39. PARK ST. & ERIE AVE. DECLARED SLUM
During my June 2017 visit to Niagara Falls, I was not successful in locating this tidbit from my childhood history: Park Street & Erie Avenue declared a slum area.
I had scanned several years of microfilmed issues of the Niagara Falls Review but limited time and the tedium of the task defeated me. Had old issues of the Review been digitized instead of just microfilmed and stored at the Niagara Falls Public Library, I’d be mining those electronic records instead of just my memory for this post.
As an adult, I have an informed understanding that any historic Chinatown in Canada occupied impoverished places; thus forming the undesirable, dark fringes of society. But as a child, I was shocked and embarrassed to learn that I lived in a slum.
I wish I knew with certainty when this declaration was made. I must have been in grade 3, or possibly 4. That would make it 1960-1961.
At the time, I don’t think I really knew what slum meant. I might have looked it up in my Winston School Dictionary. I don’t have a copy of that particular reference to check the definition. Merriam-Webster Dictionary, though, defines the word for kids as: “a thickly populated section especially of a city marked by crowding, dirty run-down housing, and generally poor living conditions.” So had I looked the word up back then, I might have come up with something like that.
What I do recall is my brother Jack’s eagerness to share the news he had read in the Review: we lived in a slum area.
He must have been at our parents’ restaurant as that’s the only place we got the newspaper. His atypical phone call home to speak to me conveyed the importance of the revelation. From his tone, I would have concluded that living in a slum was not a circumstance to be proud of.
Like most processes, the newly acquired designation must have developed over time but being up-close and only a child, I hadn’t noticed. Outsiders – those who lived beyond Chinatown – were needed to point out what we who lived within, had overlooked or ignored or not spoken of. Those who lived beyond Park Street and Erie Avenue were the authorities in describing our experience.
During the years I lived there, both sides of our block of Park Street (between Clifton - later renamed Zimmerman - and Erie Avenues) were unchanged when it came to the Chinese who resided there. There had been some minor turnover in the non-Chinese operations but for the most part, the storefronts/offices were occupied by the same or similar type businesses. Perhaps the decline had happened on Erie Avenue.
Erie Avenue from Queen Street to Bridge Street was lined mostly with commercial enterprises.
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| Aerial View - Looking North (n.d.) Courtesy of Niagara Falls (Ontario) Public Library Digital Collections |
The NY Central Passenger & Freight Terminal and John Mears Coal & Coke Office dominated the west side block of Erie from Queen to Park Street. Continuing along Erie and across Park Street, I only recall a confectionary and a locksmith although there were other shops.
At the confectionary, my brother and I brought in pop bottles, got two cents for each return and bought penny candies.
We called in at the locksmith when extra keys needed to be cut and also when we knew the Shriners’ Circus was in town. On a couple occasions, the locksmith had provided us with free tickets for a matinee performance of the circus.
People lived above some of the businesses on Erie Avenue between Bridge and Park Streets.
Unseen rooms were accessed through doorways interspersed amongst the mostly forgotten building fronts. All the Chinese who lived on Erie Avenue lived on the east side (see Post #25: Beansprout Business).
Steps farther east, where Erie ran into Bridge Street, stood the Metropole (later renamed the Lord Nelson), a hotel and lounge. Generally, my brother and I understood this corner to be off-limits. Yet chance took me past there sometimes and nothing bad ever happened.
When a door opened at the Metropole, the stale smell of beer drifted out from the dimly lit interior. One Hallowe’en when I was on my own, a bar patron came out and unsolicited, gave me some change.
Another time, a man came out and told me to come back with my father. There was a piano free for the taking. (We didn’t get the piano, though. Father looked and decided it was too difficult to move.) What I encountered on the corner of Bridge and Erie was different from my block of Park Street. It was a kind of brashness: intriguing to a child, but not scary.
On the southwest corner where Erie crossed Park, the Empire Building stood as an unknown entity. Names printed on the main door indicated offices that meant nothing to me. They were there and just that in my childhood.
However, between the Empire Building and Rosbergs Department Store at the corner of Queen Street were Veteran’s Shoe Repair, Clark’s Hardware, and Hatter’s Pharmacy. They hold spots in my memories.
My brother and I knew the rear of the shoe repair only. Outside its backdoor, leather shavings were mounded along with fine granules that stuck to our fingers and had a distinctive odour. Perhaps the smell was just the unfamiliar mingle of ground leather, wax and polish, but as a child, the mixture could be a potent, stinky magic powder that dispelled any imagined monsters.
The hardware and drug stores were different from the shoe repair. We had been through their front doors.
