The Dominion - gentrification

The importance of remembering Africville

Tim McSorley — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 13:16:57 +0000

Africville was a small, African-Canadian community in Halifax, razed in the 1960s in order to make way for new development. While it's been several decades, the pain of the action taken without any consultation with area's residents - they were moved without choice - remains today. The issue was back in the news recently, since the provincial government made an apology and offered reparations for the act. The offer has been met with scepticism and mixed feelings though, as Dalal Razzaq has reported for the Halifax Media Co-op.

It's fitting then that the second film we're featuring in our partnership with Work For All is Remember Africville, a short NFB documentary shot in the 1980s and examining the fall-out and the continuing search for answers around this East Coast tragedy. You can watch it above, and for more information check out the Work For All blog.

Goodbye, St Pat’s-Alexandra

hillarybain — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 05:18:25 +0000

Replacing North-End Halifax’s Africentric school with condos

HALIFAX—Janitors are polishing the floors at St. Patrick’s-Alexandra School while the halls are empty. It’s summer vacation. On the second floor the library shelves are half-filled with books. It’s as if the shelves have been cleared for dusting, but a janitor tells me they’ve been mostly bare for years. Across the hall the primary room looks like an outdated, unfurnished home, waiting to be filled. Four tiny tables form an archipelago in the centre of the room. Crafts, in short supply, are stacked in cupboards and a small number of stuffed animals are tucked into a hamper. This fall the classroom will do double duty for the combined Primary and Grade 1 classes, containing 11 toddlers in total.

Attendance at St. Pat’s, one of the hopeful beacons of education in Halifax’s tightly woven North End community, has been falling for years. The south wing of the third floor has been closed to students in recent years since attendance began to drop and teachers began to quit. Just 80 students attended the P-to-9 school in 2008—58 students less than the 138 enrolled the year before, though the building has the capacity for 800. Falling enrollment is one of many reasons the Halifax Regional School Board voted in March to close the brick building as a school by 2011. The former school property will be sold to make way for condominiums.

St. Pat’s is one of the few schools in Nova Scotia with Africentric leanings. Serving the mostly African-Canadian population of Uniacke Square, the school teaches the history and values of the black community, giving priority to African Nova Scotian role models such as Wayne Adams, the first black member of the province’s legislature; Dr. William P Oliver, the first African Nova Scotian to receive two degrees; and Corrine Sparks, the first African Nova Scotian judge. Plaques bearing their names and penciled portraits hang in the halls.

In a series of meetings, community members and local representatives fiercely debated the pros and cons of closing St Pat’s. Eventually, the Halifax Regional School Board voted five to three that the unique school must close.

In the end, the School Board said the overwhelming presence of social problems in the neighbourhood led to the final decision. Sex trade workers frequent nearby Creighton Street. Homeless people occasionally sleep under the brick awning at the back of the building. “Those squeegee kids sleep ‘til noon,” another janitor told me, matter-of-factly. Metro Turning Point, a halfway house on Barrington Street is also in the school’s neighbourhood.

Irvine Carvery, Chair of the School Board, was unavailable to comment further on the Board’s decision.

Denise Allen, Chair of the Halifax Central Education Committee, says the closure of the school is a sign of gentrification—tantamount to the end of the community, in her opinion. That’s why she rallied St. Pat’s parents together to fight for the school’s future. She helped to organize bus fare and car pools to an Imagine Our Schools meeting (the School Board’s public consultation process regarding a host of educational decisions), and the committee held writing sessions in advance for parents who wanted to be heard at the meeting. But it wasn’t enough to counteract the school’s dropping attendance and the area’s reputation for crime and prostitution.

“We have to look at the issue of poverty, one of the root causes of why there’s violence in the inner city. Poverty’s the number one root cause. So we should address the poverty. But instead of dealing with that, the solution is close down a school. And whenever you close down a school in the inner city, you always open up a prison.”

Allen is speaking metaphorically, expressing what is not a new idea: when youth drop out of school, she says, they often turn to a life of crime.

St. Pat’s serves a mostly impoverished community of single parents, immigrants and unemployed workers—a demographic Allen says is desperate for education. She believes a community school is the solution to poverty and violent crime in the neighbourhood because education can prevent inner-city youth from making bad life decisions.

“The drugs, the halfway house, all that is just compacted into this one community,” 19-year-old Kadeem Hinch tells me. “It’s around the kids.” He says he can see both sides of the debate but is adamant the school should stay open.

