee, bulk candy and spices.
While his parents tended the shop, Pavao explored.

“I tried all the food,” he laughs. “My favourite were the potato
latkes. I couldn’t get enough of those. And the debrezini sausages,
I’d never have that back home.”

The story of his arrival to Kensington from a foreign land is a common
one. After the original Jewish community that established the market in
the early 1900s began to gravitate north in the ’50s, the area became
a kind of ethnic revolving door, accommodating immigrants – Italians,
Ukrainians, Portuguese, Vietnamese and people from Caribbean nations
– as they arrived in waves from their homelands. Today, the market’s
diversity reflects the various cultures that have made their way here
since the mid-century.

But none of that mattered to a young Pavao, who saw the market as a
playground. His mother knew that at any given time, he’d be playing
floor hockey at St. Christopher House, or a game called “Hot Beans”
in the park. (The game required a player to chase his opponents,
attempting to whip them in the pants with a previously hidden belt
before they reached a safety zone). At Christmas, he and his buddies
went door to door collecting canned goods for the food bank. He
did these things with children from a range of ethnic backgrounds –
Chinese, Jewish, black – never knowing that racism existed.

“Everybody treated everybody with respect,” says Pavao. “To see that at
a young age makes you colour-blind. You could try to tell a kid that
grows up there that there’s a difference, and he won’t see it because
he’s colour-blind. This is peaceful. This is like heaven on earth.”

Pavao realized at some point that the diversity and openness he
experienced in his day-to-day life didn’t always extend beyond the
borders of the market.

“We didn’t have an image that we had to live up to,” he says. “You
didn’t have to be a certain way or act a certain way. We could just
say, hey this is who I am. You don’t like the way I dress, that’s
fine, that’s your problem. “It’s just a different atmosphere out in
the real world. Out there, sometimes you go to say hi to someone in
the morning and they look like they’re going to punch your eyes out.
Or I’d hear the N-word, and I’d think, give it a rest. Those are
things that I don’t see here.”

Scott Schieman, a professor of sociology at University of Toronto,
would agree.

“Kids who grow up here would be more tolerant because of the exposure
to diversity,” says Schieman, “and because they’re used to sharing
space with all different types of people.”

Though the market has Jewish roots, it’s taken the form of a kind of
culinary United Nations in recent years. Cultures ranging from Lebanese
to Ethiopian to Mexican to Vietnamese to Armenian are represented here.

Schieman lives near the market, but not in it. He studies
neighbourhoods and their effect on people’s well-being. He says the
market is a vibrant, stimulating place to grow up. Schieman says
the market is also unique in its physical structure and economics.
Whereas other busy parts of town, like the Beaches or Annex, have
busy thoroughfares (Queen St. E., Bloor St.) as their focal points,
Kensington Market is a network of narrow streets, tucked away from
the thoroughfare. All of which gives the impression of a village.

It’s the energy in the streets that makes the market special, says
Schieman. People are less private here. They spill out of their tiny
homes, let life unfold on the streets.

“Sociologists have for a long time been interested in the way a
city’s composition and structure influence the quality of the social
relationships. And it always comes back to, when people are out on
streets, they’re connecting with other people …”

Schieman believes the market’s cultural climate has allowed independent
businesses to flourish, which has led to tight bonds and a heightened
sense of community.

“Rather than going into a Wal-Mart where people don’t know you,
you’re making ties with neighbours and friends, establishing bonds,”
says Schieman.

Despite the blissfulness of Maizy’s childhood and that of her friends,
this neighbourhood is hardly problem-free. Kensington Market is a
gritty place. Fatima Alves, who has worked with kids in the market
over the past 30 years, has seen it all.

It’s naptime in the day care room at St. Stephens Community Centre,
so Alves speaks softly. She doesn’t want to rouse the resting children.

Leafing through a book of old photographs, she leans over to show
me the black-and-white picture of a small fruit shack. “This was my
uncle’s store,” she tells me. “I used to love coming to the market
to visit him. I always felt special here.”

As the child-care director for the centre, Alves has worked with
generations of children, and says the market offers both challenges
and rewards. “These children have a neighbourhood focus … and they
have street smarts.”

Street smarts are important for children here.

