When Good Neighbours Make Bad Fences
Good Neighbours Make Bad Fences

About thirty years ago I bought the one hundred year old semi-detached brick house I still live in, a short stroll from the Lansdowne subway station on Bloor Street West. I didn’t know much about the neighbourhood in 1979, so I asked a policeman who happened to be walking by if he would buy a house for his family around here. He answered that there was far too much petty crime, drugs and prostitution mostly, for him to consider it. But after he went on to add that this was also true near any subway stop in Toronto, and that he basically didn’t think it was a good idea to live anywhere downtown, I bought the house.

A week after my then wife and I moved in, a bleeding man crashed through our front window at two AM, screaming for me to phone the police. Totally unable to come up with any better idea, I did, and they took him away, protecting him from whomever it was who was more terrifying than that alternative. The neighbours, mostly Portuguese, came out to console me while we waited for the police, and taught me about Wally, who ran the local Home Hardware, and who was an absolute treasure. Wally repaired the window the next morning, as he solved every hardware problem I had over the next twenty-five years, disappearing into his basement to emerge with the exact vital part that Home Depot claimed (probably accurately) was no longer made anywhere in the world.

But Wally was the exception. It was a rough neighbourhood, and there were always empty stores along Bloor for rent as the immigrant families who ran the small groceries or ethnic restaurants burned out on working for fourteen hours every day, or made enough money to move on to something better. But I told myself that cheap housing near a subway stop could only increase in value, and surely in a short while the word would get out that Lansdowne was the new cheap area for trends and artists, and once that had happened gentrification lay only a few newspaper articles ahead.

But somehow, it didn’t happen. After about ten years of stasis, crack cocaine and a sharp rise in local prostitution arrived; I still treasure a Toronto Star full page exposé headlined “Parkdale Residents Cower in Fear as Crack Rules the Streets”. My real delight was in the picture that accompanied the article, a frilly seven year old girl riding her bicycle through a laneway past a used syringe lying sharply in the foreground, and my garage blurrily in the background. But my neighbours were solid citizens, and when I had to I managed to communicate to the Chinese family to the north who spoke almost no English that we should share the cost of a locked gate across the two foot wide walkway between our houses. After that we no longer encountered vagrant crack smokers crouching behind our houses.

All the houses on the block are brick, almost all semi-detached, two or three stories tall. They share a common layout, three rooms on the first two stories, perhaps a finished attic or basement. They have postage stamp backyards, sixteen feet wide, bounded by a line of garages that open onto the common alley that we all shovel clear of snow in winter, because once one car gets stuck, no one can drive anywhere. When I moved in, I learned that the garages were the men’s domain, while the houses were women’s, and on hot summer nights groups of men stood around ignoring a car with the hood up, drinking homemade wine, and talking in Portuguese while a small radio blared music.

From our back porch, a four by six concrete slap that held a bar-be-que and space to walk past it, I could look up and down over a dozen neighbourhood yards, mostly with chicken wire fences, or three foot lattice slats. To the north I could see all five back yards between my house and the stores on Bloor Street. Some people had grass and flower beds; the Portuguese couple who owned the other half of my semi-detached had seven fruit trees locked in a savage fight for sun and soil, and chickens for a short but odiferous period; the Chinese grandfather to the north put in hours of work every day and harvested five crops of vegetables a year. Everyone did something different, and visiting friends would admire the range of the choices people made.

Wally was the bellwether, as it turned out. He passed seventy, retired and sold his store, which became the first art gallery in the area, still named “Home Hardware” only now in a postmodern ironic sense. Now there are five art galleries within a two block walk, a film studio opening up four blocks away, the local restaurants are getting raves in Now Magazine, and the renovators have arrived. The Chinese family sold their house and moved up market, up to Markham, and the brother and sister who moved in were people like us, with an interest in art, in food, in Tom Waits. It was great; we’d say hello as we let our dogs in or out, or worked on our gardens.

But in the backyards, the fences were going up. Two to the north, the Bulgarian parents had individual decks built for the refurbished rental units on each floor. We were close friends with Nedo, their son, and when we saw him erecting a tall cedar fence all around the garden, we said sad farewells– in the two years since then we’ve had perhaps three brief conversations with him, rather than the weekly calls across fences that used to happen. Two to the south an new Portuguese family put up a shabbier but equally solid fence and now we never see them. It seems that as the walls come down to create more open space inside the houses, they’re going up outside them.

This week the brother and sister, after spending a year or two doing beautiful renovations inside their house put a deck and a two metre high wooden fence up between our backyards. It blocks the sun from the flowerbed in which the honeysuckle is blooming, probably for the last time, as well as from the patio where we sit to eat dinner. We won’t see them when they sit on their new deck, and they won’t see us on our patio. And gradually we’ll drift apart, which we’ll all regret.

Perhaps it’s a class thing. In the upper-class North York suburb to which my parents moved 45 years ago, fences separate neighbours who rarely know each other. Perhaps part of what the newcomers in the neighbourhood aspire to and see as a more gentrified lifestyle is increased privacy, and isolation from others. Perhaps it’s the trend of cocooning, shutting yourself off from the world, and fences help to do that. As shopping malls die, and home cinemas become the vogue, there is less and less space left as a shared common. Now I stand on my back porch and I see walls on both sides, so that every time I go out I know almost exactly what I will see, removing a major reason to go out at all. Why should I, when my backyard feels like a cube farm out of Dilbert? Robert Frost once wrote, “Something there is that doesn't love a wall, / That wants it down.” That something is me, as I sit here and wonder what cheap areas of Toronto remain so undeveloped that the neighbours there still enjoy seeing each other.