Hinch squints through the cloudy glass windows of the school’s front entrance. He remembers bursting through these doors with his friends at lunchtime and sliding down the snowy slopes of the moat that separates the school from Maitland Street.

A vibrant mural is barely visible through the mottled front door windows. It covers the opposite wall, floor to ceiling. Hinch, who will attend the graphic design program at NSCC this fall, helped to paint it as part of African Heritage Month when he was in junior high. Giraffes roam through a jungle oasis of grassland and waterfalls. Community members gather in the foreground, dressed in vibrant prints and head coverings. Grass huts stand in the shade of tall palm trees in the distance. The painting represents the school's cultural roots.

But there are no protective palms on Maitland Street. Instead, on the next block over and creeping ever closer is a row of brand new condominiums. "For Sale" and "Sold" signs pepper the properties. They’re waiting to be filled. Meanwhile, St. Pat's classrooms continue to empty.

As I bike the wrong way down the one-way street, another row of condos appears to my left. They look like suburbia in downtown Halifax.

“We have enough condos in this neighbourhood,” Hinch says. “I really don’t think that we should tear down a good school to build more expensive condos. I think we’re losing the community by building those condos, losing the history.”

The bright-eyed and bubbly graduate is a Staff Coordinator at Saint George’s Youth Net, a youth outreach and activity centre housed by the robin’s-egg-blue church next door. For seven years he’s participated in and helped to organize after-school activities for the dwindling St. Pat’s population.

When the building closes two years from now, the neighbourhood children will move to Joseph Howe Elementary School and Oxford Junior High School, one kilometre and two kilometres away, respectively. Hinch says it’s a shame the kids will have to walk so far when they already have a perfectly good school in their neighbourhood.

“The school itself has a lot of potential,” he says. “I mean it has a lot of things other schools don’t have, like sewing rooms, like cooking labs, a pottery lab, a nice big art room, a nice big gym. They have a lot of things that can be used. I think it should stay up. I love the school.”

On the back deck of Denise Allen's home off Windsor Street, her grandson, Lenai, gurgles in his cozy baby carrier, eyes locked on Grandma. Allen says she hopes he’ll attend a school in her neighbourhood when he gets a little older.

“The one thing that is going to make that area feel like a community, they took away,” she says. Allen also laments that once the school is closed, the land will be privatized. She saw it happen in Toronto, where she grew up.

“The most vulnerable people in our society have to suffer. Why? Because that area, that land that St. Pat’s is sitting on and Uniacke Square is sitting on, is too good for them. It’s too precious. They have to be forced out of there. And eventually that’s what’s going to happen.”

Allen hoped the St. Pat’s building would become an affordable vocational school that offers skills training to youth. “If that’s not happening then you haven’t addressed the root cause of violence in that area,” she says.

Unfortunately for Allen and Hinch, it seems the fate of the school has already been decided: the school board’s development proposal for the property says the “former Alexandra School site” will be sold to make way for 48 additional condos. Another chunk of the property will be dedicated to one of three development options, currently under appeal: six-storey multi-units, a private school or a homeless shelter.

“It’ll be condos for sure,” the grey-bearded janitor tells me as I leave through the school’s side door into the sunlight. “That’s the rumour, anyway.”

Hilary Beaumont is a freelance journalist and editor in Halifax, and a contributing member of the Halifax Media Co-op.

St Pat's

Outperforming Gentrification

hillarybain — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 18:01:02 +0000

A profile of Jessica Rose

On November 11, 2006, artist and curator Jessica Rose orchestrated A Funeral for a Building, a performance piece/memorial service to mark the end of an era for her Queen West arts community. Rose invited residents and community members to express their grief over plans to tear down her home at 48 Abell Street in order to make way for two condominium towers. For the last quarter-century, the 80,000-square-foot, industrial, loft-style building has provided 80 live/work studios for artists in the heart of what was recently renamed Toronto’s “Art and Design District.”

Less than two months before the funeral, on September 28, Toronto city council voted against designating the 120-year-old former lamp factory as a heritage building, which would have protected it from demolition. The timing was as harsh as the news; it came on the eve of Nuit Blanche, the inaugural all-night, Paris-inspired, city-wide contemporary art fest that artists from the Queen West gallery district had been helping the city plan for months.

