Mosaic or Palimpsest: Reading Kensington and the Missing First Chinatown

Kensington Market and Chinatown are usually read as the proof of Toronto's mosaic. Walked closely they are a palimpsest of five immigrant waves, and the original Chinatown is missing because the city demolished it for the new City Hall. The candy-coloured houses on Kensington Avenue are easy to misread. The pink one with the vintage clothing rack on the sidewalk and the lime-green one with the cheese shop on the ground floor are both 1880s Anglo-Protestant bay-and-gable houses, built for working families when this part of west Toronto was the edge of the city. The Jewish wave that arrived after about 1900 converted the ground floors into shops because they were excluded from the established retail streets east of Spadina. The Portuguese wave that began arriving from the Azores in 1953 inherited the houses and painted them. The Caribbean, Vietnamese, and contemporary waves that followed kept the bones and changed the signs. If you read the street as bohemia, you miss the architecture. If you read it as architecture, you miss the immigration record carved into the storefront-by-storefront tenancy. The honest read holds both.

The most useful word for this corridor is not mosaic. It is palimpsest. A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been written over, where the previous text is still visible underneath. The mosaic metaphor implies tiles laid side by side, each ethnic group occupying its own visible square. Kensington and Spadina do not work that way. They are layered vertically through time on the same block. The kosher butcher sign that is still painted on the brick above the Vietnamese pho place is the previous text showing through the current one. The whole corridor reads that way once you know what to look for.

Where the metaphor came from

The mosaic metaphor was not coined by anyone observing Kensington. It was coined by John Murray Gibbon in 1938 in a book called Canadian Mosaic: The Making of a Northern Nation (McClelland and Stewart, 1938). Gibbon was a Canadian Pacific Railway publicist and a serious amateur folklorist who wanted to argue against the American melting-pot model. His thesis was that Canada should celebrate the persistence of immigrant cultures rather than dissolve them. The phrase caught. Pierre Trudeau's government adopted it as official multiculturalism policy in 1971, and the Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1988 codified it.

The metaphor is a policy choice. It was an argument made by Canadian elites against a different model of immigration, and it has carried a particular weight in Toronto because Toronto is the city where the largest number of immigrant waves have settled. The complication is that the metaphor names a value (cultures preserved side by side) without addressing what actually happens on the ground (cultures often layered on top of each other on the same block, and sometimes erased entirely). Kensington and Chinatown are where the metaphor meets the record.

The Ward and its overflow

The first immigrant neighbourhood in Toronto was a section of the city called The Ward, formally Saint John's Ward, bounded by Queen Street on the south, College on the north, Yonge on the east, and University Avenue on the west. From the 1840s through the 1950s, The Ward absorbed every wave of immigrants who arrived in the city. Irish Famine refugees in the late 1840s. Eastern European Jews fleeing the pogroms in the Russian Empire after 1881. Italians from southern Italy starting in the 1890s. The first Chinese arrivals from the 1870s.

By the 1910s, the Ward was overcrowded and the Jewish families who had arrived in the previous two decades began moving west, to the cheaper Victorian houses around Kensington Avenue. The book that anchors this story academically is Stephen Speisman's The Jews of Toronto: A History to 1937 (McClelland and Stewart, 1979). By the 1931 census, roughly eighty percent of Toronto's Jewish population lived in or around Kensington. More than thirty synagogues operated in walking distance. The Kiever Synagogue at 25 Bellevue Avenue, designed by Benjamin Swartz in a Byzantine revival style, opened in 1927 and is the only synagogue in the market still in continuous use. The Anshei Minsk on St. Andrew Street, built 1930, burned in 2002 and was rebuilt by community subscription. The synagogues are the part of the Jewish layer that stayed.

The market itself grew from front-yard stalls. Jewish merchants who could not get retail leases on Yonge Street or Queen Street put pushcarts and tables in front of their houses on Kensington Avenue. The city eventually formalized the trade through a 1924 bylaw that recognized the street market. The market that exists today is the descendant of that 1924 formalization, and the buildings around it are the descendant of the Anglo-Protestant houses the Jewish wave converted in the 1910s.

The waves that followed

After 1945 the Jewish population began moving north and west, to Bathurst Street, then to North York and the suburbs, in the postwar pattern of upward mobility that played out in every North American immigrant neighbourhood with a Jewish first generation. The houses did not empty. They were inherited by the next wave.

