Chinatown, Toronto

Chinatown (Chinese: 多倫多華埠) is an ethnic enclave in Downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada, with a high concentration of ethnic Chinese residents and businesses extending along Dundas Street West and Spadina Avenue west of the centre of the city. A second area known as East Chinatown, extends along both streets from the intersection of Broadview Avenue and Gerrard Street. First developed in the late 19th century, the main Chinatown is now one of the largest Chinatowns in North America and one of several major Chinese-Canadian communities in the Greater Toronto Area. There are approximately six Chinatowns in Greater Toronto, including in the municipalities of Markham and Mississauga.

History

Toronto's Chinatown first appeared during the 1890s with the migration of American Chinese from California due to racial conflict and from the Eastern United States due to the economic depression at the time. The earliest record of Toronto's Chinese community is traced to Sam Ching, who owned a hand laundry business on Adelaide Street in 1878. Ching was the first Chinese person listed in the city's directory and is now honoured with a lane named after him. The first Chinese cafe opened in 1901 and that number grew to 19 in 1912 and to around 100 a decade after that.

Chinatown

A Chinatown (Chinese: 唐人街/華埠/中國城, Cantonese jyutping: tong⁴yan⁴gaai¹, Yale: tohng yahn gāai, Mandarin Pinyin: Tángrénjiē/Huá Bù/Zhōngguó Chéng ) is historically any ethnic enclave of Chinese or Han people outside China, Taiwan and Singapore. Areas known as "Chinatown" exist throughout the world, including the Americas, Europe, Africa, Australasia and Asia.

Definition

The Oxford Dictionary defines "Chinatown" as "... a district of any non-Chinese town, especially a city or seaport, in which the population is predominantly of Chinese origin". However, according to a television station in Hawaii, that definition is not necessarily true, as they said Chinatowns nowadays have little to do with China. Even further, the line between Little Saigon and Chinatown is blurred as some "Vietnamese" enclaves are in fact some city's "second Chinatown", and some "Chinatowns" are in fact pan-Asian, meaning they could also be counted as Koreatown or Little India.

Further ambiguities with the term can include Chinese ethnoburbs which by definition are "...suburban ethnic clusters of residential areas and business districts in large metropolitan areas where the intended purpose is to be "... as isolated from the white population as Hispanics". A New York Times article blurs the line further by categorizing very different Chinatowns such as New York's Chinatown, which exists in an urban setting as "traditional", Monterey Park's Chinatown which exists in a "suburban" setting (and labeled as such), and Austin Texas's Chinatown, which is in essence a "Chinese themed mall", known as "fabricated". This contrasts with narrower definitions, where the term only described Chinatown in a city setting.

Dundas Street

Dundas Street /ˈdʌnˌdæs/, formerly known as Highway 5, is a major arterial road connecting the Canadian city of Toronto with its western suburbs and several cities in southwestern Ontario. Originally intended as a military route to connect the shipping port of York (now Toronto) to the envisioned future capital of London, Ontario, the street today connects Toronto landmarks such as Yonge-Dundas Square and the city's principal Chinatown to rural villages and the regional centres of Hamilton and London.

Dundas Street is also one of the few east–west routes to run uninterrupted through the Greater Toronto Area, from Toronto to Halton Region (the others are Eglinton Avenue, Steeles Avenue, Highway 7, Bovaird Drive/Castlemore Road/Rutherford Road/Carrville Road/16th Avenue and Lake Shore Boulevard). Within Toronto, the TTC's 505 Dundas streetcar route serves the street from Riverdale to the Junction.

Route description

The route of Dundas through the city of Toronto is irregular. The street's various sections were originally constructed as several smaller named streets, running parallel but unconnected. Proceeding southwest and approximately parallel to the Lake Ontario shore in central Toronto, Dundas Street East originates near the Beaches neighbourhood at Kingston Road, itself a historic route to eastern Lake Ontario and the town of Kingston.

Spadina Avenue

Spadina Avenue (/spəˈdaɪnə/, rarely /spəˈdiːnə/) is one of the most prominent streets in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Running through the western section of downtown, the road has a very different character in different neighbourhoods.

Spadina Avenue runs south from Bloor Street to the Gardiner Expressway, just north of Lake Ontario. Lower Spadina Avenue continues the last block to the lake after the expressway. Another street named Spadina Road continues north from Bloor, but with new street address numbering starting over at zero. For much of its extent, Spadina Road is a less busy residential road (especially north of Dupont Street and the railway track underpass).

History

Spadina Avenue is commonly pronounced with the i as /aɪ/ as in mine; the Spadina House museum on Spadina Road is always pronounced with the i as in /iː/ as in ski. Historically, the latter pronunciation was used, with the former a colloquialism that has developed over the years.

The name originates from the Ojibwa word ishpadinaa, meaning "high place/ridge" or "sudden rise in the land." The Ishpatina Ridge, in Northern Ontario, which is the highest point of land in the province of Ontario, and the city of Ishpeming, in the state of Michigan's Upper Peninsula in Marquette County both derive their name from the same word.

Greater Toronto Area

The Greater Toronto Area (GTA) is the most populous metropolitan area in Canada. At the 2011 census, it had a population of 6,054,191, and the census metropolitan area had a population of 5,583,064. The Greater Toronto Area is defined as the central city of Toronto, and the four regional municipalities that surround it: Durham, Halton, Peel, and York. The regional span of the Greater Toronto Area is sometimes combined with the city of Hamilton, Ontario and its surrounding region, to form the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. The Greater Toronto Area is the northern part of the Golden Horseshoe.

Etymology

The term Greater Toronto has been used in writing as early as the 1900s, although at the time, the term only referred to the old City of Toronto and its immediate townships and villages, which became Metropolitan Toronto in 1954 and became the current city of Toronto in 1998. The usage of the term involving the four regional municipalities came into formal use in the mid-1980s, after it was used in a widely discussed report on municipal governance restructuring in the region and was later made official as a provincial planning area. However, it did not come into everyday usage until the mid- to late 1990s. In 2006, the term began to be supplanted in the field of spatial planning as provincial policy increasingly began to refer to either the "Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area" (GTHA) or the still-broader "Greater Golden Horseshoe". The latter includes communities like Barrie, Guelph and the Niagara Region. The GTA continues, however, to be in official use elsewhere in the Government of Ontario, such as the Ministry of Finance.