CRACK CORNER

Drugs are turning a vibrant slice of Toronto's downtown into an urban
wasteland

THIS CORNER's never been pretty. But it's never been counted out, either.

There's always been plenty of life at Sherbourne and Queen. Maybe not the
good life, but a good enough life. Guys down on their luck still had
self-respect. The businesses were doing okay. And artists loved the low rents.

A poor community, sure, but a vital one. Down and dirty, but dynamic and
creative, too, a community that looked after its own, in its own way.

But that was before the crack dealers moved in.

Contractors with offers of an odd job aren't cruising Queen and Sherbourne
Sts. for their day labour as much these days.

So guys like Steve Francis, who lives at Seaton House and most days doesn't
have two nickels to jingle in his overall pocket, just take whatever one of
the temp agencies up the street has to give.

Lately, that has been garbage.

Francis has been hauling the stuff off the trucks out at Canada Waste in
Mississauga for a few months. He taped up his workboots, but the cold and
the wet got in anyway. He tried to work through it. Now there is gangrene.

Doctor says he may lose both his big toes.

And it's all for minimum wage. Time was, the contractors used to pay $10 or
$12 an hour to the guys from the hostels like Francis who would wait for
work on the corner no matter how cold or dark the weekday mornings.

But Francis won't do that any more.

Too embarrassed.

``(The dealers) make it bad for the guys on the corner. The contractors
come by, see the dealing and say no,'' says Francis, who doesn't and won't
do drugs. ``They think I must be a dealer, too.''

Local councillor Pam McConnell is furious.

``It's awful,'' she says. ``The dealers have moved in and are taking over.
They're using the homeless people, the people of poverty, as shields.''

The perfect camouflage, the homeless and the inebriated and those who shout
at the sky wait outside dank doorways and the barred and dirty windows of
the discount store on this notorious northeast grit-strewn corner.

They've always been there - and they're one big reason why the drug dealers
like the spot.

``They're right in your face. `You looking? You looking?' It's not easy,''
says Francis.

Some of the guys who used to throw back the brew until blackouts now prefer
smoking the cystallized pieces of cocaine about the size of shrivelled
peas. But there are users who won't go near the corner. Jackie, for one,
goes to a nearby apartment to get her $20 rock.

``It's too dangerous there,'' she says, with a shiver.

The dealers don't suffer. Their $1,000-a-day business comes from all over
the megacity. Their transactions are done with the suburban/urban
prosperous in their gleaming black BMWs, sports utility vehicles and tawdry
white stretch limos with the impenetrable smoked -glass windows.

Then they can pack up the gym bag and leave.

It's the merchants on and near the corner who are hurting. They say
business is down because crime is up, violence is rampant, and their
customers recoil when strung-out young girls teeter along the sidewalks
offering sex for five bucks.

And what about the guys who'd cadge two bucks from the business owners,
pass out in their doorways - but just as often paint or stock their stores
and ask after their families? Since crack came that summer of '97, even
they aren't around as much any more.

The ones who have stayed on, some of them seem worried, scared. They know
they're losing this place, their place.

It's never looked like much; it's been scruffy for years.

Eastbound Queen St. streetcars easing past the city's mercantile heart at
Yonge St., St. Mike's hospital and the majestic Metropolitan United Church
approach the underbelly at Jarvis, home for the Fred Victor Mission, and
the Moss Park Armoury.

By Sherbourne, there are more shelters and street agencies, the Moss Park
apartments and, farther east, the Good Shepherd Refuge.

In a word, bleak.

But it was never uncaring. It was a community. And maybe too few of the
people driving by in their heated cars ever realized it, but the corner was
the heart of that community.

Used to be they all got along, the hard-scrabble boys from the Rock
starting their day with three-cream coffee at the Handy, (not the 24-hour
Coffee Time where salmon tins are ashtrays), and the hard-core drunks, men
and a few women with filthy hair, blackened fingernails and grimy parkas at
least 20 years old ending their day at the Canada Tavern.

The corner has always had the low-rent housing and all the hostels - just
as there have always been families living over some of its stores, Ontario
Paint and Wallpaper (since 1913) and Queen Lumber and Hardware (four years
after that).

Plus starving artists have always rented near the corner because it's cheap
but also because it's full of art galleries, old and new bookstores and
antique places.

For years, Leon Kogut's father ran Moss Park Meats. In its place Kogut
opened Queen Street Antiques about a year ago.

He has put up burglar bars on the windows and quickly learned to display
nothing of value near the front of the store. His car has been broken into
twice and his upstairs tenants have given notice. Walk-in trade is
increasingly rare.

``I'm scared during the day here, I keep a bat in the store,'' Kogut says.

His father never had to resort to this.

``We were used to the drunks. We all know them. We give them money,'' says
Alan Jaffe of Allen Gallery, carriage trade art framers, who has been in
the neighbourhood 23 years.

And work. Some of the locals sweep off the steps to Mimi's Variety, which
is good about letting neighbours from the Moss Park apartments run up a
tab. But a couple of months ago, the store experienced its first robbery in
15 years.

Jack Joram has been at the corner for 40 years. He owns Acadian Art and
Rare bookstore and the 1885 building from which it operates. Jaffe says
Joram was renowned for his generosity. One of the corner's characters named
him as next of kin in his will.

