Ossington: Last Part

I really enjoyed the situation we had in that old hardware store on Ossington Ave, back in the 80s. I hadn't really thought about how long I would be there, or what I would do if I had to move. Things were changing around us and changing fast.

The flavour and texture of the neighbourhood changed radically over a short few months. Vietnamese coffee/karaoke places were opening up all up and down the street. I think at one point, there were nine of them between Queen and Dundas. I thought, great, I could find some excellent Vietnamese food there, but these weren't like Pho places I had often eaten at. They seemed to be more like culturally exclusive clubs. I went in one and sat down, and was ignored for about 10 minutes in an almost empty place. Finally, somebody brought me a coffee menu. I felt like I wasn't welcome there, and that I was being carefully watched, but I thought it would be really rude to just get up and leave, so I asked for a coffee, quickly drank it, left some money and walked back home.

One of these places opened up next door on the north side. They played what I guess you would call a mix tape all day and all evening. The same tape. Every day the same tape. It was mostly a mix of American music from the 70s. There was a Canadian exception. Once each hour I could hear Seasons in the Sun. I really disliked that song, and hearing it every hour through the walls didn't help.

There was a guy who started parking in front of our place who had what I'm going to characterize as a "sort of" muscle car. This was a remarkable sight. It had the jacked up back end and the mag wheels and racing stripes. But this was no Dodge Dart. It was a Monte Carlo. I knew that because MONTE CARLO was painted across the trunk in huge letters.

Then one day our landlord came to see us. He had been offered a lot of cash for the building. He said he had a place back in the Azores and with all that money, he could take his family back there and live well. The buyer wanted the place empty. We had a couple months to find new places. This turned out to be a challenge, since we were in the midst of a housing boom, when rental places were expensive and hard to get. After we left, the old studio was quickly converted into another of those coffee and karaoke joints.

I camped out in the basement of a couple of generous and dear friends for a while, until I found a little apartment at Palmerston and Harbord. Soon after, I found a very good shared studio situation down in the old casket factory at Niagara and Tecumseth. Eventually, I would live in that building for several years, but that's a story for another time.

Ossington Part V

I enjoyed the vibrant music scene we had up here in Toronto in the 80s. I used to walk from my place on Ossington, down to Queen St. and east. On Saturdays, the late great Handsome Ned played a solo afternoon performance (if he decided there were enough drinkers to constitute an audience) and often with his band in the evenings. I thought Handsome Ned had something great going on. He was playing country music for Queen St. hipsters, Lefty Frizzel tunes, Merle Haggard tunes - I loved the way he played Silver Wings, rock-a-billy tunes, and he played those songs like he had been playing them forever. "The Queen St. Hills are alive with the sound of music." And he was right.

I'd walk past Czehoski on Queen at Euclid. When I was a kid, we all headed down there to buy our kielbassa because the Czehoski brothers, they had THE RECIPE. They made the stuff the right way, the way our elders remembered it from their village. Before Christmas and before Easter, there would be line-ups on Queen St. and our parents would buy coils of their fantastic sausage. Both brothers are long gone now. The store sat empty for years, and then was taken over by some folks who run a swanky restaurant there. They kept the old sign and took on the name. I can't eat there, though. To me, Czehoski is about the sausage. My parents knew the brothers. My mom, after all, grew up on Bellwoods Ave, and later, on Galley Ave. When I was a kid, we still had ties to that community, but that's long gone now. And there is no more Czehoski kielbassa. You can get some fine sausage in this town, but it doesn't come complete with the same dreams and memories.

I liked to walk over to the Pine Tree (long long gone now) at Palmerston Ave. to hear Joanne Mackell and Shelley Cooper-Smith or Joanne Mackell and the Yahoos. I haven't heard her play in many years now, but I see from her site that she has a CD out. I liked her straight-up approach, her fantastic voice and her excellent homegrown songs.