I’d be sent to the hardware store to purchase a single light bulb. My mother would admonish me to get the salesperson to test the bulb before I bought it. Being a timid child, I was reluctant to say anything other than what I had come for. Fortunately, it was part of the store’s practice to screw in the light bulb and demonstrate that it worked before selling it.
I remember a wall of drawers; each with a different screw, bolt or washer attached to the front. Any fastener that I had been sent to buy was easily matched to the sample I had carried in. Clark’s Hardware had also been the source of my almost indestructible plaid, metal lunch box that I started school with and carried for many years.
Hatter’s was where prescriptions were filled but it was also the place where my father bought Vicks VapoRub in an attempt to speed my recovery from a very bad cold. Vicks was more expensive as well as fouler than the Tiger Balm my mother plied my chest with. Still, that unpleasant encounter with Vicks was tempered by another act of caring. My father also bought me a little storybook. Books were borrowed from the library but owning them had been an unknown luxury. I still have the book. It’s called The Littlest Christmas Tree.
Living in Chinatown, I did not know the crowding that characterizes a slum area.
At the same time, another track with Rosbergs’ parking lot on one side and the expanse of Eastland’s coal yard on the other crossed Park Street and opened up to the back of the buildings on Erie. These were the open spaces in Chinatown.
The building where I lived with my family was enormous. After all, 226 Park Street had been a commercial building. There were many empty rooms as my mother was quite particular about whom she rented rooms to.
The rooms did not look like the rented rooms and apartments on television – The Honeymooners or The Lucy Show – but then again, little in my Chinatown looked like the world I saw in the media.
The rooms and facilities at 226 Park Street were in good repair with hot and cold running water and heat. The people who lived there were poor – working poor. Their lives were frugal but not necessarily impoverished. The “bachelor” men, who may or may not have had families left behind in China, had individual rooms on the ground floor. Their rooms were off a common hallway leading past the storefront on Park (see Post #15: Chinese Groceries) to the fan tan gaming tables in the rear of the building. A communal kitchen, dining area and shared bathroom were in the basement.
Apart from my family’s separate apartment on the second floor, two rooms were rented out. The larger one was prime insofar it was just off the shared kitchen and bathroom. It accommodated an older couple. At the time, I probably thought of them as older as they did not have children living with them.
The other room was smaller and rented by a single man who appeared older than my parents. We referred to him as “Baak.” I remember him best.
Baak had a collection of glass animal figurines that he’d take out and show us.
He also had an alarm clock with a farm scene on its face.
At certain times, a rooster in the scene moved its head about. I had never seen treasures like these before.
Usually, a person showing something to amuse a child is not a big deal; however, in Baak’s case, I think it was.
Baak had a vestigial digit protruding beside his thumb on one of his hands. His desire to delight us must have outweighed any concern that we might question or react to the deformity.
The third floor of 226 Park Street was the least used area. At times, there were a couple renters who had private rooms but shared the kitchen and bathroom. Friend Robert Wong (Post #21) lived there briefly when he first came to Canada. I was too young to remember that.
However, I do remember HENRY TAI (DOO TOY b.1900, d.1966).
When my brother and I were playing in the backyard, Henry sometimes came out and visited with us. He was a stylish dresser: bowling shirt, dress trousers and a straw Panama-like hat. Both my brother and I were at ease with him.
I don't know when Henry moved into our building but I do recall when he died there unexpectedly. It was a shock.
I don't know when Henry moved into our building but I do recall when he died there unexpectedly. It was a shock.
According to a notice found in the Niagara Falls Gazetter (Sept. 26, 1966), Henry had been born in Hen Thin Sin Min in China. He came to Niagara Falls in 1918 and worked in a number of restaurants as a cook.
After Henry's death, my mother ceased renting out rooms on the third floor.
After Henry's death, my mother ceased renting out rooms on the third floor.
In spite of Chinatown – tong yan gaai –being identified a slum area in the 1960s, we continued to go about our daily lives.
My child’s eye did not see the hallmarks of a slum: dirty run-down buildings and crowding. The buildings that I was associated with were serviceable and orderly. There was lots of open space, both indoors and outdoors.
As an adult, I question if the area was a slum, or just worn from decades of use.
As an adult, I question if the area was a slum, or just worn from decades of use.
I left Niagara Falls in 1971. My parents moved from Park Street about 1972. The building I grew up was demolished in 1976. For a brief interval in between, it became a homeless shelter. It was not until 2014 that the last Erie Avenue Chinatown buildings were torn down.
Although it’s been decades since I left my childhood home, I still reflect on Park Street - Erie Avenue; first as a Chinatown and then, as a slum area. At the time, the second designation was another marker of how my experience was different, and inferior, from that of my school peers. As an adult, I realize that growing up in these conditions contributed to a resilience I might otherwise not have.
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