It isn’t a place to roam free. Alves stopped taking the kids to tiny
Sonya Park – which is more of a narrow indentation between homes than
a green space – on Oxford St two years ago because there were too many
drunks sprawled out on the playground equipment. You couldn’t play
there without bumping into a homeless person. Now they visit Bellevue
Park, which is larger, but still a gathering spot for homeless people,
squeegee kids and drunks.

“We find it’s hard to get the park sometimes,” says Alves. “It belongs
to everyone, not just us, so a lot of things go on that we’re not
crazy about. There have been some times that we’ve had to leave
earlier than we wanted to.”

These challenges aren’t restricted to the park. One time, they
spotted a man who appeared to be mentally ill outside the day care,
masturbating on a bench. They put a flowerpot in the window to obscure
the view.

“It’s such a diverse neighbourhood that occasionally you get weird
things happening,” says Alves. “But you can’t get too uptight
about it.”

“This is the focal point of the market,” says Toronto Police Sgt.
Daryle Gerry, hopping off his patrol bicycle in Bellevue Park. “You
get all different groups in here. You get children playing, homeless
people hanging out in the corner drinking wine. You get artists,
musicians, people smoking pot …”

Just as he says this, a shirtless, bearded man across the park starts
hollering obscenities at no one in particular. Gerry excuses himself
to tend to the man.

“You get some guys like that,” says Gerry, upon returning from an
attempt to pacify the man. “He obviously has mental problems.”

Gerry has been patrolling the area for five years. He’s says there’s
been a drop in the presence of crack cocaine in the area since they
shut down a crack house a few months ago. Save for petty theft,
there’s little crime in the area. He says it’s a safe place to live,
as long as you don’t mind the odd encounter with characters like the
yeller – not to mention the scent of marijuana.

“Sometimes you have to put up with foul language and criminal activity
in the park, but I’d say it’s a safe place. It has its moments,
just like any other place.”

At 4, Sako has already seen so much – the beauty of cultural diversity
and art, and the struggles of homelessness and mental illness. It’s
all on display in the market, and all a mother can do is try her best
to explain what these things are as they arise.

“I don’t think I could have been as good a mother in another
environment,” says Mai Phan, Sako’s mother, sitting on her front stoop,
which the family shares with a vintage clothes store. “The market
provides an opportunity to teach Sako about life and different kinds
of people … and how to avoid certain things without being scared
of them.

“You can talk to a child about drugs or crazy people or homelessness,
but if you talk about it abstractly, if it’s something they don’t see,
they’re going to be afraid of it.

“If they see it with their own eyes, they’re less fearful – it’s less
intimidating. You can talk about those things honestly.”

Maizy’s mother, Michele, feels the market works both ways. “She gets
tons and tons of love from lots of people, but I sometimes worry that
she’s seeing too much. I’ve seen people doing crack behind the house.
It bothers me, but at the same time, that’s just life. There’s a
balance. I know that people around me care for Maizy and look out
for her, and not every neighbourhood is like that.”

Mai knows when Sako is older, he will face a world outside the market
that’s tenser, more homogenized and less colourful.

“If this is his first reference point, then the suburban lifestyle
will be an eye-opener for him,” says Mai, who grew up in Etobicoke.
“For those of us who didn’t grow up here, this is novel. But for them,
this is normal.

“I’m confident this is the best place we could could have found for
Sako to get him started. Anywhere we go from now, he has that strong
foundation, he could adapt to anywhere. He won’t be afraid of people
or new situations, he likes trying knew things … It has a lot to
do with the fact that we have lived here.”

On an early evening stroll to the ice cream shop, Sako delivers his
final round of hellos to the merchants of his neighbourhood. They’re
closing shop, sweeping the sidewalks, and drawing the shutters.

“Buenos dias, Tony,” says Sako to the fruit vendor.

“No, Sako,” says Tony. “It’s buenas noches. That means good evening.”

For the prince of this village, it’s a good evening indeed.

Kensington “You can talk to a child about drugs or crazy people
or homelessness. If they see it with their own eyes, they’re less
fearful.”

– Sako’s mother, Mai Phan

Kensington “I’m confident this is the best place we could have found
for Sako to get him started.”

Mai Phan, Sako’s mom