Cabbagetown
Working-class Victorian rowhouses named for the vegetables immigrants grew in front yards.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Cabbagetown in Toronto traces how a mocking nickname stuck: wealthy Torontonians in the eighteen forties sneered at Irish famine immigrants for planting vegetables in front of their tiny east-side cottages, and the name never went away. You'll hear how the neighborhood stayed a hard, working-class district for a century, home to breweries and rooming houses, and how writer Hugh Garner grew up on these streets poor enough to write a novel about them. A later wave of newcomers, including gay and lesbian Torontonians drawn by cheap rent and quiet blocks, began stripping the grime off the same brick the Irish had laid.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
The Annex
Victorian mansion district turned student quarter, saved from a highway by a grassroots revolt.
Half House
Victorian row house left standing alone, its shared interior wall now an exposed exterior facade.
Distillery District
Victorian-era brick industrial buildings once home to a major nineteenth-century whisky distillery.
Yorkville
Once-bohemian district of Victorian rowhouses turned upscale boutiques, galleries and cafes.
Kensington Market
Open-air market of narrow streets, vintage shops, food stalls layered by generations of immigrants.
St. Michael's Cathedral Basilica
Gothic Revival cathedral crypt holding the bishop who died tending famine-era typhus victims.