Abstract This essay is an overview of how the Toronto neighbourhood of Cabbagetown has transformed over the years as seen through the eyes of writers. According to this essay, Cabbagetown has morphed, getting larger here or smaller there, depending upon any given definition. And while there has been improvement on some fronts, there have also been the social experiments gone awry in Regent Park and St. Jamestown.
From the Paper "Back in the sixties and seventies, Toronto author Hugh Garner, a Governor General's Award winner, took Cabbagetown's border debate international with a series of literary looks at the community. In doing so, he documented phases of the community's profile complete with glimpses of how it started and what it had become, giving a history of shifts in the community as character. And, although 26 years dead, Garner managed to not only document his here-and-now, but forecast the area's slow gentrification efforts that continue revolving around what may very well be the city's longest running border dispute (Smith 21)."
Abstract This paper argues that there have been significant demographic, social and cultural changes in what was once Toronto's infamous Cabbagetown (now Regent Park) and that these changes have not been accompanied by similar changes in the realm of economic prosperity. In other words, Regent Park is poor today just as Cabbagetown was poor yesterday. The paper also looks at how the evolving neighborhood profile of Regent Park suggests that the city of Toronto has done a poor job of combating the socio-economic stratification that plagued the area generations ago.
From the Paper "To begin with, Toronto's Cabbage-town district has historically always been fairly poor. To wit, in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the neighborhood was possibly the poorest in all of Toronto - so much so, in fact, that much of the original cabbagetown was razed in the 1940s to make way for Regent Park housing project. To continue momentarily with the image of historic Cabbagetown being a place of poverty and austerity, it is generally maintained that the old neighborhood gained the monicker, "Cabbagetown," because of the popular late-nineteenth century belief that the poor Irish and Macedonian immigrants who constituted the majority of the local inhabitants could only afford to eat the cabbage they grew in their front yards (Old Cabbagetown BIA, para.4 and 6). Needless to say, Cabbagetown was a stark manifestation of the socio-economic segregation and reification that consumed Toronto - and most, if not all, other North American cities - during the industrial age."
