While I was out....

...my neighbourhood went to hell in a handbasket. Our strictly no logo zone has acquired its first truly corporate retail outlet -- a fancy bread store with Heretofore Unknown Baked Goods. Confession: out of curiosity, I bought a cheese/olive scone to have with my chicken noodle soup. It was good.

I'm working on a paper right now for a course about Jane Jacobs' ideas about livable cities, and how this neighbourhood reflects the principles that make a "great" city, how the diversity of Toronto pushes the systemic edges beyond the tropes of food and ethnic dancing multiculturalism. I think there's a fair bit of bleating in the market about this shiny new store, and there are certainly people concerned that its a wedge of gentrification. It's a bit low that the market bakery moved out of there three doors down a few months ago because the landlord wouldn't make some key repairs, and the hard core market denizens certainly won't frequent it. I think the relative obscurity of the brand will soften its impact, though -- it's not the rallying point of a starbucks or some other american brand -- and it will likely make a less resistant path for more corporate chains.

This certainly creates a tiny bit of conflict for me -- I moved here because I like the edge of the market, like the self-referential and self-creating system, love the goat meat coexisting with the shiny produce and the xylophones and chinese bathing suits. And I don't want the three excellent, ramshackle, independent coffee places displaced. But hm, it's also nice to have new options for food, and yeah, good to know that maybe my property values will stay steady. Chaos and complexity, bleah.

Knowing me, I'll probably end up buying something at the market bakery for everything I buy at the new place. And I'll just end up pudgy out of my own wishy washy values.