And then there was Zydeco. Zydeco bands were coming to Toronto. We danced to Queen Ida and her Bon Temps band two or three times, and then Terence Simien came up with his band, then the Mallet Playboys. And best of all, Fernest Arsenault and the Thunders played the Horseshoe Tavern. They had a record, vinyl, and somehow or another I had it. I was really excited to meet the band and have them sign the record. In my eyes these guys were stars. They had come all the way up from Louisiana and they played rockin accordion music you couldn't sit still for. We had a beer with a couple of the guys in the band between sets. Onstage, Mr. Arsenault's frattoir player stood centre stage, and Fernest himself stood off to the side, playing button accordion and singing. I loved that band.

The music died on January 10, 1987. Handsome Ned checked out, apparently overdosing on heroin. I don't remember who called first. I was at home, on Ossington, and news flew across the neighbourhood. I had last seen Ned perform two weeks earlier. Maybe it was a Boxing Day show, I'm not sure. Everyone in the neighbourhood knew Ned or knew about him or had been at his shows or listened to his radio show on CKLN, The Honky-tonk Hardwood Floor Show. Although I didn't know him personally, whenever I saw him walking down Queen St. with his 10-gallon cowboy had on his head, he'd nod and say hi.
It was a very sad day when he died.

Ossington Part IV

When I agreed to rent the old hardware store, I had a vague idea that living in a store might be contravening some zoning bylaws. I wasn't worried about it though, because it was an area of town that needed renters, any renters. I couldn't imagine a complaint, and I couldn't imagine anyone from the City actually paying attention.

Everything was fine until the weasel who ran the marginal little business on the north side decided he would complain to the City that we were living there. I never did find out what exactly his beef was, but I believed it had something to do with the dog.

One day a building inspector showed up. You boys living here? Yep. OK, thanks very much. Soon enough, our landlord was over, telling us the City didn't want us living there. It looked grim. We were now dipping our toes into the unfriendly waters of municipal beurocracy, and I didn't like it at all. There was an opportunity to apply for a varience, but somehow or another, we didn't get an opportunity to make our argument, and the City was leaning on the landlord. I called our local Councillor, who was sympathetic. We met with him and a planner, and looked at our options. Our landlord could take the problem to the Ontario Municipal Board. There was a fee, though, and there were no guarantees. If we could convince our landlord to appeal, it turned out the planner had a plan.

Our landlord was a fine man. He wanted to rent to us because we always paid our rent on time, and we caused no trouble and we looked after the place. He agreed to foot the bill for the appeal fee. The planner sent us around the neighbourhood with a camera, to take photos of every storefront in the area that was not being used for a business. There were plenty of them. The area was not exactly thriving. We mounted the photos on foam-core and made a little display, and off we went to the OMB. Our landlord was there, we were there, the OMB dudes were there. The only person missing was the nasty weasel of a neighbour who caused our grief in the first place. He missed the hearing. Too bad, so sad.

We explained that we were artists and that we wished to continue living and working in the space as we had been doing for a few years. We showed all the other storefronts in the area which people had converted to illegal apartments. The folks at the OMB wasted no time at all in granting our landlord a varience so he could continue to rent to us.

We thought the game was over, until a building inspector showed up a week later. Now that we had our varience to live in the place, it had to meet or exceed code as a dwelling. Now, I did most of the so-called renovations to the place, and I didn't even know what code I was meeting or exceeding. Fortunately, the inspector was not out to get us. He asked for some modest changes to be made to meet the requirements. He mentioned in a friendly way a few other things we really ought to attend to which were not on his report. We took care of the work right away. The inspector came back for a quick look, and we found ourselves enjoying one of the few legal live-work artist studios in Toronto at that time.

Ossington Part III

I graduated from university in 1983. By 1985, I had the studio on Ossington and I was painting what I suppose you might call post-industrial apocalyptic landscapes. I don't know where most of these paintings are today. The last one of these I kept recently went to a good home, where I hope to visit it from time to time.

