Ambassador Bridge by chrycopaul1066 (from our flickr pool)

Growing up in Walkerville, I always heard the stories.  You couldn’t walk down the street without getting mugged, or shot or stabbed.  Everyone always knew a guy who was jumped by a group of masked criminals and beaten severely only to have all of his belongings taken from him.  People live in rows of tenements, stacked on top of each other and the University students practically burn down the West End every chance they get.  Basically, if I knew what was good for me, I’d avoid that end of town like the plague.

I live in the big bad West End now, and I have yet to be stabbed or shot or jumped or even looked at in a rude manner.  However, it is a sad place.  It is sad seeing entire streets of boarded up homes, many with broken windows and graffiti on them.  It resembles a strange ghost town where time has simply stopped.  The homes on Indian Road and parts of Rosedale were once grand homes, not unlike the homes I grew up in and around in my former ivy-bedecked neighbourhood.  The tragic part is that the homes out here are in many cases older than those in Walkerville, but unlike Walkerville, these dwellings initially fell on hard times, only to be bought and boarded up by a faceless billionaire.  Indian Road was never lucky enough to be Argyle Road or Kildare.

The streets here are crooked and run in strange loops and curves, and I occasionally get lost, much to the amusement of my friends who live out here.  I am used to the predictable, friendly grid pattern of near-downtown Windsor, where the landmarks could lead you in the right direction.  I am used to seeing that water tower to the south, whose preachy, yet truthful message of “Use Water Wisely!” has long since been painted over.  I am used to the smell of hops and barley in the air in the mornings and the sound of the church bells telling me what time it was from St George’s.  Now I hear the hum of trucks gearing down as they make their approach towards the one thing you can always see around here – the Ambassador Bridge.  It looms over everything and is constantly in the background, never really leaving your sight when you are outside.

It’s a tough environment, it’s not clean and polished like other parts of the city, but I love the lack of gentrification and lack of falsehood here.  It’s still unique, it still has a distinctive look, and no one outside of the West End cares about it so people just leave it and the people that live here alone.  Too often gentrification of older neighbourhoods drives the rents up and drives the real people out only to have them replaced by nouveaux-riche Prius owners.  The people who live here take care of their homes and have a fierce loyalty to their neighbourhood, despite what I’ve heard growing up.  They don’t live here because it is trendy, they live here because they are from here, and it’s theirs.  This is a part of the city that is bare bones.  It’s the oldest part of the city, and it really looks like it, but to me that adds to the appeal of living here.

Streets like California, Patricia, Sunset, Rosedale, Granville Crescent, and so on rival anything in Walkerville for their Victorian charm and odd angles, but we never hear of that in the newspaper, all we hear about are the problems and the crime.  We hear about the vandalism and left over furniture in May when thousands of students leave this end of town to go home, where ever that may be.  We don’t hear about the kids playing hockey in the road, or the neighbours shovelling each other’s driveways after snowstorms.  We never hear of the crooked streets and the ancient homes, the countless ghosts of the past and the constant spectre of the bridge on the horizon, just over the rooftops.

The future of this end of town is in jeopardy, especially if the bridge is twinned.  It will cut a hole right through a neglected and forgotten part of this city and split the people who still live here off from the rest of the city.  Living here is in some ways like living in a different city.  There are so many things here I have yet to see and to do, and I don’t know every inch of it like the back of my hand, and I probably never will.  There is no more water tower looming, no more church bells in the distance and no more ivy walls.  I wouldn’t have it any other way.