In Thorncliffe Park, Frannie Haist and Gordon Membery are visible minorities. Her hair is blond. His eyes are green. Their mother tongue is English.Each December, their neighbours from Tanzania, Guyana and Ghana wish them a Merry Christmas. At another time of year, Gordon and Frannie would like to reciprocate, but hesitate.
"I don't know what to say," says Gordon, 72. "Is it 'Happy Ramadan'?" (Absolutely. The proper Arabic greeting during the day-long fasts in the ninth month of the Muslim calendar is Ramadan Sayeed, which means, yes, Happy Ramadan.)
- Chapter 1: Introduction
- Chapter 2: Cold calls without a coat
- Chapter 3: Seven people, one bedroom
- Chapter 4: The landlord and the insults
- Chapter 5: How can she be truthful about her life here?
- Chapter 6: Doctor at the cash register
- Chapter 7: The doctor's sitster's story
- Chapter 8: There's almost nowhere for Deewa to play
- Chapter 9: William's and Julie's big news
Please see earlier installments of the series:
Gordon and Frannie live in Building 79, a boomerang-shaped tower of white bricks and aluminum-framed windows. Thirty years ago, when he first moved in, it was a chic address for white professionals. Gordon remembers that someone in the next high-rise, Leaside Towers, owned a Rolls-Royce. Back then, diversity meant three different denominations of Protestant churches.
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"When I came, it was mostly white Anglo-Saxon working couples. There were not many kids here," he says, sitting in an easy chair in the 18th-floor apartment he shares with Frannie, who moved in in 1991.
"The mayor lived next door," he adds, referring to True Davidson, female mayor of the then borough of East York, who lived in the next building.
While others have moved on, he stayed, partly because his rent is relatively low, but mainly because Thorncliffe Park was and always will be his home. Some of those who left probably didn't consider themselves racist but felt uncomfortable with suddenly becoming a minority. But Gordon, who was raised a Protestant, had already had his fill of prejudice. He remembers when people got upset if a Catholic girl married a Protestant boy, or vice versa.
"You couldn't work for city hall or the post office or the TTC if you were Catholic."
Over the years, he and Frannie have watched the neighbourhood evolve. First, there was a Greek family or two. Then, people began arriving from the West Indies and Czechoslovakia. Today, highly educated newcomers from dozens of countries, mostly Pakistan, India and Afghanistan, live in 35 apartment buildings along the curve of Thorncliffe Park Drive, a former racetrack wedged between Leaside and the Don Valley Parkway.
"Oddly enough, the people moving in were friendlier than the people moving out," Gordon says.
"A lot of them say hello," adds Frannie, 52.
In the old days, when his car broke down in the garage, he would have to hunt around for help. The other day, he lifted the hood and then "a gentleman came over, and said, 'Can I give you a boost?' " Gordon says. "He spoke very little English."
Gordon and Frannie, both retirees, are convinced they're now the only Canadian-born residents in their building, which houses about 1,000 people. Everyone seems to recognize them (one reason they declined to be photographed for this article).
The reverse isn't always true. The other day, Gordon was at the mall across the street when a woman in full veil accosted him. "She gave me a poke and said, 'Don't you say hello any more? Don't you recognize me?' "
He stared at her eyes, then realized she was a young woman in his building he had always chatted with on the elevator. Except that she had had a baby, and now completely veiled her face. They both had a good laugh.
At the mall, English language-related businesses -- a Coles bookstore and a movie theatre -- have been replaced by a halal butcher, a Chinese bakery and a store selling saris. A local restaurant has morphed from Dracula's to the Conquistador Steak House to its current incarnation: Iqbal Kebab & Sweet Centre. It sells the most delectable samosas in the neighbourhood.
With his pink skin, grey hair and mustache, Gordon would blend in at the Rosedale Golf Club. But in Thorncliffe Park, his pale face might as well have a flashing neon Information sign on it; he's forever giving out directions to, say, Yonge and Bloor.
His building once shared an indoor swimming pool with Building 75 next door, but the pool was filled in after a fire. With two families often crammed into one apartment, children from a dozen nations tend to play together in the hallways.