One day I was working on a toxic green painting I called the New Murphy Power Plant. It had smoke-stacks and I was working on this acidic smoky junk coming out of one of them. I remember it being a really intense experience. As I was painting it, I could smell that smoke. I thought I was having a synesthetic experience of the first order - I was smelling form. The experience became more and more intense until I snapped out of my foolish reverie to realize there was a fire in the kitchen. The video artist who was renting in the back studio at the time, had put some toast in the toaster, then returned to her studio to yak on the phone. It wasn't a very good toaster. It didn't simply stop toasting when the toast was ready. It kept on going. By the time I got to the kitchen, little flames were shooting out of the toaster. Synesthesia indeed.

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I worked until midnight, and was usually home by 12:30. Many nights, I'd have a beer, turn on some tunes and start work on my paintings until about 3:00. I got into the habit of going to bed late and waking up late. Also, it was as close to the wild years as I was going to get, meaning that late on a Friday night, I was apt to enjoy a brew or three with the friends I hadn't seen all week.

On Saturday mornings, I had regular visits from some nice clean-cut young men in white shirts, with ties and nice little brief cases. They were concerned for my spiritual well-being, and felt they had some answers I might benefit from. I tried answering the door, but I was grumpy.

"Do you believe in God?"
"I'm a practicing neo-Druid."
"We can help you with that."

For several Saturdays, I just ignored their 9:00 a.m. knocks. Sometimes I'm sure I slept right through. Other times, the loud knocking would startle me from sleep for a second. One morning I heard them talking. "His bed is just behind the bookshelf. I know he's there. If we knock harder for sure he'll hear us... For a brief second I considered staggering out of bed and launching into a tirade. Instead, I went back to sleep. After a dedicated onslaught to save my soul lasting two or three months, they stopped coming. I was among the lost.

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Sometimes my friend Grant would come by at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, with his Martin guitar. Grant wasn't much for possessions but he had a lovely guitar and he played and sang the most beautiful songs I believed he made up on the spot. He would start telling me a story, and it would get more complicated and he would weave a little guitar picking into the story, and at a certain point the story became a song, and he sang a chorus and there were verses and guitar breaks and then it was a story again. I know if I asked him to tell that story again at another time, it would come out differently, the music would be different, it would be new, always told in the moment. I loved it when Grant would tell those stories and play his guitar. I haven't seen him in many years now. Hey, old friend, if you're out there somewhere and you read this, check in. It would be great to say hello.

Ossington Part II

My friend Rob, who rented the back studio for some time, had a dog named Giotto. Giotto was Rob's dog, but I had a stake in his care too. We worked different hours and we both cared for the dog when we were available. I liked Giotto very much, and when we finally had to give up the Ossington studios, I really missed him.

Back then, in the mid-80s, quite a lot of people took their dogs out to Trinity-Bellwoods Park to run. It was not a "leash-free zone", if they even had those in the city at the time. Mostly, if you cleaned up after your dog and the dog stayed out of trouble, nobody complained. We took Giotto there, and let him off the leash. The first thing he would do would be to look for squirrels. Every squirrel belonged in a tree and Giotto made sure they understood. Next, he would start running the perimeter of the park. In the field near the east side, there were usually a lot of birds on the ground doing bird stuff, but Giotto held a heartfelt belief that birds belonged in the air. He came around the corner at full tilt and chased those birds until they were all flying, then he would continue on toward "the pit". Back in those days, the pit was the place where they had the wading pool. Giotto love to swim and headed right for it. We would call, and he would ignore us. Down into the pit he would go. Children screamed. Giotto didn't care about the kids though. He just loved to run through the water. Then, back up the hill to check for squirrels, and around the south end and back toward the field where the birds had just landed.

Occasionally, we would walk him down to Coronation Park, beside Ontario Place. When we would let him off the leash he would bound toward the water and leap off the cement wall into the drink, with no thought that it might be difficult to get back out again. That dog loved the water.

At one point we had a problem with rats. It was a big and ugly problem. I think they had rat highways and they could travel from place to place up and down the street. They were big rats, and somehow or another, they worked a deal with Giotto. Remember, this was a dog that would identify a squirrel from a football field away and come very close to catching it as he chased it up a tree. One evening, I heard the tell-tale sound of dog kibble being crunched. I looked up and saw Giotto resting in the doorway between my studio and the kitchen. If he wasn't crunching kibble, who was? I looked up over Giotto and saw the grand-daddy of all rats feasting on dog kibble. Giotto didn't even look.

