Kensington Market & Chinatown: The Mosaic, Read Closely
Toronto sells itself as a mosaic. Walk Kensington and Spadina and the mosaic is more honestly a palimpsest, and the first Chinatown is missing.
Start
College & Spadina: The Gate
College & Spadina: The Gate
The northern entrance to the corridor and the gate the Jewish wave crossed through from the Ward in the 1900s and 1910s.
Kensington Avenue: The Front-Yard Market
The entrance to Kensington Avenue, where 1880s bay-and-gable houses became a market because the Jewish wave was excluded from established retail streets.
Augusta Avenue: Four Waves in One Frame
The most legible layering point in the market. Portuguese, Caribbean, Vietnamese, and contemporary signage on a single block.
Kiever Synagogue: The Wave That Stayed
Built 1927, designed by Benjamin Swartz, Byzantine revival. Designated under the Ontario Heritage Act in 1979 and the only market synagogue in continuous use.
Bellevue Square: King of Kensington
The Al Waxman statue by Ruth Abernethy, unveiled 2001, named for the CBC sitcom that ran 1975 to 1980.
Dundas & Spadina: The Surviving Chinatown
The southeast corner of Dundas West and Spadina. Late-19th-century commercial buildings retrofitted for Chinese signage from 1971 onward.
Jean Lumb Lane: The Climax
The lane named in 2019 for Jean Lumb (1919 to 2002), restaurateur, Order of Canada 1976, who led the 1969 Save Chinatown delegation that spared this block.
Grange Park: The Closer
South of the AGO, looking east toward University Avenue. The western edge of The Ward and the first Chinatown, both now absent.
Best Time to Visit
Weekday mid-morning. Tuesday through Thursday, ten to noon. Kensington Avenue and Augusta are walkable on weekends but the sidewalks fill from about noon on Saturday and the audio gets lost in the music. The Kiever Synagogue exterior is always visible; interior access is by appointment with the congregation only. Heritage plaques are readable in all seasons.
Pro Tips
- •Walk Tuesday through Thursday, late morning. Weekend crowds on Kensington Avenue make the audio hard to hear past noon on Saturday
- •The Trachter's Milk Store building at 71 Kensington Avenue is now a different business. The address is what the photograph documents, not the current storefront
- •The Kiever Synagogue interior is by appointment with the congregation only. The exterior heritage plaque on the east wall is the audio anchor
- •Jean Lumb Lane is a working alley east of Huron Street, south of Dundas Street West, one block west of Spadina. The plaque is on a building wall
- •If you want to read the demolition chronology against the building it produced, walk an extra ten minutes east on Queen Street after Grange Park to see Nathan Phillips Square and New City Hall in person
- •Shirley Faessler's A Basket of Apples and Other Stories, Oberon Press 1988, is the published memoir literature for Jewish Kensington in the 1920s and 1930s, by a writer who grew up here
Safety & Precautions
- Spadina Avenue is a busy streetcar corridor. Stand back from the tracks at the College and Spadina stop and at Dundas and Spadina
- Kensington Avenue sidewalks are narrow and packed on weekends. Saturdays after noon are not the best time for an audio walk
- The Kiever Synagogue is an active house of worship. Photograph the exterior from across the street and do not approach the door on Friday evenings or Saturday mornings
- Bellevue Square Park is a public park and is open at all hours, but the Waxman statue is best read in daylight when the bronze plaque is legible
Gallery
Related Reading
Go deeper on what you'll see, hear, and walk through.
