Quote:
Originally Posted by Docere
It is interesting. Toronto's Jewish community has been moving up Bathurst St. since the 1940s, it was the corridor they followed as they moved out of Spadina and the inner west end. First to Forest Hill and North York, then Thornhill a generation later.
You also have all the flavors of Jewish communities all along the street. Establishmentarian Forest Hill, Orthodox Bathurst-Lawrence, Russians around Sheppard and so on.
In the 1960s and 1970s, there was some migration to Bayview Avenue, a very desirable street to live nearby. The orientation of the community being north-south led some to feel it wasn't "connected" to the main community. So the center of gravity then moved to Thornhill when Vaughan opened up in the 1980s. Bathurst has an almost magnetic pull.
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I guess part of what makes Toronto's Jewish linear "enclave" special is maintenance of the old communities (in the old city) as new ones form, so the new ones add on continuously, without taking away from the old.
What's unique it seems (both compared to within Toronto and elsewhere and even other communities, for instance, Italians) is not abandoning old previous locations during the jump from city to suburb, just expanding, instead so that even as the center of gravity moves, the overall distribution does not, instead being geographically wider.
I suppose lack of inner city decline or suburban flight might in part explain why Toronto maintains a pattern like this (not abandoning old spots even as suburbanization takes hold) but it cannot be the whole story, otherwise other ethnic groups like Italians would have also done this and maintained old enclaves, and also other cities' Jewish communities would have done this too in places where there was no urban decline.
Perhaps the central location of Bathurst (close to Yonge and thus the heart of the city and its former metro area) made it desirable and a good place to be where the important economic action/hub of the city is, while being enough to one side to settle a more close-knit community?