THE RISE AND SPRAWL

After 200 years of permanent settlement, North Point Douglas is a complicated neighborhood in the middle of a complicated city. There is a sense of mystery to the place. Much of the city’s population has only a vague sense of where Point Douglas is located. For the rest, they are divided between two camps: the first thinks of it as nothing but urban dystopia, where thousands of junkies and prostitutes parade the streets at all hours, taking care to step over the murder victims that litter the sidewalks. The second group—lets call them very broadly the “thinking classes”—have some inkling of what the neighborhood is: “very historical,” “getting better,” “where Jordan van Sewell lives.”

But even for people who have lived here for years, and have spent an embarrassing amount of time thinking, researching and writing on the neighborhood’s many layers, it is still a hard place to fully understand and pin-point exactly why we like it. However, Talia Syrie came about as close as one can in a short piece in the Free Press today.  

Like Syrie, I was encouraged to purchase a house in North Point Douglas by the late Walter Lewyck. Something of a grandfather in the city’s arts scene, it was said at his funeral that Walter did more to revitalize the Exchange District through his various quirky enterprises in the ’80s than all of the Core Area Initiative funding combined. By the time I met him in 2003, he had moved on to Chinatown, where he would regularly hold court with an assortment of local hipsters, artists, and neighborhood weirdos in his cluttered little antique store on Pacific Avenue, Golden City.

But it was up in North Point Douglas, in a small 1920s bungalow near what’s now Michaelle Jean Park, where Walter lived. When I told him one day I was thinking about moving to the neighborhood, he lent me an old bike he had at the store—a 1940s-era CCM—to ride around North Point Douglas. The best way to see a neighborhood, Walter told me, is from the seat of a bicycle. 

Kids on Granville Street, circa 1948

There are problems in Point Douglas, and any resident who loves it here can just as easily go on at length about the neighborhood’s problems as they can its assets. (Violent crime and social dysfunction, private and non-profit slum landlords, a real lack of commercial services, and the public elementary school, are problems that readily come to mind.) But there are many people that live here—whether long-time residents, or those among the slow but steady stream of members of the young hippie/ster set—who, if asked what they like about the neighborhood, would say much of what Syrie wrote.

The “little bubble” on her block, which contains a complex network of organic social orders that exist on Syrie’s street, were discussed at length in the early chapters of Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities. The same kind of system exists in the “little bubble” I live in, a couple of streets over from Syrie. Friends on other streets say the same thing about theirs.

My street functions as a space that is publicly used and coöperatively “owned” by the residents, but with a complex set of private boundaries. With most houses built close to the sidewalk, the verandah or front steps acts as a gateway into the public sphere, where the dog-walkers, bike-riders, child-minders and all the rest are walking somewhere, to work, to the park, to Metro Meats, or to the nearest beer vendor. Some people will place lawn chairs right on the sidewalk or boulevard and just hang out there all evening. 

Hallet Street, 2011

Varying shades of relationships are formed with neighbors and friends here. Some people you may trust and find endearing in the public sphere of the front street, but would never wish to invite into your house for a drink—or even into your backyard. These would likely find it awkward if you did. Such is the nature of city neighborhoods: they are able to be strong not because everyone is the same, but because the physical nature of the street creates public spaces that allow interaction and trust to develop among people who are different, and who would otherwise have nothing in common.  

This piece in the Free Press was not the last word on North Point Douglas, but it was a refreshing take from one of its keen residents on what the neighborhood is, and can be, at its best. For now, I look forward to a summer on the front steps and sidewalk of this serene and charming little island of village urbanism.