The Portuguese arrived starting in 1953. The first arrivals came on the steamship Saturnia from the Azores as sponsored agricultural workers, and the chain migration that followed concentrated west of Spadina. The Multicultural History Society of Ontario's oral history collection is the best source for this layer. The Caribbean wave arrived after the 1962 and 1967 federal immigration reforms removed the national-origin quotas that had previously limited immigration from non-European countries. The Vietnamese wave arrived after the 1975 fall of Saigon, with the 1979 to 1980 "boat people" resettlement bringing roughly 60,000 Vietnamese refugees to Canada. The contemporary wave, beginning in the 1990s, is harder to characterize ethnically: it includes students, artists, food entrepreneurs, and second-generation Torontonians of various backgrounds choosing the market for its visible texture rather than for cheap rent.

What is on the street is the layering itself, visible to anyone who walks slowly. The Portuguese azulejo tile next to the Caribbean fruit stall next to the Vietnamese pho place next to the third-wave coffee shop is a real spatial pattern, not a brochure invention. The eye can read four waves on one block on Augusta Avenue. The Al Waxman statue in Bellevue Square Park, by Ruth Abernethy and unveiled in 2001, names the layering: Waxman (1935 to 2001) grew up Jewish on Cecil Street in the 1940s and played the fictional Anglo butcher Larry King on the CBC sitcom King of Kensington (1975 to 1980), which became the city's idea of what Kensington was at exactly the moment the neighbourhood was layering further.

The first Chinatown

The hardest claim the corridor makes is that the Chinatown the visitor walks through on Spadina is not the original. Toronto's first Chinatown clustered along Elizabeth Street and Dundas, in the southern part of The Ward, just east of where City Hall now stands. The neighbourhood developed in the 1880s and grew through the early twentieth century within the constraints of the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, which effectively halted Chinese immigration to Canada until its repeal in 1947. The bachelor society that resulted from the Exclusion Act was visible in the demographic record: by 1931 the Toronto Chinese population was approximately ninety percent male, almost all living within walking distance of Elizabeth Street.

Between 1955 and 1965, in two phases of expropriation, the City of Toronto demolished the entire first Chinatown to build Nathan Phillips Square and Viljo Revell's New City Hall, which opened on 13 September 1965. The first phase, from 1955 to 1958, cleared the land for the square. The second phase, beginning in 1965, was prepared to take the surviving fragment on Dundas West that the original demolition had spared.

This is where Jean Lumb enters the story. Lumb (1919 to 2002) was born in Nanaimo, British Columbia, moved to Toronto in 1935, and opened the Kwong Chow Chop Suey House at 126 Elizabeth Street in 1959. She watched the bulldozers come down her block through the 1960s. When the second phase of expropriation began, Lumb organized the Save Chinatown Committee, led a delegation to Toronto City Hall in 1969, and persuaded city council to spare the Dundas West block. In 1976 she became the first Chinese-Canadian woman appointed to the Order of Canada. The City of Toronto named a lane off Spadina for her in 2017.

Arlene Chan's The Chinese in Toronto from 1878: From Outside to Inside the Circle (Dundurn, 2011) is the canonical secondary source. Valerie Mah's An In-Depth Look at Toronto's Early Chinatown (1977) is the contemporary academic account. Both are explicit that the Chinatown on Spadina is the displaced successor to the demolished original, expanded after 1967 with new immigration from Hong Kong. The mosaic metaphor has trouble with this story. A mosaic does not lose a tile. A palimpsest can lose a layer and still read.

What the corridor adds up to

Walk the eight stops of the Kensington and Chinatown tour and the thesis tightens. College and Spadina is the gate where the Jewish wave crossed west from The Ward. The candy-coloured houses on Kensington Avenue are the converted 1880s commercial stock. Augusta Avenue is where four waves are visible in one frame. The Kiever Synagogue is the Jewish wave that stayed. Bellevue Square Park, with the Al Waxman statue, is the wave that became the city's idea of the neighbourhood. Dundas and Spadina is the surviving Chinatown. The Jean Lumb Lane plaque is the civic naming of the woman who saved the block. Grange Park, south of the Art Gallery of Ontario, is the closer: stand at the western edge of what was The Ward and the first Chinatown, look east toward Nathan Phillips Square, and the absence is the point.

The corridor argues for the palimpsest reading without arguing against the mosaic itself. It argues against a particular use of the mosaic metaphor, the use that treats Toronto's immigration history as a finished celebration rather than a continuing record. The buildings record more than the brochure does. The buildings hold the previous waves underneath the current one, and the demolition is what is missing from the mosaic but present in the city. Walk slowly and the metaphor adjusts itself.