UNLOCKED 31.1 Kensington Market Palimpsest

Antifascist Dad — Episode 31.1 Kensington Market Palimpsest Patreon Coda to Episode 31 Matthew Remski Matthew Remski: Welcome, Patreons, to part two of episode 31 of Antifascist Dad Podcast. My name is Matthew Remski. Part one was called Voices of Kensington Will Ring in Ottawa with Serena Purdy, and it featured my conversation with Serena, who is the NDP candidate for the University-Rosedale federal byelection that was recently held. She lost, and she talked us through the process of that and how she looks forward. I'm calling this follow-up essay Kensington Market Palimpsest. I'm really grateful for your support and I hope this project brings some joy, hope, and utility to your works and days. For housekeeping: you can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name. I'm on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad, and the Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast. Now, if you're listening to this on the main feed, you could have listened to it as soon as it dropped a few weeks ago, because that's what subscribers get — early access to every second part of the main-feed episodes. And also in the show notes you will find a link to my new book. It's called Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times, and it's available in ebook and audiobook versions. The audiobook is read by yours truly. And I should also say that if you have read it, if you're reading it, if you want to think about leaving a review in one of the places that people leave reviews — please think about that some more and maybe go ahead and do that. I'd really appreciate it. And of course I'd also just love to hear from you too. Whatever feedback you have, I'd really appreciate it. Okay. So in my interview with Serena — she's a comparative health policy researcher who just ran as a socialist in this byelection — we spent some time on how important her neighbourhood is in her life and politics. And after we recorded she actually told me by DM that some folks call her the Mayor of Kensington Market. That's how locked in she is. And so I wanted to take this time to thumbnail the history of this special place, because I think it holds, in precarity, layer by layer, a way of being in and organizing and remembering things about the world that many folks are trying to create or recreate or make from scratch. STINGER For the past several years when I've had the time, I've taken our now 13-year-old down to Kensington Market for an afternoon walkaround — to visit The Beguiling bookstore for new manga and graphic novels. We grab tacos and churros. We buy a load of vegetables, sometimes cheese. We see what's on the vintage t-shirt rack. Maybe it's Che Guevara, maybe it's Link from Zelda, but it's always faded. Out on Spadina I'll stop at Tap Phong Housewares, where three generations of the same family stock all the kitchenware that Chinatown restaurants need. And then the kid will look through rare Pokemon cards at A & C Games and then stop in at Gwartzman's Art Supplies for a few Copic markers for the characters he's working on. And then we go back into the inner streets to see if Weekend Characters is open. This is a design studio where they're drawing OG characters for advertisements, but also graphic art for various projects. We talk about how that little business might be organized and making money. Is it a co-op? How much would you have to sell to keep the doors open? And all of that conversation is in the frame of: what do you think you'll do with this life of yours? And what do you think will happen to art in the age of AI? He's fierce on that last point. It will never do what we can do, he says. And then we find some old rickety cafe with a patio if it's warm, or a sunroom with heat lamps out back if it's not. And we drink espresso and hot chocolate. The kid loves the Market — the slapdash construction layers, rickety apartments, tiny businesses slammed together in this kind of self-organizing chaos. He says it reminds him of the Undercity of Coruscant. And I say that we really do have to watch Blade Runner — I've said that a bunch of times. And then he tells me where he's at in his playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077, and how this corner or alleyway with the graffiti mural reminds him of a zone in Night City. Seeing it all through his eyes reminds me of my own time as a young person there, when I would ride my fixed-wheel bike wearing Doc Martens and overalls, with a shoulder bag slung over my shoulder for groceries. I always had plans to meet someone for some long hour of coffee. And those plans were made by phone — the dialing phone, the hardwired landline — or we would call out our plans on the street as we were parting the previous time. Today, one thing that's missing are the signs that used to be up everywhere for political meetings. Maybe arrangements are all on Signal or Telegram these days, I don't know. But 35 years ago there were signs with pull-tabs and telephone numbers for this or that anarchist or communist group. But you had to seek the meetings out. But now I know that in generations before me, political resistance to the capitalists was not hidden, but built into the daily life of the streets. Because from 1905 till about 1940, the Market's political and cultural life was shaped by Toronto's iteration of the Jewish Labour Bund — and by the fierce internal arguments that it struggled with. STINGER But let's go back to the time before time, because we have to say that Kensington Market now sits on the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation, and the Huron-Wendat. It's land