Rose, a key organizer for the overwhelmingly successful Nuit Blanche, is diplomatic about what many in the arts community consider outright betrayal on the part of the city: “I’m in a complicated position,” she says. “But what’s the alternative? Not getting involved and not being able to impact things and saying, ‘Oh, you’re an agent of gentrification--I hate you’? That’s a really dumb position.” Rather than just complaining about it over cocktails, the 28-year-old is using her performance art to get Torontonians thinking and talking about the value of preserving affordable live/work spaces for artists.

Rose moved into 48 Abell with her mother 15 years ago, when it was far from the sightline of circling condo vultures. “There were 14-year-old prostitutes on the corner,” she recalls. “Everyone thought [my mom] was crazy for having a kid in this neighbourhood.” Her long bangs mostly obscure her eyes and she has a serious, almost brooding appearance that belies her moxie. “This was such an amazing building, even then,” she says. “John Scott [a major Canadian painter] lived here…all the senior faculty at OCAD [Ontario College of Art and Design]—they all lived here.”

Spurred on by her community, Rose got her first film grant at 19 and left to study filmmaking at Emily Carr shortly thereafter. By the time she came back and moved into her own loft space at 48 Abell in 2001, the neighbourhood was well on its way to becoming the contemporary art mecca it is today. New galleries had sprouted up everywhere. “To come back in to this amazing, active community—it was sort of like my introduction to the world,” says Rose. After assisting sculptor John Jackson in his studio for a year and completing courses at OCAD and the University of Toronto, she secured a job as the associate art director of the Drake Hotel and was curating shows within six months.

While there’s no question that the area around the Drake has gotten a lot trendier since the boutique hotel opened on Queen West in February 2004, Rose thinks that blaming it for the gentrification of the area is a simplistic way to look at community growth. “I really believe that if you have a good thing, you beam that out to the world. You don’t have something that’s really great and only show 10 people just so you don’t lose it,” she says. Yet a disheartening pattern emerges whenever artists move into low-rent neighbourhoods: they act as catalysts for urban renewal by beautifying live/work spaces and producing amenities (as Richard Florida, author of Rise of the Creative Class, would say), which in turn ups the hip-quotient of the area, thereby increasing rent and forcing artists out. And they are not alone: all low-income community members who have made the neighbourhood a home suffer the same consequences.

Rose, however, refuses to accept this as inevitable. “There are other cities where planners or councils will hire an artist to be on their board,” she says. “What needs to happen [in Toronto] is more artists working closer with the city and guiding the people who have the ability to invest.”

While Rose has devoted a lot of time to working with Active 18, the community group formed to fight irresponsible development in the Ward 18 gallery district, she does not identify herself as an activist. When it comes to raising awareness about the importance of preserving a space like 48 Abell, she says she’s “a lot more comfortable with the artist strategy.” Sparked by her research on public art for Nuit Blanche, Rose joined forces with choreographer Jenn Goodwin in May 2006 to launch the “Movement Movement” in which they “run with art” through public spaces, like galleries and city squares, along with whoever wants to join them. The purpose is less about creating a spectacle, Rose says, and “more about bringing together the janitor who works at York University with the executive who’s obsessed with running, with kids from some high school in Scarborough and... creating a circumstance for them to make relationships with each other and with the space.” The concept behind the project--bringing attention to shared public space by activating it in a unique way--outlives the temporary act. Is it conceptual art? Performance art? Interventionist art? Social art? Rose uses all of these terms to describe it.

On May 12, 2007, Rose and Goodwin accomplished their most ambitious project to date: running through the Royal Ontario Museum with some 250 people. It was the first stop in a cross-country tour of major art institutions that will continue into 2008. At Nuit Blanche numero deux on September 30, 2007, Rose will participate by bringing the Movement back to the seat of its inception. In “an extension of A Funeral for a Building,” she and fellow artist residents will present another large-scale public project at 48 Abell.

Efforts to appeal the city’s decision, and even the backing of Toronto’s mayor, David Miller, have only helped to delay, not stop, the condo plans. In the meantime, “there’s a bunch of work that’s going on behind the scenes to save as much as possible,” says Rose.

“What we learned from Nuit Blanche is that people really do give a shit and the thought of a live/work space that houses 80 units for artists and dancers and writers getting torn down is ridiculous in any city,” she says. “It’s not just an artist issue; it’s a much greater issue about Toronto. There are so many people who love this city so much who are just saying, 'No, this should not be happening.'”

Related:

Run the ROM

Piccadilly Hotel

dylan — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 02:15:27 +0000

The ongoing closure of low-rent apartments in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside has been dealt another setback, at least temporarily.