Excerpt:
Last Tuesday (2010.04.13), the Thorncliffe branch of the Toronto Public Library reopened after a lengthy renovation. Obviously TPLFans attends and documents all library reopenings. (Photos.)
The library is located in Thorncliffe Park, a neighbourhood of typical Toronto high-rise apartment buildings hidden behind the giant concrete East York sign at Millwood and Overlea. The sign doesn't say this anymore, but until the '90s it claimed East York was A GOOD PLACE TO LIVE · WORK · SHOP. A bit Orwellian. East York: The maximum-security suburb.
Thorncliffe Park is now and has for decades been a low-income neighbourhood. Like other such neighbourhoods, it has found itself populated by different waves of the poor over the years. Now it's dominated by Indics and Muslims.
Among the couple of hundred people waiting in line for the library reopening, I counted no blacks, no East Asians or Orientals, and three white people other than me. (One of them represented a previous caste of Thorncliffe Park poor who spent her time passive-aggressively berating an Indic mother for keeping her kids out of school for the library reopening.) The four whites were outnumbered 2:1 by women in full-body niqab (ethnic origin obviously indeterminate) and about 20:1 by women in hijab, mostly Southeast Asian or Indic or Arab. I drew the obvious conclusion about the men who closely accompanied these women, namely that they were their husbands.
A glorious multicultural mosaic? No, a glorious mosaic of a couple of cultures. An ethnic enclave, you might call it, or a ghetto, though Toronto thinks it's too good for ghettos. Chinatown isn't much different, nor is Rosedale. What's the problem here? There is no problem here, apart from poverty and the concentration of same.
The problem is inside the library.