governed by the Dish With One Spoon wampum belt covenant and Treaty 13. And so it was until the late 18th century, when British colonizers surveyed and parcelled it out to military officers and loyalists to basically establish aristocratic rule. This sounds technical, but of course it was a really violent, brutal process. So what's now the Market was settled and built on in 1815 by a man named George Taylor Denison — a British-born loyalist military officer who'd arrived in 1796, and who went on to become one of Upper Canada's richest landholders. The mansion and estate he built was called Belle Vue, and it covered a lot of what is now the present neighbourhood. The ghost of that estate survives in Bellevue Square Park, which is now a small piece of green on the footprint of the oligarch's old front yard. In recent years, as housing precarity has risen and city services have shrunk, Bellevue Square Park has become one of many meeting places for unhoused or marginally housed people. And recently, when some folks started setting up tents — a sign of shelters reaching capacity — the authorities got aggressive and started a harassment campaign that included keeping the park's public bathroom locked. Serena Purdy worked with a group that advocated for these neighbours and for those encamped at the nearby St. Stephen's Church. By direct message, Serena told me: "When the public bathrooms started getting locked, I made a deal with a neighbour for folks to use a porta-potty he had on site for a construction project, if volunteers would maintain it." But then there are stories of cruelty and neglect, because Serena also told me that at one point one of the encampment residents died, and the police just put up tape and left his body there for a whole day. Serena and her group ran a poster campaign through the neighbourhood featuring the slogan: "If you don't want to see people living on the street, house them." STINGER Okay, back to the history. In 1837 a brewery opened up on the Denison estate. And in the 1850s, following the death of the patriarch, the estate was subdivided. During the 1880s, houses were built on small plots for Irish and Scottish immigrant labourers arriving in Toronto. And this is the era of the small Victorian brick row houses that still stand mostly intact along places like Wales Avenue. Two storeys, peaked gable roofs, narrow frontage, ornamental trim. These are working-class urban housing units designed for workers who would walk to nearby factories before sunrise. In the late 1800s, immigrants from Italy and Jews driven from Eastern Europe and Russia by antisemitism poured into the Ward — an overcrowded immigrant-reception area between Yonge Street and University Avenue, just to the east of where we're talking about. What they found in the Ward was decrepit tenement housing, and they could work in the garment sweatshops on Spadina — in between the Ward and Kensington Market. But by 1905, some Jewish merchants began moving west into Kensington, buying up the smaller Victorian houses cheaply, subdividing them, and adding storefronts. They built stalls and converted ground floors into stores and displayed their wares on the sidewalk. From 1900 to 1931, the Jewish population of Toronto increased from about 3,000 people to 45,000. And 80 per cent of them lived and worked as tailors, furriers, bakers, and such in and around Kensington, which became known as the Jewish Market. There were 30 synagogues and, increasingly, a lot of socialist activism. Spadina Avenue, where my kid now picks up drawing supplies, was once known as Red Spadina, because workers organized hard there against the bosses of the 60-plus sweatshops in the seven-block garment district. There were 38 strikes in the Toronto needle trades between 1912 and 1937. That string kicked off with the Eaton's Strike of 1912, in which 65 workers refused new orders, and that grew to over 1,000 workers walking out over wages, and then a demonstration of over 2,000 marching in the streets. A year later, the Spadina Labour Lyceum — a meeting hall for the Jewish labour movement — opened up on Spadina. Now, if you caught my profile of Avi Lewis's great-grandfather Moishe and his roots in the socialist Jewish Labour Bund of what is now Belarus: here's where some history intersects. Moishe joined the stream of Bundists who made their way to Montreal. But he could have as easily wound up in or around Kensington, and found a political home amongst other Jewish refugees from the Russian Pale of Settlement, where the Bund was the dominant political force. These folks arrived in Canada shaped by Bundist culture: secular Yiddish identity, class consciousness, and labour militancy as a Jewish practice. And what a cast of characters this scene generated and nurtured. Emma Goldman lived on Spadina three times — that is, whenever the US deported her. And when she died, she was eulogized at the Spadina Labour Lyceum to crowds that spilled out onto the street. Attilio Bortolotti, the Italian anarchist, arrived weeks before the 1929 stock market crash and faced deportation to Mussolini's Italy. But Emma Goldman stepped in and campaigned for him to stay, and so he became Toronto anarchism's grand old man. Sammy Luftspring was a champion boxer raised in Kensington. He boycotted the 1936 Berlin Olympics and publicly predicted Nazi genocide when most people still doubted it — thought the whole idea was nuts. And there was the Polish-born J.B. Salsberg, who became a sweatshop worker at 13, and then the only elected communist in North America — MPP for St. Andrew in 1943 — but who resigned from the party after witnessing Soviet antisemitism firsthand. There