A curious thing about Southeast Spadina is that it has not gentrified. The neighbourhood is directly adjacent to downtown on the east and the University of Toronto on the north, locales that provide gentrifiers aplenty to other city neighbourhoods. Its streets are treed and pleasant. Many houses need some work, but no more than those in some other inner-city neighbourhoods before gentrification happened. When location and condition are reckoned together, house prices are not out of line. Yet Southeast Spadina obdurately refuses to go the way of Don Vale, Sussex-Ulster, Riverdale, or any of the city’s other gentrified areas, all more distant from downtown. It remains a somewhat scruffy neighbourhood that looks pretty much as it did thirty-odd years ago when Albert Franck, Toronto’s painter of old houses, plied its streets and lanes making pictures like Backyard on Baldwin Street.

A reason commonly cited for the area’s stability is the presence of Chinatown. Commercial frontage on Spadina Avenue and Dundas Street is almost uniformly East Asian, and many Chinese homeowners and tenants live on the residential sidestreets. The vivid Chinese presence, it is sometimes said, has been a bulwark against gentrification. Maybe. But the Art Gallery of Ontario and Ontario College of Art and Design are also in Southeast Spadina. Picturesque Baldwin Street Village is there. Just south of the neighbourhood is a district of trendy restaurants, boutiques, nightclubs, and theatres. Nor is gentrification typically a bashful process in the face of reasonable property values a few blocks from a central business district. But it has not happened.

What nearly did happen was more cataclysmic. The decisive moment in the neighbourhood’s recent history was a report published in 1972, Toward a Part II Plan for Southeast Spadina, that trenchantly captured tensions in Toronto’s politics and planning at the time. Part II plans were meant to frame proposals for applying the City’s 1969 Part I plan to local areas. In the case of Southeast Spadina, the Part I plan imagined almost total erasure. Most of the neighbourhood – areas adjacent to the university and the central business district – was designated for high-density institutional and commercial development and the rest for highrise apartments. This reflected the city’s prevalent policy in those years of displacing whatever was old and appeared dilapidated in the name of growth and prosperity. Although bourgeois in the 19th century, it became a working-class district after Toronto industrialized and, for decades, was home to Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe (mixed, during and, after World War II, with Maritimers coming to Toronto for work). In the 1960s, as the Chinese began replacing the Jews, the City labeled the neighbourhood “blighted.”

But Toronto’s politics were in ferment at the time – the period when the Spadina Expressway was terminated, when people in Trefann Court and Kensington Market battled to prevent demolition of their homes and businesses for public-housing projects. Throughout inner Toronto, neighbourhoods were fighting the scorched-earth “urban-renewal” agenda rooted in civic boosterism, deformed modernism, and corporate rapacity. Planning was changing, too. The first generation of planners to have been schooled amid debates engendered by Jane Jacobs’s caustic critique of modernism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, were now on the staffs of municipal planning departments.

Toward a Part II Plan for Southeast Spadina not only declined to execute the vision of the Part I plan but, in a quiet and measured tone of civic bureaucracy, suggested this vision was dangerous rubbish. Meanwhile, people in Southeast Spadina had been fighting their own battles – against provincial plans for a block-sized electrical transformer at Baldwin and Beverley streets, a Police Department notion for a new division headquarters on quiet Darcy Street, developers’ proposals for high-density residential projects that would wipe out two more blocks at Phoebe Street and blanket the east side of McCaul Street. Under the aegis of the new Part II plan, only the last of these was built, in a more street-friendly form than the initial design for a cluster of highrise towers.

Preserved by its Part II plan, Southeast Spadina has marched three decades to the beat of an idiosyncratic drummer but will inevitably gentrify. The seeds are present. While there is not a lot of conspicuous renovation of the old houses in the south part of the neighbourhood, there is already a substantial middle-class presence here, particularly in and around a batch of new houses made to look like Victorian homes built on Phoebe Street in the 1970s; and a luxury-condominium development is underway on Beverley just above Queen. Meanwhile, the northeast quadrant of the neighbourhood, centred around Baldwin Village, will sooner or later yield to inexorable pressure. Only around Dundas, west of Beverley, the main hub of the Chinatown commercial zone, is it likely the process may remain dormant for the foreseeable future.

Wandering the neighbourhood’s genial streets today, a passer-by can only wonder how Southeast Spadina might appear if Jacobs had written her book a few years later.

Jon Caulfield