As it turned out, it was very difficult to get rid of the rats. We would win the battle, but we always had to be on our guard, watching for insurgencies and border skirmishes. They're smart and they're persistent.

More soon...

City Beat: Ossington back in the day....

Did you read the article in the Saturday Globe about the revitalization of Ossington Ave here in Toronto?

I used to live on Ossington between Queen and Dundas back in the mid-80s. I had finished University, got myself a part time job, and was trying to get out of my parents' house in Etobicoke. I wanted to live in the city, so I started looking for studios I could live in.

I found this place on Ossington. It used to be a hardware store. The landlord didn't care what I did with it. He just wanted the rent in cash each month. I remember him coming over to collect rent, counting the money in front of me then giving me a big smile.

The place had peg-board walls, perfect for a painting studio. I divided it into two studios with a makeshift kitchen in the middle dividing them. The idea was that I would find someone for the back studio, and we would share the kitchen and the basement, which also had the bathroom. I had no money, but it's amazing what you can do on no money when you apply yourself to it. I divided the front into work and living space with two bookshelves, forming a wall and a half wall. My bed nested in behind the half-wall. It was pretty comfortable, and the studio was excellent. I covered the windows with paper stretched across frames. It let in light but offered privacy. Perfect.

At the time, Ossington Ave was dominated by Portuguese businesses, including a remarkable number of kitchen shops, places where custom kitchens were built. There were a few artists sprinkled up and down the street. Mendelson Joe had a store-front a couple blocks north. I knew his music - both the older Mainline material and his newer solo stuff. He often sat on his stoop playing the guitar, in cover-all cut-offs covered in paint. The artists were there for the same reason the kitchen places were there. Rent was cheap. It was a good place to live.

There was a little bakery just up the street from me. I was working evenings at the time - I think it was 7-midnight. I'd paint late after work and sleep until the crack of maybe 11:00 in the morning. Sometimes, I'd then put on coffee and go over to the bakery for a custard tart or some such thing. It seemed to me that they usually sold me day-old goods. I don't mean I was paying for day-old goods. I just mean that's what I ended up with. One day I noticed that when certain other people came into the place, they got food that looked decidedly better. It came from the back. I got the stale stuff; they got the fresh stuff. That's what I'm trying to say. I resented this, seeing as I lived just down the street and I was a regular customer. I didn't mind that they did it. I only minded that they did it to me. One day I had enough and accused the lady of selling me stale goods. I was so ticked off. I must have shouted at her. She protested, and started ranting back at me in Portuguese. The more angry I got, the less English she spoke. We never spoke of it again, but from that day forward, miraculously I got fresh goods.

There was a dog that lived down the street whose name was King. He was a husky and everyone knew him. I used to watch that dog wait at the bus stop on Ossington in front of our place, get on the bus, go up a couple stops and get off. He did it just about every day. I'm sure he was friends with the driver. Maybe he even got treats. The fellow who lived in the back studio had a dog, a big black lovable mutt. King sometimes called on him. King would come up to the back door and knock. The two of them would play in the back yard behind the place. One day they took off. I have no idea where they went but they were gone for hours. When they returned, they each had one of the biggest bones I had ever seen. I don't even want to know where they got them. I do know that back then, there was some home butchering going on. One day, we were out with the dog in the back lanes and passed a garage which was open but blocked by a big white cargo van. There was a steady stream of blood flowing into the lane from the garage.

For quite a while, next door there was some kind of storefront church which celebrated on Saturday mornings. The congregation came all dressed up. The men wore suits and the women wore hats, and they gathered to pray and sing. This was a serious church. I could here people work themselves up to a frenzy, praising the Lord, getting louder and louder. Sometimes there were musicians. There was always singing. There was pounding. There was praising. I really enjoyed the whole business.

more on Ossington soon.....