are countless developments, changes, splits, and betrayals in this Bundist culture over the next years, including the critical stress point of 1917, when from afar the Bolshevik Revolution split the Bundists into Left Communists and Social Democrats. So waves of immigrant Jewish socialists set a pattern for the neighbourhood that has been stressed by development and gentrification ever since, but never broken. The pattern was to use affordability to gain a foothold, convert residential space to commercial use, build ethnic and community institutions. This repeated itself decade on decade, through groups of immigrants from Italy, Portugal, the Caribbean, Latin America, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Iran, Vietnam, and Chile. And like Serena says in our interview, they fought for everything they have. They battled the University of Toronto's plans to build a huge student residence, and then plans for large apartment-style housing that were pitched to the city by tycoon developers as slum-clearing projects. So Kensington Market remained a neighbourhood of refuge, holding a line against surrounding gentrification. And in 2000, a young Mexican couple opened the first taqueria in Canada, El Trompo, on Augusta Avenue. That's where the kid and I go now. STINGER There's this moment I have when sorting through any angle on the last century: that by the time the story enters this threshold between the 60s and 70s, everything begins to feel both ungrounded and accelerated. Does that have to do with me being born right on that line, at 1971? Maybe. I associate the whole period with TV and plastic toys and expanding suburbs, and this growing sense that I am getting farther and farther away from the type of neighbourhood and community that Kensington made possible. I think I've said enough in prior essays about the cascade of neoliberal changes that have poured over our Gen X lives. Globalization sends wage labour to the Global South. Union-busting for the workers who remain. A constant drumbeat of austerity, privatization, oil development, wealth extraction, rent-seeking. Gentrification hollows out whole communities, third spaces evaporate, and we have the rise of digital platforms and communicative capitalism. And yet Kensington has hung on as a cultural touchstone. How? How did so much of the vibrancy of the neighbourhood remain when the political passions that built its original funky architecture had faded? You can still hear the klezmer music, but there's no sign of the Bund. In the 1930s, Antonio Gramsci theorized something called passive revolution — a process by which the dominant culture can absorb, neutralize, and transform oppositional energy without violent confrontation. The political meetings, rallies, the marches: these are replaced by the cultural atmosphere that these movements produced — the bohemian density, the tolerance for difference, the informal economy, the street life. The Situationists talk about recuperation, which is the process by which capitalism absorbs the forms of its opposition and converts them into aesthetic commodities. These are the Che Guevara t-shirts my kid and I flip through, looking for Link. But one very specific thing happened to bridge the Kensington of the Bund with the Kensington of grunge hipsterdom. It was a TV show on the CBC. King of Kensington was a sitcom that ran for 111 episodes from 1975 to 1980. Al Waxman played Larry King, most beloved by the neighbourhood. The showrunners wanted to showcase the everyday lives of working-class Canadians living in an urban, multicultural environment. And so Larry King played the centralizing role: he was Kensington's unofficial mayor, a backslapper, a peacemaker. His wife was Protestant, his mother was Jewish, and his best friends were Black and Italian. This mixed multicultural reality of urban Toronto was on full display for everyone to find common ground in cultural sharing and jokes. In a lot of ways, King of Kensington was the Canadian foil to All in the Family — with Larry as unabashedly liberal as Archie Bunker was a conservative asshole. But Larry's right-wing mother Gladys served as the show's own conservative counterpoint. The transitional thing was that Larry was not a socialist, not a Bundist, not a communist, not an anarchist. He was a small business owner — a corner store proprietor — whose political instinct was community bonding rather than class struggle. He solved problems over coffee and handshakes and jokes. And in Larry, the form of Kensington solidarity survived — he helps his neighbours, the community takes care of its own. But the content was stripped of its political history, its political direction. The corner store replaced the workers' club. Coffee klatches replaced union meetings. Liberal pluralism replaced socialist internationalism. In the 1930s, Bundists understood their ethnic particularity in class terms. They were Jewish and workers and excluded from the formal economy by antisemitism, and their political response addressed all three. But the framework of King of Kensington separated these things out. Ethnicity became a kind of cultural texture. Class became personality — Larry is working-class, but not class-conscious. And the exclusions that produced the neighbourhood's diversity are invisible. Larry's Black friend Nestor and his Italian friend Duke are present and they lend colour to the ensemble, but you never hear about their own histories of marginalization. Now, one amazing synchronicity the show offered — but also kind of buried — is that Al Waxman was born in 1935 in the heart of the Jewish Market, just two blocks down from the Spadina