"It's just amazing the amount of children. If you come in at noon or 3:30 [p.m.], you wait for three or four elevators," Gordon says. He doesn't mind that. Nor does he mind the hall noise or even when the little ones, just for fun, tap on his mail slot. "I never find it annoying," he says, "but I guess it annoys some of the old people."
The kids seem to like him too. Every Christmas, some of the Muslim children give Gordon and Frannie decorations fashioned from salt-and-flour dough. "It's a building where you don't have any trouble from one nationality," he says.
Like all the buildings in this enclave, his high-rise has become a vertical village. Everyone socializes between apartments and floors, carrying chapattis, samosas and curries. "It took me a while [to get used to it] because I never smelled curry before," Gordon says. "You'd get off an elevator, and it would just hit you."
He surprised newcomers by gallantly holding open elevator doors. Once he carried groceries for a neighbour down the hall. "Just the once," he says grinning. It led to a long relationship. "Pretty well every night, there'd be a knock on the door, and she'd bring in a bowl of food."
The neighbour was from Uganda. Gordon is from a dairy farm in Kleinburg, Ont. "I wasn't really keen on spicy food, so I'd have to pretend I wasn't home," he says.
"She would try the door, and if it wasn't locked, she would walk right in," says Frannie, who was raised in Lawrence Park, a WASP enclave of stockbrokers and dentists. "She wanted to know how many people lived here so she could get more food."
The neighbour was shocked when Frannie said there was just the two of them in the two-bedroom apartment. Frannie and Gordon were shocked, or rather their taste buds were, by her cooking. "What are those hot triangles called?" he says. "Oh, yes. Samosas."
They grew up on meat and potatoes, but not the spicy kind that fill samosas. Before the globalization of Thorncliffe Park, their biggest culinary adventure was chow mein in Chinatown. Even today, their cherished daily habit is morning coffee at the McDonald's in the mall.
When Gordon moved here in 1975, Thorncliffe Park was a womb-like community with every convenience at hand. The supermarket and bowling alley were across the street. The gas station was at the corner. His two children from his first marriage went to the high school on Overlea Boulevard. His job at the St. Lawrence Sugar plant north of Overlea was a six-minute stroll away.
And like a womb, it has been secure. He and Frannie have never had a break-in, or heard of anyone else having one. The only incident Gordon recalls was in 1985 when some kids went on a spree, smashing the windows of 32 cars in the underground parking lot, including his own. "The majority of people in this building being Muslim, I never ever saw anyone drunk or fight," he says. "No drugs, either."
At the sugar factory, he worked his way up to foreman and, eventually, plant manager. Frannie worked at the order desk. From their living-room window, they can see the factory, which was eventually acquired by Atlantic Sugar. Other local plants are gone -- the Corning Glass Works of Canada Ltd. and the Canada Wire and Cable Co. Ltd.
Gordon, who quit school after Grade 10, and Frannie, who has a bachelor of science degree from the University of Toronto, would probably have a tough time today qualifying for immigration to Canada. Many of their neighbours -- chemists, doctors and physicists -- have multiple degrees, including PhDs and MBAs, and speak multiple languages.
The couple know that many of their neighbours hold down two jobs, and sometimes deliver newspapers on the side. "It's very unfair," Gordon says. "I wonder if people in those professions are just protecting themselves." But then he remembers that his ancestors from Scotland and England, and Frannie's from Scotland and Germany, also had a hard time. "That's always been the way."
Still, he feels sympathy for newcomers. A neighbour, a young woman from Pakistan, once confided in him that she had left Vancouver a decade earlier after someone spat on her on the street. Here in Thorncliffe Park, Gordon is pleased that overt racial strife is miraculously absent. "I had enough of that when I was a kid," he says, "to last a lifetime."
Next Saturday, final chapter: Tales from the Towers epilogue. How the series affected people's lives, including those of Abida Manzoor, the Pakistani physiotherapist; Amir Kassam, the Tanzanian landlord; Gharzai Ranzooryar, the Afghan doctor; and William Xu and Julie Wu, the type-A couple from China.