College Street, between Euclid and Shaw Streets, is one of Toronto's liveliest nightlife strips. And for many residents, therein lies the problem. They're pushing the regulators to crack down.
A spate of liquor licence suspensions in the past year along the busy entertainment strip – more than a dozen, all told – and the constant attentions of either inspectors from the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario or the city's noise bylaw officers have left bar and restaurant owners feeling unwelcome in their own neighbourhood.
And it has become their neighbourhood as much as anyone else's. Since the '50s, when the stretch of College St. bound by Bathurst St. and Ossington Ave. was colonized by recently arrived Italian immigrants, Little Italy has changed drastically, from working class ethnic enclave to, by the early '90s, an eclectic mix of bars and eateries. Ever-increasing property pressures have prompted what some have taken to calling a showdown between the area's most recently arrived residents, many of them in new condominiums right on the busy strip, and the bar and restaurant owners that were left to proliferate before their arrival. It leaves the neighbourhood in the awkward position of potentially uprooting the very character – vibrant, non-stop social activity – that drew people here in the first place.
"It really seemed like last year, they came out in full force," says Allan Thomson, who owns Sotto Voce, a stylish restaurant at Queen and Clinton Sts. Last summer, Thomson received a letter from Toronto Police Service's 14 Division, which sometimes works in concert with the AGCO and has enforcement authority. Thomson calls it a "friendly warning."
"It said they were going to crack down on College St., so behave yourself," Thomson recalls. "I thought, `That's fine; we're not doing anything wrong.'"
And then, Thomson got charged with overcrowding. The AGCO (Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario) suspended his licence for 10 days, forcing him to close down in March. "We were maybe a few people over," Thomson shrugs. "In the past, the inspectors would come in and say, `You've got too many people on your patio,' and I'd fix it right away. No harm done. Now, they write you up on the spot. It's frustrating. We're trying to create something here that promotes the city, and this is how we're treated."
It's part of what lawyer David Winer, who represents clients dealing with liquor-licence issues, calls a rash of "very overzealous enforcement of the (liquor control) act by inspectors without any discretion. And," he continues, "they do have discretion." ...
Astra Burka, the chair of the Palmerston Area Residents Association, said the problem wasn't the influx of restaurants, but the changing character of College St. restaurants and cafés themselves. "We used to have a lot of restaurants. Now a lot of them are becoming lounges."
Particularly vexing, she says, is the elastic definition of a liquor licence is slack. "Everyone hands in applications – `Oh, we're just doing a restaurant.' And then it's lounge, lounge, lounge. There's something wrong with that picture."
I know Ms. Burka. She lives a few blocks north of College Street, and there's absolutely no noise from the street carrying up there in the late evening. By and large, the people who come down to College don't behave like pigs. You don't see people littering, vomiting, tossing bottles, vandalizing property or otherwise leaving tangible evidence of their visits.
In the five years I've been in the area, there's been little evidence of any violence or other types of crime that could be associated with out-of-control people. I can remember about two such incidents over that period (plus the low-level bombing of Coco Lezzone's in late 2002, a story unto itself).
To my mind, that suggests that the resto-lounge owners are actually doing a reasonable job of policing their patrons.
If that's the case, then what's the problem, other than that some people apparently want to live in a dead, sterile neighbourhood?