Labour Lyceum. So he carried the blood and bones of that world. But what he performed on screen was not that world's politics — it was its warmth, its sociality, its community density, its friendliness, all translated for an audience of 1.8 million Canadians per week as wholesome liberal entertainment. So the show is an unwitting document of what happens to a community's political energy when it has been absorbed into the mainstream: it becomes recognizable, loveable, national, and safe. And maybe this safety is the source of some of the disquiet I now sometimes feel as I sit with the kid at the cafe. So much has happened in this neighbourhood, and I can sense it in the bricks, and layer on layer of plaster, in the storefront signs painted over and over again. So much has happened, but is anything happening now? How would I make something happen in this world? And as the kid sits and drinks his hot chocolate in this sunroom with the heat lamps buzzing overhead, is he feeling that too? Is he absorbing some prickle of energy, desire, and unfinished business from these cracked walls? There's one plot twist at the end of King of Kensington's third season, and it links Al Waxman and Larry King to our current Mayor of Kensington, Serena Purdy. Larry sells the convenience store and takes a new job with a youth community centre, in social services, caring for kids in need. STINGER I want to end with an idea I first heard about in college: the palimpsest. In medieval Europe, scholars wrote on vellum, which was the dried skin of a calf, lamb, or kid, stretched and scraped to a smooth and durable writing surface. The palimpsest is a manuscript of vellum that has been written on, scraped or washed, and then written on again, such that the earlier text bleeds through to the newer one, or remains visible if the newer writing is scraped away. The technique evolved in relation to the expense of vellum and of the expensive book bindings, which could also be recycled through this process. And what the practice leaves behind is the story of slow or fast religious, cultural, and political revolutions. Sometimes the layers are only revealed by accident — like when a scribe doesn't fully scrape or wash away the previous layer. This is how we have Cicero's De re publica: the only copy we know of was found under Augustine's Commentary on the Psalms. And two books by Archimedes were found layered into the pages of a 13th-century prayer book. By the 19th century, palimpsested texts were still being found in the monasteries and old libraries of Europe, but the material object had transformed into a metaphor for history and memory — how the past folds into the present, remaining active but ghostly. In 1925, Freud picked up the metaphor in a short paper called "A Note Upon the 'Mystic Writing Pad.'" He was talking about the Wunderblock, which was a child's toy. You're probably familiar with them. It's a wax slab covered by a transparent celluloid sheet and a wax paper layer. You write on it with a stylus — we had plastic ones in the 70s — the marks appear clearly on the surface, and when you tear the upper sheet off, the surface clears. But the wax below retains a ghost of the impression. I think you can still find these at Dollarama. Freud saw in the Wunderblock the surface of the mind receiving fresh perceptions, while the deeper layer retained prior impressions permanently, like scars. The great Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin never used the word palimpsest. But his Arcades Project was an enormous accumulation of quotations, images, and fragments from 19th-century Paris, organized into what he called convolutes, that produced a historical understanding through a collision of materials rather than through linear narrative. The past, for Benjamin, is not behind us but sedimented in the present. He underscores the feeling in his memoir, Berlin Childhood around 1900 — he wrote it between 1932 and 1938, though it wasn't published until the 1980s. In that memoir, he reads the space of Berlin and the years of his own life as layers in time, in which memory and place are inseparable. To walk through the city is to read a text written across the generations. The city is not a container of history, but it is its medium. So Kensington has been written and overwritten by generation after generation in dialogue with each other. Much of the rest of Toronto has followed the flow of neoliberal erasure: scraped clean and overwritten in a single hand — the glass condo tower, the chain store frontage, the uniform pavement. The survival of multiple layers in Kensington is the outcome of working-class diversity and solidarity: small lot sizes, low-rise buildings, communal DIY stewardship and construction. Talking with Serena and listening more to the socialist organizers I've gotten to know, I think that more and more of us are starting to see the palimpsest clearly — how many stories have been written and overwritten but never forgotten. And that includes the fact that at the base level we have vellum, the hide of a body. Everyone here is always building on top of Indigenous land, a living series of relations we can still feel and honour. Back at home, whenever I look over and see the kids drawing, they always have erasers at the ready to rub out miscues or tidy up their lines. The erasers leave a trace. No drawing ever disappears. At this point there must be thousands of drawings packed away in folders and drawers in the house. I don't know that I can ever renovate these away, because history shows me how many powerful and simple ideas come from the past. Thanks for listening, everybody. Take care of each other.