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THE COOL CYCLE
The ecology of the hip urban neighbourhood.

Text: ROBERT FULFORD

Neighbourhoods are like love affairs: Sometimes it's better not to know too much about the object of your desire. If you are to love a neighbourhood, especially one of those dense inner-city zones that attract the adjective "cool" you shouldn't be quite sure where it begins or ends, in space or time. The boundaries of these exceptional places - like the West End in Vancouver or Lower Water Street in Halifax - are always blurred, as they live as much by taste and whim as by necessity and convenience.

Every cool neighbourhood follows much the same narrative of rise, decline and rise again. There's no such thing as a newly built cool neighbourhood: A certain history is essential. Typically, it enjoys prosperity early in its life, then falls from fashion. Low rents then open it to artists, students and proprietors of risky and marginal businesses. These groups end up unconsciously playing the role of town planners, shaping their neighbourhood first by moving in, then by shopping here and not there, then by improving their property.

All this can only happen in a limited space, usually a part of the city that you can walk across in 10 minutes. This is what makes an intense local identity possible. People feel at home as they walk the streets or sit in the bars and cafés. A cool neighbourhood offers human recognition within the anonymity of a big city - something like a small-town feeling for those who also want the advantages of a metropolis.

Of course, people will always want to brag to the rest of the world about the pleasures of this special place. The cool neighbourhood is thus always under threat from gentrification (the bookstore owner finds himself pushed out by the landlord who can get higher rent off the glitzy boutique selling $200 jeans) or land developers or over-anxious bureaucrats at city hall. By never remaining still, it eludes definition. Once it's defined, a cool neighbourhood turns into something like Toronto's Annex district, which is charming but hasn't been surprising since about the time of Pierre Elliott Trudeau's second election.

European cities provide many precedents, but on this continent Greenwich Village remains, after nearly a century, the template for the cool neighbourhood: a bohemian district, a place of fresh ideas and unusual human types, a cityscape of pleasant variety. Extending south from 14th Street and west from Washington Square, it was the home of wealthy New York families for much of the nineteenth century. In 1881 Henry James, who had lived there as a child, introduced the Village into literature with Washington Square, his still-popular novel about cruelty and betrayal among the rich, set in the square that dominates the district to this day.

Greenwich Village lost its cachet with the rich during the next few decades, and immigrants replaced them. Around 1910 artists began turning its old stables into studios and galleries. By the 1920s it was famous as the American capital of free love and unorthodox thinking. Writers gave it a special tone: in one generation Eugene O'Neill, E.E. Cummings and Edna St. Vincent Millay; in another, Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. The Village has a way of making both cultural and sexual history. This is where Billie Holiday found her audience and artists ranging from Woody Allen to Bob Dylan started out in the local bars and coffee houses. And it was here in June 1969 that the gay liberation movement was born during a demonstration at the Stonewall Inn, now officially listed as a National Historic Landmark. High rents have made the Village too expensive for most artists and writers, but it retains its restaurants and clubs. To walk its streets is to feel American cultural history.

In Canada one of the first cool neighbourhoods was Yorkville in Toronto. It arose in the 1960s as the core of local hippie culture, a mélange of folk-song clubs and cheap rooming houses. By 1967 the hippies felt so much at home that they believed they owned the place. They demanded the street be closed to automobile traffic and staged demonstrations to push that idea. (One turned into a riot that made national news.) Soon the rest of the city learned that Yorkville houses were selling at rock-bottom prices only a block or two from the high-end retail area on Bloor Street. That attracted developers, good restaurants, expensive art galleries and couturiers. By the mid-1970s the marginal businesses that made the area famous were gone, off to seek low rents elsewhere.

This shuffling of neighbourhood functions, while difficult to handle, is no argument for rent control or any other form of civic management. Neighbourhoods, cool and otherwise, depend on entrepreneurs to charge them with life, and entrepreneurs in turn depend on a landscape of opportunity with as few rules as possible. If human scale and street life are essential, so is commercial diversity. A block in a cool neighbourhood should include, along with middle- income and low-income residents, a heterogeneous array of businesses. A perfect list would include two Italian restaurants (one cheap), a bookstore, a specialty cobbler who makes tap shoes, an Oriental restaurant, an antique store selling mid-century modern chic, a tattoo parlour, a martial-arts school, a record store that sells used vinyl, three bars (two with pool tables) and a Brazilian soccer team's social club.

Do such places still matter in a time of giant cities and global corporations? They matter more than ever. They spawn inventiveness, originality and new forms of human society. They are the places where each generation of innovators creates the human future.