Joram's daughter Rochelle and her husband Carlos Galdamez run the business
now. Their 6-year-old is often with them after school. His parents worry.

``It's comparable to Vancouver's skid row now with all the drug
trafficking,'' says Rochelle Joram.

Early this year, the owner of The Painted City art gallery opened a print
drawer underneath her front window and found a bullet inside. A 9 mm copper
jacket bullet from a Luger had penetrated the brick exterior and ripped
through 10 prints.

Colette French still can't believe how lucky it was there were no customers
then at the front of the store. And that the single mom she hires to do
framing wasn't in that day with her small daughter - as she often is.

French is part of a community group running an art gallery cum cafe cum
non-profit neighbourhood centre called Diego's just down the street from
her gallery. It, too, had a bullet through the window. Not too long ago,
the window was broken a second time.

French replaced it with a larger-than-life painting she had just completed
- - of a generic drug dealer.

``No, it's not subtle, but I am angry,'' she says. ``This is my
neighbourhood, too.''

And she is fighting for it.

She mounted a show of the damaged prints, called Wounded Art and invited
the entire community.

But long before that, she had a talk with Michael Thomas, an artist and
community activist who had started the Toronto East Downtown Residents
Association. Called TEDRA, it had successfully routed drug dealers from the
Dundas-Sherbourne and Dundas-Jarvis areas - only to have them end up at
Queen and Sherbourne.

French asked Thomas to help her community banish the drug dealers. The
first Queen-Sherbourne area meeting was held in September, 1997, at John
Innes community centre and led to the formation of QUEBA or the Queen East
Business Association.

It still meets monthly, lately to pass along its brand of neighbourhood
news, or intelligence, to the police.

Politician McConnell demanded - and got - more lighting for the
neighbourhood. QUEBA lobbied for - and got - the north side of Queen St.
included in the city's façade-improvement program.

Police have bumped up the number of foot patrols in the area. Thomas
accompanied them on a neighbourhood safety patrol where they spotted
backyard bushes that blocked sight lines, unsecured laneways and
recommended all store owners buy gates to close off access to the recessed
doorways after hours.

But nothing has really changed for the better.

``Police have the excuse that this has always been a bad neighbourhood,''
says Rochelle Joram.

She wonders if this would be allowed to happen in front of, say, Holt Renfrew.

``We're at war,'' Thomas says. ``This is really a push/shove situation with
the dealers.''

The neighbourhood group TEDRA was successful because it sent resident
patrols to ``visit'' the drug dealers at their place of business - with
video cameras. Usually after 20 minutes of being watched, the dealers would
scatter. Then All Saints Church installed outdoor surveillance cameras.

But, Thomas says, dealers won't be as easily moved this time: They have
found a perfect business venue at Queen and Sherbourne.

Unlike their previous locales, there is not enough day pedestrian traffic
at this corner to impede or prevent transactions - but people are
accustomed to seeing people loitering there.

``It has been a neglected and forgotten part of the city with all the
hostels and low-income housing,'' Thomas admits.

But it has also always been a place of unique businesses, many in
historically designated buildings. Thomas wants to capitalize on what he
calls the corner's ``connection with the past.''

He is also counting on urban renewal bringing back hope to the street -
building up a mix of people - with zero tolerance for crack dealing.

``We'll be building a critical mass of a new population of downtowners with
disposable income,'' he says.

He believes they'll balance, not drive out, the people in the hundreds of
beds at the Salvation Army's Maxwell Meighen residence, the Good Shepherd
and the Fred Victor Mission. He is counting on implementation of the
recommendations in Anne Golden's task force report on homelessness to ease
the demand for emergency shelter.

But he also notes there will soon be 480 new condominium units on the
market at Tridel's The Richmond one block to the south of them. There are
also 138 new Brewery Loft units farther east on Queen at Sumach, more lofts
opening soon in the old Sears warehouse and the extensive housing
development on the Gooderham and Worts grounds.

Gallery owner Colette French says the new developments won't wipe out the
character of the corner. Nobody wants that. The place has never been
pristine, and it has never been dull.

``We've always had a little fencing here, a few rounders, but that's part
of the scene,'' she says. ``This place is lively and vital - like
Vancouver's East Side used to be before it got all the drugs.''

And lost about all its legitimate businesses.

Rochelle Joram has kept a list of the businesses in the one short block
east from Sherbourne that recently have moved away. There are five names on
it. She wonders what would happen to the area if the few that are left
moved, too.

``I don't want to move,'' French says. ``I've always lived in places like
this. And I've never been scared before.''

At 6 o'clock on an icy Sunday evening Steve Francis is outside on the
corner. Waiting.

But this time he knows work is coming. Since before Christmas, he has been
helping out antique book dealer Doug Wilson, who lives above a store here
and sells books every week at a Sunday market.

It's good pay, he says, helps him make up the shortfall now that he works
out of the temp agencies. Francis, 40, gets $10 to carry the many boxes of
books from Wilson's van up the flight of stairs to the apartment. It's
about a half-hour's work.

He is always on time - even if Wilson isn't.

Nor will he complain about the cold wait. ``I like to help,'' he says.

He keeps to himself, trying to ignore the drug trade, not meeting the
glances of people who walk by him, then double back to walk by him again.

Today, Francis has on newer, warmer workboots, which he has lined with
plastic bags.

Just to be safe.